That tentacle will be pleased, after all these long years…
Half-Life recently received a major update to commemorate its 25th anniversary, but a major bug remained. The scientist and the tentacle would be misaligned in a famous scripted sequence in which a long, green tentacle busts through a window and drags away a scientist, giving the impression that the scientist floated out of the window of his own volition.
Not any longer. After more than two decades, Valve programmer Ben Burbank has fixed the bug and explained how.
To begin with, this bug did not exist when I first played Half-Life in 1998 and 1999. The Win32 API, according to popular belief, was introduced with Windows 2000. As Burbank explains on Mastodon, the misalignment would be visible on “computers running at least Windows 2000 or newer.”
“We wanted to fix this for the 25th Anniversary Update but other stuff took priority pre-ship,” Burbank wrote.
When it came to fixing it after the fact, there appeared to be three options. Fix the code, which Burbank says is “plausible but would definitely require re-testing every other scripted sequence thoroughly, and may not even fix it”; “Change the animations that play (doable)”; or, “change the map so the timing works.”
“We chose to change the map for a few reasons. If we fixed the sequence so that the scientist timing worked out, a player could still stand in the doorway and shoot the scientist, interrupting the sequence, and then he would play his animation in an insane way. So we wanted to change how the sequence was triggered to be uninterruptible,” Burbank added.
“That said, recompiling the map was creating a bunch of changes in the resulting bsp (remember, these maps were last compiled on a Windows 95/98 computer!).” “Any .bsp difference could cause minor but annoying pathing and collision bugs. Didn’t want that.”
“Hence, I just hex edited the map. Triggering the animation on the door opening (some community mods did this with decompiled / recompiled versions of the maps) instead of when the player walks through the door ensures the player can’t shoot the scientist before things start ‘syncing.’ The sequence is SLIGHTLY different but plays more closely to what the alpha maps ran when this was authored.”
Hex editing is a method of altering a computer file’s underlying binary data, and it appears as the string of letters and numbers seen at the top of Burbank’s Mastodon thread. However, as he explains in a response, “fortunately the parts [he] needed were the plain text on the right side.”