Half-Life can be played both single and multiplayer, with support for OpenGL 3D accelerators and MMX processors.

Half-Life is based on the Quake(tm) engine by ID Software, with Valve's own enhancements to the engine, such as 16-bit and 24-bit color and MMX support.
More on Half-Life's features in part 2.6

This is what Gabe Newell (Valve founder/managing director)
has to say about the game:

"Our goal with Half-Life was to build the most exciting and technologically advanced game possible."

Founded in 1996, Valve develops games software. It is based in Kirkland, Washington, and consists of more than 20 leading artists, game designers, and programmers. Valve's prestigious development team is comprised of many well-respected names within the gaming community, including: 3D artist Chuck Jones, formerly with Apogee/3D Realms, where he was an artist and animator for Duke Nukem 3D, Rise of the Triad, Shadow Warrior and the Duke Nukem Plutonium Pack; game and level designer Harry E. Teasley III, former art director of Williams' Doom for Sony Playstation; Tools Architect Ben Morris, creator of DCK (Doom Construction Kit) and WorldCraft; game designers Steve Bond and John Guthrie, creators of the Quake Airplane and Quake Kart; and level designer Dario Casali, one of the world's best-known deathmatch level designers, including those found on id Software's Final Doom. More information about Valve is available through the company's web site at www.valvesoftware.com.

2.5 What's the story behind Half-Life?
________________________________________

Assigned to a top-secret experiment at a decommissioned missile base, you've made an amazing breakthrough, an alarming discovery, and a stupid decision. Now, with the pieces of your colleagues scattered around the lab, you must fight your way past crafty alien monsters to the surface, where a full-scale battle has erupted between the invaders and government troops. Safe at last? No! The military is just as interested in silencing you as they are in eradicating the alien menace. You must make a last ditch attempt to reach the alien world, foil their monstrous schemes, and figure out how to make peace with your own murderous kind.
Along the way you'll discover fantastic experimental weapons, diabolically cunning death squads, and grotesquely beautiful worlds. It will take a fast trigger finger and a faster mind to survive, as not every monster is your enemy and not everything is as it seems.

2.6 What are Half-Life's features?
_______________________________________

- 16 bit and 24-bit Color:

All other current quake engine games (Sin excepted) are 8-bit color, but Valve has added it themselves. Half-Life supports a dazzling 65,535 colors without hardware enhancement.One of the most noticeable limitations of first-person shooters has been their 8 bits per pixel (bpp) color quality. The result is monotonous, unrealistic lighting and color that adds little to the gaming experience. And, even though an accelerator can improve the appearance of 8-bit games, they cannot expand an 8-bit game's color palette beyond the original 256 colors.

Half-Life is engineered in 16-bit color:
which expands the available palette to 65,535 colors. And, with support for graphics acceleration, Half-Life lets those with advanced hardware see over 16 million colors. The result is greatly enhanced realism and visual richness.
This comparison shot came from this CGW preview.

Dynamically changing surfaces/Decals Surfaces:
in Half-Life are dynamic-they can change over time or as the player interacts with them. Damp walls may grow mossy, water will ripple as the player moves through it and, through the use of "decal" technology, hard surfaces will retain the scars of a previous firefight. Decals--spot painting effects over existing textures--also make it possible for opponents to leave threatening graffiti on walls, or for blood, water and smoke to leave their marks on both surfaces and characters in the game.

- DSP(digital processing effects):

audio effects accelerated by MMX instructions allows for sounds to realistically reflect the environment they take place in: high-end, tinny effects for confined spaces and hollow, booming reverberations for wide open spaces. Sound cues are often a gamer's best orienting tools, and Valve has made sure that Half-Life's sound technology provides the same quality and feedback reliability as its light, color, and other realism effects.

Real-time DSP:
Valve has created a proprietary method for producing DSP in real time. Without the DSP functions, effects would sound the same in a small hallway as in a wide open space. With DSP, however, a sound effect is muffled underwater, is deadened in a fabric-padded space, and reverberates in a very large room. DSP affects every sound a player makes or hears, such as shots and grunts or machinery and monster noises.

Valve's implementation of the DSP technology also saves disk space and memory. Half-Life can reuse the same effect but give it very different sounds based on the geometry of the room rather than have to record a separate WAV file for each type of effect. 3D sound For any sound they hear, players can tell which direction it is coming from-left, right, below, above, in front, or behind. The source direction changes as they move through the space (e.g., engines that were revving on the left will sound off on the right when a player turns around), and constant sounds recede as players get farther away.

- Skeletal animation system:

Hand-in-glove with a demand for realistic lighting and color effects is a desire for monsters that look and move as realistically as possible. To accomplish this goal, the engineers at Valve have created a skeletal animation system for monsters. Rather than store a discrete set of polygonal meshes for each key frame of animation, as traditional action games do, the skeletal system moves the "bones" within a monster and deforms a mesh and texture map around them. There are a number of advantages this gives Half-Life animators as they build more compelling and complex monsters:
Smoother and richer animation Half-Life players will see much smoother animation than in typical action games. While both sprite- and mesh-based animation systems are based on a fixed keyframe animation rate, which is typically targeted at the lowest common denominator system, Half-Life's skeletal animation system does not limit the number of frames in an animation. For instance, a typical walk cycle may have as many as 80 frames in Half-Life, as compared to only 4 in some sprite-based games.

6000+ polygon monsters:
With Valve's new skeletal system, monsters can be much more complex than ever before-without affecting performance. Half-Life will have monsters of up to 6000 polygons, compared to the 500-plygon monsters in traditional mesh-based games.. Anatomically correct motion Through skeletal animation, motion can become more realistic and natural because the animation doesn't depend on thousands of interactions of mesh vertices that are difficult to map in all permutations. The faster a character runs, for instance, the faster the legs will move.

Multiple animations:
compound animations and switchable body parts Because skeletal animations are more economical, Half-Life has many different animations per creature. And, rather than have a fixed set of animations that involve a monster's entire body, Valve can build animations of many different parts and then combine them into a whole. Monsters can turn their heads to look at the player while they are running. Troops can pull out weapons and fire while they are moving or kneeling. Compound animations also make it possible to remove or switch body parts in response to the gaming action-say, to allow for a weapons change or to show damage to a monster that's still fighting.

- Monster AI:

Traditionally, game AI is a set of hard-coded if-then decisions for every possible situation that could confront a monster, such as, "If there is a bad guy in this room then shoot at him." Valve took another tack, designing a module-based AI system that provides practically infinite flexibility and monster growth potential. Below are just a few of the ways that AI decision modules work together to produce unprecedented monster intelligence.

Monster behavior based on player's actions moment by moment:
In Half-Life, monsters might advance only when it makes sense to. They assess how much health the player may have, where the player is heading, how many of their own kind are left in a room, and whether they have enough health themselves to fight. Such conditions and others dictate whether a monster will chase, attack, or retreat. While in other games monsters are basically suicide squads, in Half-Life monsters don't want to die.

Multi-sensory monsters:
Half-Life monsters possess a rich and varied group of senses for detecting a player's presence-namely, sight, hearing, and smell. For instance, some monsters can't see at all, but locate the player by sound. Others have the ability to track the player who has moved on by using a scent trail. This forces players to rethink their tactics and weapons choices.

Valve thrusts players into a full-surround gaming environment that is its own thriving space. Half-Life has an ecology and a society. Monsters are breeding, herds are forming, and some monsters prey on others. Players are dropped into the middle of this environment and must learn from what they see. In order to survive, they must use both their weapons and their wits. Some examples of innovations that enhance the player's gameplay experience include: Continuous-world experience Instead of discrete levels that offer no chance of turning back, Half-Life lets players return to any space they've visited-though what has happened in that space in the player's absence may be surprising

Usable vehicles and props:
Valve's designers have made sure that vehicles and props aren't merely backdrops to a story-they are tools that must be used to advance in the game. For instance, an underground train system takes players to numerous stations and allows them to backtrack. Some vehicles also contain, or can be used as, weapons to mow down monsters.

Scripted sequences to advance the story and interact with:
Rather than jar players out of their immersion by plugging in backstory details as a voiceover or text screens between levels, Valve's new scripting technology reveals information through sophisticated scripted animations that can be deliberately or accidentally interrupted (such as by shooting at a character or bursting into a scene in progress).

2.7 When will Half-Life be released?
_______________________________________

Half-Life is currently slated to be released 1st quarter 1998.

_____________________________________________________________
3. Half-Life System Requirements
_____________________________________________________________

3.1 What are Half-Life's system requirements?
_____________________________________________________________

- being required
+ not being required

- Pentium 100
+ MMX processor
- 16 MB RAM
- CD-ROM Drive
- SVGA graphics adapter
- Windows supported sound card
+ OpenGL supporting 3D accelerator

3.2 Under which Operating System will Half-Life run?
_____________________________________________________________

Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0(or greater)

3.3 Will Half-Life make use of a 3D accelerator and/or MMX processor?
_____________________________________________________________

Half-Life will support Direct 3D and OpenGL.
One of Valve's enhancements to the Quake engine is support for MMX(tm) processors (Pentium MMX or Pentium II). If you have a 3DFX 3D accelerator, capable of running OpenGL at a decent speed, it will look mind-bogglingly cool.

Other chipset support is not known at this time.

_____________________________________________________________
4. Multiplayer
_____________________________________________________________

4.1 What kind of multiplayer capabilities will there be in Half-Life?
_____________________________________________________________

Half-Life lets up to 32 players to play at once, and it has the the ability to support spectators. Other features include support for game setup, server filtering, and related Internet functionality.

Here is what level designer Dario Casali had to say about internet play:

"Net play in Half Life will have QuakeWorld style functionality and we are currently discussing this with several gaming services. We are making sure that the process of getting a net game going will be a simple one."

_____________________________________________________________
5. Half-Life Editing
_____________________________________________________________

5.1 In what ways will Half-Life be editable?
_____________________________________________________________

(DLL's in this case), models, sounds, levels. Almost everything actually. Half-Life will allow experienced programmers to modify via modules, Half-Life will avoid using an interpreted language approach (ie, QC), which is better suited for Dos games.

Ben Morris creator of WorldCraft is part of the Valve development team.
WorldCraft, the definitive Quake level editor will be shipping with Half-Life.

5.2 Can I change Quake C like in Quake?(tm) ?
_____________________________________________________________

Half-Life is Windows/NT based, allowing people to use C/C++ to develop add-ons. Editing will be different in Half-Life, as Valve is using .DLL's
instead of .QC files. This makes editing harder for some,
but for experienced programmers, .DLL's are heaven.

_____________________________________________________________
6. The Half-Life Team
_____________________________________________________________

•Gabe Newell -Founder/Managing Director
Gabe held a number of positions in the Systems, Applications, and Advanced Technology divisions during his 13 years at Microsoft. His responsibilities included running program management for the first two releases of Windows, starting the company's multimedia division, and, most recently, leading the company's efforts on the Information Highway PC. His most significant contribution to Half-Life was his statement "C'mon, people, you can't show the player a really big bomb and not let them blow it up."

•Ted Backman -Art Director/Conceptual Artist/Illustrator/Animator
Ted has been a freelance artist and animator in the Seattle area for the last four years. Ted developed many of the more unusual monsters for Half-Life, including the Head Crab, Mr. Friendly and Big Momma. He is also a black-belt karate instructor.

•Harry Teasley -Game Designer/Level Designer/Artist
Harry came to Valve from Shiny Entertainment, where he was working on the upcoming game Wild 9's. Prior to Shiny, Harry was at Williams Entertainment where he was lead artist and designer for PlayStation Doom, and was lead designer for Doom64. Before Williams, Harry worked with Sid Meier at Microprose on Civilization as well as Pirates Gold, among other projects.

•Chuck Jones -Illustrator/3D Artist
Chuck joins Valve from Apogee/3D Realms where he was an artist and animator for Duke Nukem 3D, Rise of the Triad, Shadow Warrior and, most recently, the Duke Nukem Plutonium Pack. Formerly a tattoo artist, Chuck tagged Jerry Cantrell of rock group Alice In Chains long before he created the space aliens who invaded Los Angeles.

•Ken Birdwell -Senior Software Development Engineer
Ken has contributed to a wide range of projects in the last 15 years. These include in-circuit emulators (CodeTap), 3D surface reconstruction (Surfgen), 3D prosthetics design tools (Shapemaker), and satellite networking (Microsoft's Broadcast PC). He also wrote one of the first graphical shells for multiplayer on-line games for Compuserve's Sniper. Oddly enough, Ken has a BFA from Evergreen State University, where he studied painting, photography, and animation. Ken has designed and implemented the animation system and many other engine components for Half-Life.

•Ben Morris -Tools Architect
Ben is the creator of DCK (Doom Construction Kit) and WorldCraft, the definitive Doom and Quake level creation tools. He is currently developing tool-kits for our in-house designers as well as for third party use and general release.

•Kelly Bailey -Senior Software Development Engineer/Musician
Kelly, formerly a product unit manager at Microsoft, has a programming background that includes consumer multimedia, database engines, and networking. He created all of the music and sound effects for Half-Life. He is also lead singer for a Seattle band, Lucy's Fishing Trip, and, therefore, shaves less than the rest of the staff.

•Dario Casali -Level Designer
Joining Valve from England, Dario is a world-famous level designer. His work includes some of the most popular deathmatch levels on the Internet, as well as Final Doom, published by id Software.

•Steve Bond -Game Designer/Engineer
Having made the great trek westward from Fort Walton Beach, Florida, Steve is responsible for much of Half-Life's sophisticated monster and entity behaviors, of which the squad-level AI is his favorite. Steve worked with John Guthrie on several projects that demonstrated the power and flexibility of the QuakeC development environment, which caught John Carmack's attention, who in turn referred him to us. Before that, Steve worked at a local Internet service provider and delivered pizza, a fact that we rarely let him forget, even in his corporate bio.

•John Guthrie -Game and Level Designer
Along with Steve Bond, John started the influential and popular Internet gaming site, Quake Command. John was also the co-creator of Quake Airplane and Quake Kart. Today, he occupies Valve's darkest office, where he is hard at work constructing the chambers and corridors of Half-Life's treacherous missile base and underground train system.

•Brett Johnson -Level Designer/Composer
Brett's craftsmanship as a musician is matched only by his ability to create traps which snare, snag and frag unwary explorers in 3D environments. Valve lured Brett mid-way through his final year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a promising career in biochemistry. A hard-assed New Yorker, Brett continues to deny Seattle's claim to being the birthplace of espresso.

•Karen Laur -Illustrator/Texture-Maker/Artist at Large
Karen has contributed to Starwave Corporation's Castle Infinty and Eastwood, and Activision's Zork Nemesis. She was the sole creator of Materia Prima, a texture collection published by the Valis Group, and was head designer for Maya Romanoff, a prestigious producer of hand-made wallpaper. Karen was also owner/operator of the Washington DC restaurant, Dante's.

•Dave Riller -Level Designer
Prior to joining Valve, Dave was an active developer in the on-line Quake community, and worked with id Software on the deployment of Quake World. For his day job, Dave was a program designer/analyst at MSI, a Windows software developer located on the East Coast. He also ran their website. Dave has been a beta tester for Doom 2, Hexen, Quake, and Warcraft II. In his virtually non-existent spare time, Dave is a pilot and musician.

•Marc Laidlaw -Writer/Game Designer
Marc Laidlaw is the author of half a dozen strange novels, including Dad's Nuke and The 37th Mandala. While writing a cover-story about Quake for Wired Magazine, he determined that level designers had the coolest jobs on earth--although the fact that he'd been working as a legal secretary for 10 years might have warped his perceptions very slightly. In addition to building levels for upcoming projects, Marc will be working to ensure that Valve's stories and scripts are as intense and entertaining as all the other elements of its games. Oddly, he refuses to do anyone else's typing.

•Jay Stelly - Engine/Special Effects Developer
Jay recently joined Valve from Tetragon where he was lead engineer and 3D engine developer of Virgin's Nanotek Warrior. Before that, he developed titles for Sony Playstation & 3DO. Way before that, he wrote his first computer game (at age 9) and had a game published in a magazine (at age 15). A native of Cajun Country, Jay finds Northwest buildings too hot (what, no air conditioning?) and the food not hot enough.

•Gregg Coomer - Game Designer/Art Director
Gregg has worked on a variety of graphic design, multimedia, and web projects for Nintendo and Microsoft. Resident art-boy, he'll critique your shoes, interior decoration, and interface design, in that order. His secret dream is to create a game called 'Aksidenz Grotesk'. You know, for kids.

•Yatzse Mark - Artist/Texture Illustrator
Yatsze Mark (pronounced "Mark") came to Valve from San Diego where she was working at the Lightspan Partnership, doing background painting for traditional cel animation in educational games. Prior to Lightspan, she worked at Leland Interactive Media (later to become Midway Home Entertainment) after her graduation from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Her exceptional skill at painting is only exceeded by her questionable taste in husbands.

•Doug Wood - Animator/Modeler/2d Artist
Doug joins us from Apogee/3DRealms where he worked on projects such as Duke Nukem3d, Shadow Warrior, Prey (before everyone left) and the Plutonium/Atomic Edition for Duke. Before 3DRealms, he worked for Origin down in Austin. As far as we know, Doug is the only member of Valve who has ever been a Guardian Angel in New York City. Doug is responsible for many of Half-Life's scripted sequences, including tentacles that pull unsuspecting scientists through the ceiling.

•Louis Donaldson - Office Manager
Louise is the only person at Valve who wasn't a hardcore gamer before joining. She is still a bit suspicious when we tell her that not only is it OK to play games at work, but that we expect her to play games at work. Her daughter thinks it is sooo cool that her mom is working at a games company, even though her mom won't let her play Half-Life until she is ten.

•Joe Bryant - Programmer
Joe, an Alaska native, recently joined Valve from Realtime Associates, where he was lead programmer on Magic: BattleMage. Before that, he was a programmer for the Alaska Army National Guard for 6 years (yippee COBOL!). Joe also worked on medical and oil pipeline robotics and once spent 3 days on an Arctic Ocean beach debugging code for an oil robot.

•Karl Deckard - Designer/Artist
Karl comes to Valve by way of Nintendo, where he was responsible for graphic design and production on Nintendo Power Magazine and several player's guides, including Killer Instinct, Yoshi's Island, and Super Mario RPG. His thorough familiarity with paper-based role-playing games, wargames, and CCGs, combined with his knowledge of PC and console video games, mark him as Valve's quintessential game fanatic.

•Randy Lundeen - Mapper/Artist
Randy comes to Valve by way of Microsoft, where he worked as an interface designer for the Internet Gaming Zone. Randy designs some of the most unusual and original levels in the company; he also is the most likely person to be pushing the polygon and memory limits of our engine. In his distant past, he was a key staff member at a potato processing plant (his responsibilities including peeling and potato quality oversite). ______________________________________________________________
7. Where to find more information about Half-Life
______________________________________________________________

7.1 WWW
______________________________________________________________

You can check out the following webpages:

ValvE

THE Official Half-Life site
Sierra On Line

>VALVE EMPLOYEE PAGES

Hoc opus
Dario Casali's Quake levels
HeT3

>FAN PAGES

The Half-Life Benchmark
Effective Half-Life
f r a g i l e m o r t a l i t y
Half-Life@far2cool
Half of It
Inside 3D Half-Life
Microguys Half-Life News
Underworld
Unknown Life
The Corridor
QNG - Quake derivatives - Half-Life
Reign's 3D Gaming Studio's Half-Life Page ____________________________________________________________

7.2 IRC
_____________________________________________________________

#half-life or #valve on 3DNet...get mIRC at www.mirc.co.uk and select the 3DNet server.
Then type /join #half-life or #valve and chat with other Half-Life fans, and Valve employees.

7.3 NewsGroups
_____________________________________________________________

Currently unknown

7.4 Public Forums
_____________________________________________________________

Telefragged's public Half-Life forum

Public Forum at North American War Council

Discussion Board at The Underworld _____________________________________________________________
8. Credits

Valve Software
- extra big thanks to Lisa Mennet from Valve

Jason Thierbach(a.k.a.)jaspur

Thanks to Satanic maintainer of the Official Hexen2 Faq

____________________________________________________

______________________________________________________
9. Revision History

______________________________________________________

v.10 - Almost finished for first non-public release
v.20 - Too many things to be mentioned
v.21 - Changes in links, system requirements, and team sections
v.22 - Changed release date