FM 37: Bat sighting?

[DeWolfeJV]

I feel we will see the particle bat again. Maybe it followed Freeman into stasis and all the way to his awakening and placement into City 17.

[Bugthing]

gqdcp76oSus

 

 

It's weird how I keep managing to find my way into this thread once a year.

[Veyrdite]

 

There's a definite turning point in the pat's path. Plotted frame-by-frame whilst the camera was mostly still, cropped version of above:

 

In order to properly handle the future success of the particle bat we're going to have to emulate it's natural environment. I can set up the grinders, but does anyone know what vertebrate was being ground up for those meat chunks? I'm thinking it's not cows...

[Bugthing]

I haven't really seen a lot of meat handling in the rest of the game. Maybe the Black Mesa's fast food industry was situated right atop. Cows are a safe bet.

 

Is there anything we can learn from its trajectory and speed? Mass? Composistion? There isn't really a physics model for this, but maybe we can take a page from the book of XKCD and do some educated guesswork.

[Blightmare]

I kinda want to make a particle system involving a single bat in UDK and start putting it in anything I make there from now on.

 

I want particle bat to live.

[BTGBullseye]

Particle bat can never die!

[Veyrdite]

I haven't really seen a lot of meat handling in the rest of the game. Maybe the Black Mesa's fast food industry was situated right atop. Cows are a safe bet.

The staff looked pretty healthy until Opposing force. Perhaps different staff are allocated different diets? You don't want any one catering service knowing too much about the whole facility.

 

Is there anything we can learn from its trajectory and speed? Mass? Composistion? There isn't really a physics model for this, but maybe we can take a page from the book of XKCD and do some educated guesswork.

More TODO

 

Particle bounces off a virtual floor

If proper physics is not used for particle effects (likely for the original goldsrc, unknown how it may have been changed for the source version) then their paths are going to be pre-animated or pre-coded. Either way we can note two things:

• Particles travel through walls. Assuming nothing interesting happens in the room we saw the particle, it could have been created somewhere else
  
• The particle movement is setup as if it exploded on a flat surface, as it looks like it bounces off a virtual floor (the path abruptly starts moving up again for a second bounce, but with less energy). Its bounce point will be at the same Z height as where it started.

 

Potential to be an artefact

CPU/code phantasmal erroneous generation of particle entities or coordinate fumbling of existing particles: possible

GPU fumbling: much less likely, considering how the particle kept a smooth velocity over a few dozen frames.

Video capture/encoding: possible, given the 'follow movement' behaviour of modern encoders. It may have just happened to be a very lucky 'path' of small variations in the image over the given frames that appeared to be a sharp object moving to the encoder.

 

I don't have hl source, but I'll try probing the same area with the original hl sometime. Who knows what we'll find?

[optimusjamie]

Particle Bat, Particle Bat,

Doing the things a particle can.

What's he like? It's not important.

Particle Bat.

 

Is he a dot, or is he a speck?

When he's underwater does he get wet?

Or does the water get him instead?

Nobody knows,

Particle Bat.

[Bugthing]

The staff looked pretty healthy until Opposing force. Perhaps different staff are allocated different diets? You don't want any one catering service knowing too much about the whole facility..

Maybe it's not meat but fish? It's supposed to be brainfood. Salmon perhaps, since the chunks are red. I wonder how much salmon there is in New Mexico at any given time.

 

The particle movement is setup as if it exploded on a flat surface, as it looks like it bounces off a virtual floor (the path abruptly starts moving up again for a second bounce, but with less energy). Its bounce point will be at the same Z height as where it started.

I think this find may simply support my earlier claim that the particle bat is quantum entangled with another particle bat. The other one hit something, so the one in the Black Mesa meat sewer also changed its trajectory accordingly.

[BTGBullseye]

Or it just decided it preferred that direction to the one it was on... It does happen.