Gabe, once again, will not confirm or deny the possibility of another Half Life game but did imply in an interview that there are no teams currently working on one. The reason is sad but obvious, as our sometimes maligned Raptr posts have shown, DOTA 2 and CS:GO make up over 10% of the time spent gaming by those with Raptr installed and at the time this article was written 14% of online Steam users are playing those games. That translates to a lot of hats being sold and a lot of money coming into Valve; significantly more than would come from a new Half Life thanks to the ongoing nature of those online games and the market they have created.
You can catch the interview from the links on Slashdot but stating that this is the end of single player focused games from Valve is an overstatement. The online gaming market is more lucrative but there is still a market for those of us who prefer stories to online bragging rights and some of the work they have done on current game engines should be translatable to a financially viable single player game or ten.
"Half-Life 3 is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated games in history. While Valve transitioned from the revolutionary series that brought the company most of its original success, to online games like Team Fortress, Dota and Left 4 Dead, people still desperately want to believe that there is more coming for Half-Life."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- IBM's OpenPower gang touts first proper non-Big Blue-badged server @ The Register
- Delving into Office 2016: Microsoft goes public with new preview @ The Register
- Facebook unveils P2P moola-to-mates payment feature @ The Register
- Nobody expects the BIOS inquisition, so nobody patches them @ The Register
- FREAK: How government security worries got us into this mess @ The Inquirer
- TP-Link Archer C9 AC1900 Dual Band Wireless Router @ Kitguru
- Tech ARP 2015 Mega Giveaway
“Gabe, once again, will not
“Gabe, once again, will not confirm or deny the possibility of another Half Life game but did imply in an interview that there are no teams currently working on one.”
I see no implication of the sort in Gabe’s quote. If anything, he confirms the existence of “Half-Life 3” by referring to it by name.
It’s become pretty clear to me that the reason Half-Life 3 is not finished is directly tied to the nature of how Gabe runs Valve. People who work there choose what they want to do, instead of being assigned a task. If only a few people want to work on Hal-Life 3, then the pace at which it gets made is going to be very slow, just like we have seen.
Half Life 3 is going to be a
Half Life 3 is going to be a ray traced Contra style side scroller. Just Because.
No video games are going to
No video games are going to be ray traced until all GPU makers put dedicated Ray Tracing hardware on their GPUs, Even on the PowerVR wizard, that has a dedicated ray tracing unit on the GPU, the amount of ray interactions calculated is limited, and though the results are better than not having any ray tracing hardware on the GPU, what is there has to be used sparingly. Reflections, and transparent reflections can only be properly done with ray tracing algorithms, and mostly that is done on the CPU, and even quad core/8 thread CPUs struggle with ray tracing single images, let alone the multiple frames of gaming. Hopefully the PowerVR wizard will start a trend, that the other GPU makers will be forced to follow, I’m sure hoping so for other graphics reasons, but are there any design wins for the PowerVR wizard yet?
If any other feature on games/gaming hardware is a candidate for being done in a massively parallel way, it is Ray Tracing interactions, and the more dedicated parallel Ray Tracing execution units the better for any GPU. Consumer CPUs are not going to get enough cores/threads to allow for any sort of high quality ray calculations at gaming frame rates, so on the GPU and massively parallel is the way to go, even if it means having a dedicated Ray tracing Chip next to the GPU on a module/interposer and thousands of parallel ray tracing hardware engines.
Beyond those perpetuating the
Beyond those perpetuating the le may-may “HL3 confirmed”, who really cares?
On that note:
“Half Life 3
On that note:
“Half Life 3 confirmed!”? 😉
It’s the third week of the
It’s the third week of the third month, and Gaben will not confirm or deny the possibility of another Half Life game!
Half Life 3 Confirmed!!!
SteamOS and Steam VR are each
SteamOS and Steam VR are each a hundred thousand times more important than Half Life 3.
I don’t care if Valve ever releases a game with the number 3 in it as long as they get those right.
Steam OS especially, and
Steam OS especially, and eventually when CPUs cores begin appearing right next to the GPU and stacked HBM memory on the interposer, these complete gaming systems on a module/interposer will need a streamlined gaming OS. It’s just a matter of time before the requirements of 4k, and above, gaming dictate that the CPU cores will need the wider/faster memory bus traces to HBM memory, and discrete GPUs will need their own on DIE/Module CPU cores to keep latency to a minimum, and take advantage of the uber wide HBM style memory bus. Steam OS being a Linux distro, will be able to make the transition to the discrete PCI card based complete gaming platform, and be there to host the gaming engine. Steam OS being open source and streamlined, and can be made to run only the essential for gaming engine and game only functionality/code, with a minimum of system overhead, that the proprietary OSs can not be modified to do.
The CPU down on that slow motherboard narrow bus connection will just not have the bandwidth, and low latency of the CPU cores that are on DIE/Module, and the discrete GPUs will eventually get some CPU cores of their own sharing those wide internal buses, and no need for any PCI induced protocol encapsulation/de-encapsulation latency inducing steps. If you look at the Gaming APUs, as weak as their total provided GPU execution resources are, having the CPU cores next to the GPU on die does provide a great latency reducing benefit. For sure giving a CPU a direct and wide bus connection to both the GPU and HBM memory, by integrating the CPU on DIE/Module is the way to go, so there will be a need for Steam OS, with its streamlined for gaming, and completely modifiable open source OS/Kernel build making it the prime candidate for the OS to utilize for the GPU/CPU and OS/gaming engine on a discrete PCI card based complete gaming systems.
To be honest the only reason
To be honest the only reason I want a new Half-Life game is so we can get some more episodes of Gordon Freeman’s Mind.
Mr Newell was not looking too
Mr Newell was not looking too good last time I saw him. I hope he is working on that along with the game.
I’d be happy with L4D3. Make
I’d be happy with L4D3. Make it happen Gabe!
I wonder if they just dont
I wonder if they just dont wana admit that they got no good-enough idea for HL3, perhaps it should stay in the awesome “NeverWhere” class like jodorowsky’s dune is or where DN-4EVER shoulda stayed.