HL2 Dev Commentary Part 2 - Red Letter Day

[@reallyMika]

1:13 Oh yeah, the choreography. The choreography for Freeman, the choreography chosen especially to help Freeman, Freemans choreography.

[@idontlikethis980]

good to know i wasn't the only one who noticed his similarity to patrick warburton

[@mahuba2553]

Woah, nice choreography.

[@etiennevanier]

@@mahuba2553 I rate it... 8.5 out of 10.

[@Randarrradara]

Let’s see Paul Allen’s choreography

[@DrCranberry]

that choreography?

[@trinitygod863]

"we watched a play tester slap Kleiner with a box for 5 minutes straight" How did they get footage of my gameplay??

[@03opelcorsa]

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall as the Valve employees watched that one playtester repeatedly bash Kleiner with a wooden box.

[@botno69420]

They never knew he was a speedrunner and onto something!

[@03opelcorsa]

​@@botno69420 playtester from the future

[@lucasliboiron7342]

as a game dev sound designer, it is fascinating hearing how they developed the audio for HL2 back in the early 2000s. ahead of their time.

[@StrikeWarlock]

Kelly Bailey is a living god.

[@WangleLine]

Likewise!!

[@lucasliboiron7342]

@@WangleLine Fascinating? or youre a Sound Designer too?

[@WangleLine]

@@lucasliboiron7342 both!

[@DJBLVZD]

Yeah I agree, we are soo blessed to have the tools we have today for game development.

[@MindVortex23]

I haven't played the commentary version, and probably wouldn't have ever gotten round to it, but seeing it in a video actually makes it a lot more enjoyable - thanks Philip

[@thewoodpeckers655]

We all knew how smart valve was when making these systems and gameplay scenes, but this new commentary shows just how ingenious every single aspect of the game was. Truly one of the greatest games ever created.

[@Khunark]

theyre just explaining to me why i never liked the games story or characters. they were DEI ahead of their time, back when people didnt expect that being thrown at them like it is today.

[@peve9132]

​@@Khunark😂

[@lt2660]

​@@Khunark what are you talking about

[@jaykstah]

​@@Khunark 👎

[@videojames1]

​@@KhunarkYou are the worst kind of person. Shut up.

[@Extendedklips]

I appreciate that the audio team has the highest quality voice recordings

[@killerlifealbum]

I still think the graphics look fab today

[@oldm9228]

Yes especially the texture work, sometimes I look at some wall or entire building block and think: damn. Damn.

[@LewdSCP1471A]

I think the weakest aspect has to be environment art, obviously in 2004 this was top of the line, but nowadays we do art for levels so differently than we used to, old games like this used a lot of whats often referred to as "brushes" which is just basic blocky geometry that they texture in their map editor. Nowadays we use meshes far more which allows for stuff to look nowhere near as flat as they used to.

[@XJ9LoL]

Same. I am not a fan of the hyper realistic games now a days.

[@Thornskade]

I find it fascinating how many of these little details were brought over to Team Fortress and presumably Counter-Strike as well. Like the bullet whizz sounds, the collision sound effects, the rope physics, the facial animation system especially without which TF2 wouldn't be nearly as funny. I wonder, had it not been for Half-Life, whether these systems would have been important enough for them to create just for their multiplayer shooters

[@ffwast]

It really drives home how foundational all this stuff was.

[@bonelesschickennuggets1868]

Gabe said it best in the documentary, it’s all thanks to Half life and the episodes that they were able to make such fantastic games in the following years, more than their crowning achievement, it was a massive learning experience.

[@Flor-nl5ko]

its really sad seing the views on the second part dropping to the degree it did. i can say for myself, i will watch every part of this series and i think many will too.

[@E1025]

Really appreciate that you didn't just speedrun through the game while listening to each commentary track to ensure you were the first one to upload them. You've clearly put effort into making sure each commentary node is given the attention it needs

[@nuxter6210]

Thanks for making these, I dont think i would go into the commentary myself but this way is really nice to watch, especially with you flailing your camera around in a way that has basically become your trademark!

[@andi36356]

I wonder if the Audio Caching mentioned at 16:42 is what causes the typical Source Engine sound stutters. Like when changing a map or CS' "Let's roll-oll".

[@Slasha00]

It is. Basically the sound in the cache is buffered and when the buffer doesn't load the next block of audio data (because the process is suspended for other tasks) the process to play the sound in the buffer continues and repeats.

[@toasted_alien]

incredible observation!

[@VioletPrism]

Thanks Phillip really makes it easy to listen to these. I started my own hl2 play through but I really just wanted to hear the commentary c:

[@donnkuhler9046]

thank you so much for uploading these! Even tho these kinda videos probably wont make you top numbers, you uploading these for those of us who are as interested in this as you are is awesome! PS: Its very enjoable to watch these videos aswell, given your way of interacting with the world while listening to those records

[@vincepale]

Seeing all these names is nuts; Thank you for posting these.

[@sadtoast6122]

Thanks for making and posting these! I had the orange box growing up but I never listen to ALL of these wish I did . So thanks Nan ill watch the whole series :3

[@isfiyiywafibc6qaiiiiiiiiii570]

These are newly added. This probably contributes to why you've never listened to all of these.

[@Thornskade]

The Orange Box only had commentaries for the new titles released in 2007. It included Half-Life 2 but without any commentary. These were added to the PC version only a few days ago

[@corex1464]

thank you for these videos. I dont think id have the patience to play the game AND wait for the commentary. This, i can just listen to like an audiobook ❤

[@isfiyiywafibc6qaiiiiiiiiii570]

It's easy to forget that Half Life 2 at the time of its release was a state of the art game which was pushing the boundaries of what was possible across the board.

[@bkmisc54]

I loved listening to the TF2 developer commentary, HL2 ones are even better!

[@Knowbody42]

I remember there being an exploit used in speedruns to make characters teleport to their destination by bonking them on the head with an object. The game wants the character to walk to a position, but if there is no path for them to do so, the game just teleports them there instead. You can trigger this by bonking them on the head, thus obstructing their movement.

[@kisaragi-hiu]

I learned here that what the community now refers to by analogy as "cutscenes" is called choreo-scenes internally, though I also noticed in a HL:A commentary node that they've already used the term there.

[@JayMaverick]

Valve 2004: Pioneering facial animations and interactive storytelling in games. Ubisoft 2024: You want writing and facial animations? Players today are way too demanding.

[@CRmRUSnew]

16:50 I wonder if this is why that hilarious sound looping occurs whenever source engine freezes

[@AyesC9000]

Kind of, the DSP holds the currently playing "chunk" of audio in a buffer and the DSP runs on a separate thread from the rest of the game. If the main game thread freezes, the DSP is no longer fed any new "chunks" of audio and resorts to looping the previous chunks until it receives new data from the game thread.

[@VADemon]

This used to happen when older computers froze. Today you rarely get the same kind of OS crashes to provoke the looping audio.

[@Kris-2]

Thank you for these videos, I really enjoyed the HL Alyx development commentary and I'm looking forward to more of this one. 👍

[@noonenoone9418]

19:19 PARKING GARAGE 😮

[@DriftJunkie]

The DSP tuning thing is a marvel 😮 I can't even fathom how hard can, an automated tool like this, be even conceptualized. And they implemented a reliable product!

[@StrikeWarlock]

HE'S FUCKING FLEXING. THIS IS NO DIFFERENT FROM WHEN MIKE SHAPIRO SWITCHES FROM HIMSELF, G-MAN, THEN FUCKING BARNEY IN A SINGLE TAKE IN THE HL2 DOCUMENTARY. Hot fucking damn, it's amazing how you can catch traits from people from some interviews Valve has released, but the one takeaway from the latest one is how Kelly Bailey and Mike Shapiro just can't stop styling. Also Kelly might just be the sound guy, but his input gets mentioned alot by other devs so you know he did more than just the sound and the OST, he had a huge say on what the game should feel.

[@explosivesexplode]

A SMALL ROOM 😱

[@SwissWaterslides22]

Thank you so much for posting ^_^

[@idontlikethis980]

bill fletcher sounds like he's trying to do a joe swanson or Patrick Warburton impression. he talks in the same cadence. There's only a slight difference in the voice.

[@kadaver1n]

cadence

[@sirduggins]

We were animating a, hey uhhhhh peter, dialogue scene and....

[@DiddyHop]

I just googled him and he's the face of cave johnson.

[@idontlikethis980]

@kadaver1n thanks, mate!

[@byteyourownteeth2100]

Audio cache 125ms preloaded smart af.

[@porquinho_fofinho]

just finished the last one. thanks for uploading the next one!

[@nifethrubutter]

I really appreciate you making these! Thank you!

[@s_callahan]

thankyou for these, they're a blessing

[@AntonioZL]

19:40 oh, Kelly, I wonder WHO that single person working on audio was...

[@YaroslaffFedin]

Audio cache 125m preload is smart

[@ProductsforProfitsInc.]

do you have schedule for these or you just upload when you finish editing

[@daunder6138]

WE LOVE YOU PHILLIP

[@ScarfKat]

I'm so glad you're doing videos for these, I loved the ones you did for HLA

[@cavemann_]

I love these.

[@CampGareth]

Press 0 Hear "Kleiner's Laaab. Kleiner's Lab" Repeat until satisfied

[@WayStedYou]

I didn't know they had patrick warburton working on half life 2

[@Jarethenator]

*~ P A R K I N G G A R A G E ~*

[@em_the_bee]

So, in 2004 a game would load the first 125 ms of a sound file from RAM while loading the rest from a hard disk In 2024, a Windows 11 laptop with NVMe SSD, Ryzen 7 8845HS and 16 GB of DDR5 RAM takes several seconds to open file explorer

[@NekoHibaCosplay]

Valve cooked so much, the way they gone around hardware limitations of that time for the sound design is peak game design even by today standards

[@HuckerDuck]

Great video :)

[@PeterusTV]

9:40 thick of it reference

[@Melanittanigra]

modeling the characters after the HL1 archetypes was genius

[@kisaragi-hiu]

Wait. The captions. Thanks for doing the job that Valve seems to have missed doing.

[@0wn3dgam1ng6]

there are captions for the commentary, though they are mostly just walls of text badly formated.

[@pessimistickris2718]

​@0wn3dgam1ng6 how to turn them on? I have in game subtitles turned on but the dev commentary subtitles don't show up

[@GaomonAndLucario]

@@pessimistickris2718 If you have Steam set to a different language, they won't appear. You will need to set the Closed Caption language in game to English for it to appear. All you need to do is open the console window (there are guides on how to do this if you are stuck) and type "cc_lang english" without the quotes. It should make the Closed Captioning for the commentary nodes work properly!

[@YaNasral]

So, basically, 2004 engine have features that are still not implemented by default in both unreal and unity last versions, lol. I could say that about lipsync also but unreal recently made a tool to generate those, but as i remember it doesn't do it realtime? But decently. (Unity still not?)

[@VADemon]

I think lipsync is based on text there? Because audio analysis would be very hard algorithmically and computationally.

[@robert_0505]

No text in half life ​@@VADemon

[@LewdSCP1471A]

Engines dont make the game for you, a lot of these features are specific to what Valve needed for their games.

[@YaNasral]

@@LewdSCP1471A i perfectly know that engines don't make games by itself, because im amateur dev, lol. But who says that imitating sound depending on environment, for example, won't be useful LITERALLY IN ANY 3d game, okay the lipsync case is not needed if making a topdown game, you won't see the mouth, but even here you can give it in dialogues. Unity default 3d sound, i don't think it do something about environment like in hl2, at least it got dumb cutting after 5 meters(even lower?), i dunno why the default parameter is so low, to be prepared to spam new unsetted audiosources in a script? (Oh wait its also in 2d mode by default, so i don't get it even more (in 2d at any distance volume is the same) ) P.s. To be honest if thinking about it, it sounds like trolling, many features are core like, that's not specifics of a certain company, though many are outdated.

[@subnok3961]

When I start a commentary, there is no box appearing. And shouldn't music keep playing while loading into a new map? This don't work for me either. Someone else have similar problems?

[@mtw7025]

hey mr kliksphilip can you pwease release the next dev commentary episode :3 UwU

[@AdrenResi]

in hl2 characters ignore getting slapped by items but in hla they try to get you to back off in a rather realistic way

[@1234Needforspeed]

Hey, do you know how to enable subtitles for the commentary?

[@lymfley]

17:13 so that's why when game is low fps sounds repeat? It plays the cache it has?

[@robert_0505]

Exactly Because the freezes and it doesn't send any new audio to the dsp So it just replays the cached audio

[@MattNF]

Could you turn on ingame captions for these videos? It would be nice to read along.

[@MelonLuminus2845]

Kelly Bailey - Genius!!

[@lgfrgorekgkreg]

Isn't Jay Stelly the Obsolete guy

[@HeyKyle]

W man

[@shrub8644]

Bill Fletcher sounds like Patrick Warburton

[@tonnentonie2767]

I have played through the citadel until right before the finale and and there wasnt any commentary node. Is that normal?

[@klaus1756]

ty

[@nofacegamedev]

2kilksphillip i think you're very sigma skibidi

[@matinprsd]

1:17 bro sounds like Joe Swanson

[@MsCounterMax]

PARKING GARAGE

[@StrikeWarlock]

a small room and outdoors also had different echoes as well, trying to hammer his point about how sound should complement the area and setting.

[@ReachTea]

Why is the audio weird

[@-austinfelts]

moar plz you kind lovely soul :D

[@61f757r34m]

a bit sad to hear how much thought they put into the audio/voices, only to have them be comically bad in other languages

[@isabelle5089]

w

[@Iqbal1808]

hawk tuah

[@parranoic]

Does anyone else have really bad mouse input lag with the new update ?

[@HeyKyle]

You have raw input enabled?

[@parranoic]

@@HeyKyle yes. I also tried lowest settings, windowed, fullscreen etc. We've played the multiplayer mod 3 weeks ago and it was fine. The must have broken something

[@Thornskade]

@@parranoic Is Vsync enabled?

[@parranoic]

@@Thornskade yes, I feel so dumb.. Had it turned off previously. I guess it didn't keep my config. Thank you both

[@umilovesu2254]

31 seconds and 1 view, 2kliksphilip fell off

[@nuxter6210]

up to 6 now =P

[@hapytreefriends78]

it’s over

[@RabaBoem]

i kliked twice on that like button

[@SasquatchOni]

One of the most absurd but best KZbin jokes lol

[@Die-Coughman]

This is so true

[@casuspacis3196]

This update is so buggy, I hope they will fix it promptly

[@clausdk6299]

@2kliksphilip why are you reposting HL2 commentary clips? xD

[@Eisencrafter]

it sounds like ai for the first 1 second

[@Strelokos666]

Too much nerdy stuff involving systems and engine. its like 20 years now and everybody who wanted to get their hands on Source and its tools are probably read the whole Valve Dev Community many times and know that thing. I think gamedesign, plot dedicated and development process commentaries are way more interesting in that matter.

[@andmind]

This sound so AI 🤣

[@sdsdsdssdsdxdd]

come on. stop leeching on their work and upload all of it already. youre better than this.

[@boris8303]

All of it is already available everywhere. You are being unreasonable in your comment. To put it lightly.

[@sdsdsdssdsdxdd]

@boris8303 oh yeah? Stuff like this deserves to get called out

[@gray_star6032]

​@@sdsdsdssdsdxdd ok and half life 2 was FREE on the 20th anniversary so you could go listen to it yourself

[@MrSHURIKENCHO]

"Stop your life for a few days just so you can play and edit hours of footage because I am lazy and don't want to play it myself"

[@d11asian]

You fuckin do it then