Hardware News

Half-Life 2 Preview

Joe "OuTkAsT-1" Topolnisky

2003-05-29 00:00:00.0


Computer and Video Games.com has tossed up a preview on Valve Software's upcoming first person shooter, Half-Life 2. Here's a clipping:

Once again, a great deal of time, money and research went into making this stunning system. "There's a guy called Dr Paul Ekman (www.paulekman.com) who did a bunch of research on the mentally ill, to find out what it means to look mentally ill. He came up with this whole language of facial expressions, incorporating the 40-odd facial expressions we all make, which can be mixed to create a sub-set of facial expressions. We basically took things from his research and made it applicable to Half-Life 2's facial animation system. So we have these simple sets of facial animation fonts, and they can be applied to Alyx, to an alien or whoever we want." Later on in the day, when I caught up with Gabe again, he expanded on the process Valve went through to achieve complete authenticity for their character's facial expressions. "There's a part in the brain which figures out where other people are looking. So we've tried to make the characters as real as possible so that when they react to you, your brain will tell you whether they like you or not, or whether they're looking at you or somebody else."


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