Seattleite

The .5x value is kinda working, but... The combine fights are HELL. Yeah. Lowering damage and assuming Gordon has a helmet. .2x.

I hit a snag in HL2. A pretty serious one. Player locational damage in HL2 doesn't work. The player always takes normal damage on their body and double damage on their head, no matter what the SKs say. Melee weapons also don't deal locational damage at all, no matter who wields them. This means I have to adjust damage directly from sk_dmg_take_scale and that Gordon will be both unusually resistant to head wounds and unusually weak to body wounds. Unless we just assume that in HL2 Gordon finally gets a helmet, which seems unlikely since one is never shown, ever. I'm just going to have Gordon take 50% damage, period, and increase his melee power 50%. At least it still works in 1.

It doesn't matter either way. Both versions include the same .cfg file because they both use the same setting names for difficulties. I'm pretty sure it'll work either way, and if it doesn't I don't know what to say. The package I got was Half-Life Complete. Look it up, it's on Steam for $39.99. It has Half-Life, Half-Life Source, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, Half-Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, Lost Coast, Half-Life 2 Deathmatch and Team Fortress Classic. It has both Half-Life and Half-Life Source. So maybe Opposing Force and Blue Shift aren't Source, but Half-Life is.

Well, I've never seen it once. I've never seen the crossbow pin anything.

We only have one shot left, really. State governments are too weak for the most part to be worth buying, since the federal government technically has control over them. State governments have repeatedly managed to spit in the federal government's face, doing things like legalizing marijuana (a schedule-1 narcotic, which is ridiculous because it's harmless) for medicinal purposes in most and recreational use in two, including mine. These things were done despite corporate interest being against the legalization of marijuana. Our best chance for a peaceful resolution is a constitutional amendment, which can be passed if a 2/3rds majority of the state governments can agree on it. One state pushes for the amendment, they vote, and if they succeed they can remove corporate personhood, and put a limit on individual campaign donations (say, $100) so that the wealthy can't keep buying our politicians. We should also prevent congressmen from working outside of government after they've been in office so they can't be bribed with a lucrative job, and ban private political advertising. That way, congressmen don't have to sell out to be elected like they do now. The odds of this working? Slim. The corporations will likely just start bribing the state politicians when they realise this is going to come to a vote. But it's worth a shot.

I don't know where you're getting your info. Steam sells Half-Life source, Blue Shift and Opposing force in one package. That's where I got it. Exe Version says 1.2.2, Exe build: 13:14:12 August 29, 2013. These are the newest Steam versions, sold with the HD pack, and if I do recall it said Half-Life Source when I bought it.

This is Source... What made you think they weren't?

These are .cfg mods, so they're small, easy to install and uninstall, and were actually really easy to make. (Getting them right, on the other hand, can take some effort.) They also, by the nature of that, are primarily just gameplay effects. I'll list the details here. Shot placement. You now do different damage hitting enemies in different parts of their body, not just different damage between head and body shots. This also applies to you, so be mindful of your character's weak spots. This is difficulty dependent and is in fact the only impact difficulty has other than black ops cloaking and auto aim. Details below. Health/Power redistribution. Health is much harder to come by. 5%/kit and 25%/charger in Half-Life 1 and Black Mesa, 5%/vial, 10%/kit and 20%/charger in Half-Life 2. Armour charge is somewhat easier to come by. 25%/battery and 75%/charger in Half-Life 1 and Black mesa, 25%/battery and 100%/charger in Half-Life 2. Barney still gets 60% armour from a vest and 40% from a helmet because dammit I can't find the convars for that. Remember that as long as you have armour you take 40% less damage and 2/3rds of the damage is redirected to your armour points, which means armour actively acts to reduce the damage you take in addition to acting as extra hit points. (Way better than what they did in HL2, in my opinion.) If you run out of armour, find some right away because you won't last long. Especially if you're fighting HECU. Enemy difficulty. Xen animals aren't much of a threat to the armed and armoured player, but the various military forces most definitely are. Details below. Weapon damage. Some of the weapons frankly made no sense with the damage they did. Like the pistol doing more damage than the SMG when firing the same round. Much of this has been fixed. Varies a bit between games. Details below. Difficulty. There is a much wider gulf between the difficulties, as you take half as much damage and do anywhere from 1 2/3rds to 3x as much damage on easy as you do on hard depending on placement, making easy a breeze and hard crushing. Now, I designed the mods around the hard difficulty, but I made sure they'd work on easy and normal if you'd prefer that. There's also a difference in difficulty between the three games. Regular Half-Life is easiest due to Gordon's impenetrable body armour and hyperspace arsenal. Opposing force is harder because while Adrian doesn't have a weak spot his armour isn't as good, and while his hyperspace arsenal is roughly equal to Gordon's, he has to fight Race X and Black Ops, which are often harder than Xen and HECU. Barney has the hardest time, though. He has the biggest weak spot because his arms and legs are both exposed, his armour is only about as protective as Adrian's, his arsenal doesn't compare to the other two, and he fights HECU a lot. Now, I'm only releasing my mods for Half-Life 1, Blue shift and Opposing Force. I'm not releasing the Half-Life 2, Episode 1 and Episode 2 mods because I haven't tested them yet. I'm far enough to know they don't have any massive adverse effects, but I still want to make sure they work entirely as intended. I'll put those up when I've played through Half-Life 2 and its episodes. (I'm pausing from Route Canal to post this. I'll get back to that in a second, and once I'm through it I'll upload it as well.) Half-Life: To install, first back up Skill.cfg from your Half-Life/Valve folder. Then drag this one in. To uninstall, just drag your old Skill.cfg back in. Blue Shift: Same installation, just remove the (BShift) tag from the end first. Opposing force: Same install, don't remove the "opfor" from the end.

I personally find (real life) violence abhorrent, warfare inparticular, and would like to at least try to handle it through proper legal channels.

That is bizarre, but I never shoot head crabs with it so I guess I wouldn't know. (I do shoot vorts, but never pin them. Or anything else.)

Hopefully it won't come to that... But yeah it probably will.

Yeah, we're off-topic. But I personally think an entire factory of vortigaunts that are totally passive if not attacked would have been better for the story than just the one room we got in the final.

Xen's gravity isn't that hard to handle. But breathable air and flying platforms could use some speculation.

Odd how it doesn't ever do that to me, and I use the crossbow a lot.

Actually, if I remember, houbdeyes were supposed to be friendly, but QA killed them too much so they cut that idea. Never heard a thing about vorts, I just know there are passive ones.

Oh goodie, I'm not the only one noticing. But it's not just the news. The media belongs to the corporations, sure, but the politicians also belong to the corporations, the jails belong to the corporations, the judges belong to the corporations, the police belong to the corporations, and just try to deny the workers belong to the corporations, I dare you. Why are we even surprised anymore? Everything belongs to the corporations now. They control enough of our government and media to control us. The more... Optimistic minds of Wolf-PAC talk of getting to the governers, as most of them have been ignored due to there low strategic value, and getting the state governments to pass an amendment without bringing in the federal government (yes, they can do that if they have a 2/3rds majority), but I think it is unlikely this will actually work. I'm pretty sure the US is going down in flames. I say, run while you can.

I brought it up because there's a good chance he didn't know there even were friendly vortigaunts. Most players don't, and he's said himself he hasn't played the later sections of Half-Life in years.

HATE. Seriously, though, it just kinda did. The internet is like this sometimes.

You just proved it, when you said that a prisoner would probably kill anyone who angered them just because they can't be punished any more. Three problems with that. 1. This is demonstrably not true. There are worse things guards can do to a prisoner, such as put them in solitary confinement. Which is the default response to violence, I might add. Solitary is so much worse than regular prison it's silly to even compare them. It's basically a never ending psychological torture that gets worse and worse as it goes on. 2. Fear keeps them from attacking guards. They are intimidated, and after enough time grow timid in the guards' presence to avoid the guards' attention and further injury. As a result, any violence on their part would be directed towards other prisoners. 3. Most people find the idea of killing another person repulsive, especially one they know, even if that person is abusing them. They won't kill a guard simply because they don't want to. Do guards get attacked? Yes. They get attacked by three classes of people, though. 1. New "tough guy" inmates. These guys stop real fast when they realise they aren't hot shit, but there are plenty of cocky violent bastards who get sent to jail. Sure, they're a small minority, but there's always at least one in there. 2. Cocky prison-yard shieks. This is rare, but some guys in prison think they run the fucking place. And if a guard cuts off their smuggling op or whatever, they might order one of the other inmates to kill them. This is probably what got your friend. 3. Suicidal/mentally ill inmates. There are a decent number of people who are suicidal or mentally ill when sent to jail. It basically ruins your entire life forever, so that's to be expected. Plenty of regular people become suicidal or mentally ill in prison due to the squalid conditions, abhorrent abuse and intentional deprivation of basic human dignity, or top of your whole life being ruined forever. Spending enough time in solitary is 100% guaranteed to cause psychological degredation and people with long sentences tend to become suicidal after coming out of a couple weeks of solitary. Most of those people never did a thing wrong before they were put in prison and now they're abused so bad they want to die. They'll frequently attack a guard when wronged by them just because they don't care anymore and if they get killed at least it'll be over. These are unfortunately quite common.

The thing is, though, these ones aren't hostile. The only time in the game they aren't deployed in a military action and there aren't any controllers present, they're not hostile. That's not really something to just gloss over.

That is so far from true that I can't decide if I find it depressing or hilarious that you believe it. The people we send to prison aren't a bunch of violent animals. Certainly some are, bur they're a tiny minority just amongst the people who actually did something, who are in turn a tiny minority. Most people in prison are there for minor drug offenses. They never did a fucking thing wrong, and they got thrown into an environment of intolerable abuse and daily loss of human dignity so people like your friend's scumbag boss can keep soaking up massive amounts of goverment money. Most of them are timid, cowardly victims of our corrupt and abusive system who would give anything to be treated like a fucking human being again. And if you think most of the abuse comes from other inmates, you're wrong. Prison guards, by their very nature, abuse the inmates constantly and think they're entirely justified because they see the people on the other side of the bars as subhuman animals, just like you do, even though all most of them did was put a substance into their OWN BODY. Which is done at the same time that the pharmaceutical industry rakes in massive amounts of money selling unsafe drugs like ritalin, oxycodone and methamphetamine (why yes, methamphetamine is also used as a psychiatric medication for two "illnesses" that don't exist), that they know aren't safe and are likely to kill people, including children which two of those three are primarily prescribed for, which the FDA knows aren't safe and doesn't do a damned thing about because they're just as bought off as the congressmen that keep our ridiculous drug war going.

If I were to post links to my .cfg mods for the Half-Life series here, would anybody be interested? Because I'm not doing it if nobody cares.

Maybe there's a large, unseen mass under the cloud? Maybe the large, unseen mass is the cloud and we're towards the top of it? Maybe the cloud under us isn't a cloud at all and is actually solid ground, but the crappy graphics make it look like a dark cloud? Some mass must be down there to produce that gravity, and none of those would be a stretch.

It's the second game where crossbows pin enemies. There it's firing a heavy piece of electrically superheated rebar, not a tranq. There it's a believably lethal improvised weapon that would be extremely deadly due to a combination of a large puncture wound, severe burns all along it including in vital organs, and possibly an electrical discharge due to its strong negative charge. (It really causes electric damage in-game. Watch what it does when you hit.) Granted, it'd need to fly faster to work, but the slow projectile speed is an issue with most of Valve's non-firearm weapons and the only break from reality there... Well, except for the death being instant instead of slow and excruciating as the hot bolt burns the victims organs, basically cooking them from the inside while they're still alive, producing shrill sheiks of agony as they desparately grab hold of it and pull it out, leaving their wound open and causing them to bleed out and die in incredible pain, and I can't fathom why they left that gut-wrenching spectacle out. Not a clue.

Ross: There are a number of vortigaunts towards the end of the game that are non-hostile if you don't injure any of them. Are you aware of this, and is there a plan regarding them? It might be a humanizing moment for Freeman to stop and take note of this, maybe realize they're slaves and everything they did was against their will. On a similar note, is Freeman going to find the All-Knowing Vortigaunt in the second game? Lots of exposition there for Freeman to take in and react to.