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   ben burbank (bburbank@idlethumbs.social)'s status on Monday, 20-Nov-2023 00:05:26 JST ben burbank

   well we updated half life 1!

   I got to do a bunch of work specifically for fans of the game like me.

   I’ll talk more about it later!!

   https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife25

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     ben burbank (bburbank@idlethumbs.social)'s status on Monday, 20-Nov-2023 00:05:24 JST ben burbank

     in reply to

     This is going to be a long story about Half-Life.

     24 years ago I was working on a computer science assignment to build a phone book application in desktop Java. It was a pretty decent portion of the grade for the class. I seriously hated working on it, I saw a future of typing up code for phone companies or banks or law offices. I wanted to make video games and it was hard to see how this had even a dotted-line connection to that end goal.

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     ben burbank (bburbank@idlethumbs.social)'s status on Monday, 20-Nov-2023 00:05:24 JST ben burbank

     in reply to

     A few nights before the assignment was due, my platter hard-drive started clicking. It was only a few months old, and it just died. I spent a couple hours before realizing, barring any professional help, the drive was toast and my phone book application was cast to hell along with it. I went to a store and bought a replacement drive and got windows 98 reinstalled. Any motivation to work on the phone book application was basically lost.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     ben burbank (bburbank@idlethumbs.social)'s status on Monday, 20-Nov-2023 00:06:10 JST ben burbank

     in reply to

     I thought screw this I’m going to be an art major and installed the copy of Half-Life I’d been meaning to play all year.

     Everybody told me it was great, and while it took me the better part of an hour to get used to using a mouse in a first person shooter (!), by the time I hit Office Complex the hook was in deep.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Lina Inver?e (lina@eientei.org)'s status on Monday, 20-Nov-2023 00:06:36 JST Lina Inver?e

     in reply to
     @bburbank hey video game programmer at valve
     when is tf2 gonna get a proper anticheat???
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     ben burbank (bburbank@idlethumbs.social)'s status on Monday, 20-Nov-2023 00:07:05 JST ben burbank

     in reply to

     I played the game in one go in my dark dorm room, cutting classes for a couple days. I’d become an art major, I thought. Give up on the CS class. No more phone books.

     I ended up failing that CS class. And I did take a bunch of art classes. I learned C++ to make weird graphics stuff. And after bouncing back and forth between art and CS classes I ended up finishing college weirdly prepared to go work on video games, having a mixed bag of skills.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     ben burbank (bburbank@idlethumbs.social)'s status on Monday, 20-Nov-2023 00:33:12 JST ben burbank

     in reply to

     • Lord

     @lord while we work on fixing the mods, for now you can install the beta branch of Half-Life called “steam_legacy” and you should be good to go.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Lord (lord@pleroma.lord.re)'s status on Monday, 20-Nov-2023 00:33:14 JST Lord

     in reply to

     @bburbank I replayed it a bit. It's still such a great game !

     I tried Opposing Force and Blue Shift and none of them work on my linux :-/

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     ben burbank (bburbank@idlethumbs.social)'s status on Monday, 20-Nov-2023 21:01:24 JST ben burbank

     in reply to

     • Joshua Ashton 🐸✨

     BTW a huge shoutout to @frog who did a bunch of technically challenging things in the anniversary update. When I started looking at the code history I spotted some periodic tinkering from Joshua that implied a real love and understanding for these old games, and there were already some changes just sitting there basically ready to ship. Glad we got to!

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     ben burbank (bburbank@idlethumbs.social)'s status on Monday, 20-Nov-2023 21:01:25 JST ben burbank

     in reply to

     UPDATE: my old CS teacher saw this and finally knows part of why I just gave up 24 years ago and I’m NOT crying.

     Also this phone book assignment is the kind of programming work I relish when I get to do it these days, a well-defined problem with easily testable requirements!

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     ben burbank (bburbank@idlethumbs.social)'s status on Monday, 20-Nov-2023 21:01:26 JST ben burbank

     in reply to

     Well I’ve worked in the video game business for almost 20 years now. Through a strange series of events I now work at Valve, the company who made Half-Life. And a few months ago I got it compiling again, and I finally updated it from MSVC6 for Windows 98.

     I just wanted to maybe make the crosshair a little bigger at higher resolutions. Maybe get a checkbox in so you could turn off the texture filtering without console commands.

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     ben burbank (bburbank@idlethumbs.social)'s status on Monday, 20-Nov-2023 21:01:26 JST ben burbank

     in reply to

     A group within Valve wanted to do something nice for fans today, Half-Life’s 25th Anniversary. Lots of folks helped on this; I think we fixed a bunch of stuff to be the way we saw it in the 90s, but now on modern screens. It was an honor to work on this update, and it’s so exciting to see servers filling up again.

     Happy birthday, Half-Life.