Half-Life: Alyx (formerly: Half Life 3 is coming??)

Duggy747

I don't expect HL3 news of any kind at this (maybe something like Left 4 Dead 3, which I'd love to see at some point.)

Still, Valve know the importance of the number "3" to the community so are getting nice publicity with the rumour mill in full swing, the filthy trolls :pac:

C14N

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar wrote: »

i dunno, i think replayability is pretty important in a game. so long as nothing is sacrificed for it, the ability for a game to keep you going for 2-3 runs through it is something worth looking for.

would you be happy with a film you were only going to watch once? out of all the films i've seen there's only one that I actually liked that i'm 100% never going to watch again.. all the rest will be trotted out at various intervals until I die, the same with most of my games.

I don't think I'll ever be able to replay witcher 2 though... dark souls ruined it for me.

I sort of agree with you but it does seem like a lot of people have gotten "replayability" out of the Half Life games because of how good they are. I generally like watching films twice or more times too but the simple fact is that I often just don't get that luxury with games anyway. A film is only 2-3 hours long, a game is 10+ hours long so it's hard to find the time to go back to a game that was enjoyable before when there are so many unplayed games still to play. I think the only games I have ever finished twice have been Braid, Spec Ops: The Line (both of which are very short) and Resident Evil 4 (when I was 14 and had a lot more free time).

bizmark wrote: »

will be a linix based steam box or something like that dont get your hopes up for hl 3

Tar.Aldarion wrote: »

Dunno how anybody thought it would be anything to do with HL3, it's about interconnecting devices in the livingroom.

Yeah but we can always imagine that they'll make the three announcements and they'll be pretty good and then they'll just kind of throw in at the end "oh by the way, Half Life 3 is out this Christmas".

Antar Bolaeisk

C14N wrote: »

Yeah but we can always imagine that they'll make the three announcements and they'll be pretty good and then they'll just kind of throw in at the end "oh by the way, Half Life 3 is out this Christmas".

Or just casually show a clip of someone playing HL3 during the announcement.

BeerWolf

Absolutely

Antar Bolaeisk wrote: »

Or just casually show a clip of someone playing HL3 during the announcement.

Or just a teaser of HL's iconic crowbar.

jumbobreakfast

If it's a living room announcement then perhaps spectating of games will be part of it...also, perhaps they want to give us the tools so we can make HL3 lol

cherryghost

Wireless streaming to various devices anywhere in your house.

CastorTroy

Steam site to crash in less than 6 minutes?

C14N

3 cheers to the guy who predicted Steam OS

Professey Chin

And another countdown clock for 2 days :pac:

danthefan

So, the thingy on the left is a circle, and the thingy on the right is a circle + a circle. So I'm guessing the final announcement will be a machine to run this new SteamOS...

The one in the middle, no idea.

CastorTroy

That stuff in the blue is hard to read.

Though I'm a bit lost as to what Steam OS is.

Will have to do some reading to see if it's anything useful

Genghiz Cohen

danthefan wrote: »

So, the thingy on the left is a circle, and the thingy on the right is a circle + a circle. So I'm guessing the final announcement will be a machine to run this new SteamOS...

The one in the middle, no idea.

Some killer software maybe?
One that would make this thing sell like hawt caeks!

C14N

danthefan wrote: »

So, the thingy on the left is a circle, and the thingy on the right is a circle + a circle. So I'm guessing the final announcement will be a machine to run this new SteamOS...

The one in the middle, no idea.

My guess is that the next announcement will be the box. The middle icon is literally a circle inside a sort of box.

The circle represented software before so I think it's safe to say the third announcement will be Half Life 3.


:pac:

danthefan

CastorTroy wrote: »

That stuff in the blue is hard to read.

Though I'm a bit lost as to what Steam OS is.

Will have to do some reading to see if it's anything useful

It steams games, movies, music etc to your TV. You can apparently stream your Steam library games to your TV. Whether you need some hardware attached to the TV is still unclear but I can't see how it would work otherwise.

AlmightyCushion

CastorTroy wrote: »

That stuff in the blue is hard to read.

Though I'm a bit lost as to what Steam OS is.

Will have to do some reading to see if it's anything useful

It's an OS build on Linux and made by Valve that will run Steam games. They are looking at doing things like reducing lag to make it better for gaming than something like Ubuntu. It looks like it'll play Linux steam games and steam the rest from your Windows PC. The streaming functionality (if it works well) would be quite cool and could come in handy.

danthefan

C14N wrote: »

My guess is that the next announcement will be the box. The middle icon is literally a circle inside a sort of box.

The circle represented software before so I think it's safe to say the third announcement will be Half Life 3.


:pac:

Actually yeah that makes way more sense than what I said.

And don't tease about HL3

C14N

danthefan wrote: »

It steams games, movies, music etc to your TV. You can apparently stream your Steam library games to your TV. Whether you need some hardware attached to the TV is still unclear but I can't see how it would work otherwise.

Well it will need a PC. A regular HTPC with Steam OS installed should do the job but I'd expect them to announce specialised hardware too.

CastorTroy

It's obvious the last button represents Freeman's glasses.

:pac:

danthefan

C14N wrote: »

Well it will need a PC. A regular HTPC with Steam OS installed should do the job but I'd expect them to announce specialised hardware too.

Well yeah, obviously you'll need a PC, but if my PC is upstairs and my living room TV is downstairs, how do you stream from the PC to the TV?

I am under the impression here that Steam OS goes on your TV rather than PC. But still don't know.

stevenmu

I wonder what that means for the other icons.

The second now looks like SteamOS in a box, aka the Steambox, a living room PC built for SteamOS.

The third is two instances of SteamOS, which kind of implies a SteamOS network along the lines of Xbox Live or PSN. But Steam already has all that functionality. They do mention "Content creators" a few times. I wonder are they expanding Steam for other media (TV/Movies/Music etc)? (edit:nevermind, read it again, that seems to be on the way anyway)

CastorTroy

My tv is my computer screen so no streaming required.

My understanding would be that it would be optimised so that resources in the PC used to run windows normally will be freed up to boost game performance via Steam?

Or is that wishful thinking?

Guessing it will require dual boot?

wyrn

CastorTroy wrote: »

It's obvious the last button represents Freeman's glasses.

:pac:

Nah, it's Half Life: Combine edition

C14N

danthefan wrote: »

Well yeah, obviously you'll need a PC, but if my PC is upstairs and my living room TV is downstairs, how do you stream from the PC to the TV?

I am under the impression here that Steam OS goes on your TV rather than PC. But still don't know.

I mean it will require a PC to be plugged into your TV. It's a Linux operating system, it will be installed on a computer the same way you would install Ubuntu or Windows. How would you expect to install an OS on a TV? Even if you could, how could a TV possibly have the hardware to play games locally (as the Steam OS does)?

danthefan

C14N wrote: »

I mean it will require a PC to be plugged into your TV. It's a Linux operating system, it will be installed on a computer the same way you would install Ubuntu or Windows. How would you expect to install an OS on a TV? Even if you could, how could a TV possibly have the hardware to play games locally (as the Steam OS does)?

They judiciously use the word "stream" though.

then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!

Hooking your TV up to your PC is not streaming. It must need this Steam Box to work.

CastorTroy

Slightly off topic, but Half Life 2 was one of the best games, especially for its time. And Portal 2 is a great game. And other Valve games get praised. So why don't more games use the Source engine?

Seems all games use Unreal Engine and this will probably continue when Source 2 is released.

danthefan

danthefan wrote: »

Well yeah, obviously you'll need a PC, but if my PC is upstairs and my living room TV is downstairs, how do you stream from the PC to the TV?

You'll need a box under your TV. But at the most basic level it can be a thin client that is effectively just playing a video stream and passing control inputs back to the server (your gaming rig).

So it can be something very cheap and low power. Something you can buy prebuilt, or build yourself with low power components. Maybe even an ARM box, it remains to be seen.

jester77

It's fairly obvious that this is a standalone OS with steam running on top that will run on a box/pc/console/whatever you want to call it, hooked up to a PC. It is built on Linux and all current/future games that are developed with Linux support will run directly on the box. For all other games that have no Linux support, you can stream them from a windows/mac machine to the box connected to your TV and play them that way.

I'm liking the sound of this, will be interesting to see what hardware partners get announced later in the week. I can imagine that there will be some simple cheap boxes that just support streaming and that there will be more powerful boxes where you can play linux supported games on.

MadYaker

Here, start another feckin thread to talk about the steam OS/steambox announcements because theres no way they're announcing HL3.

C14N

danthefan wrote: »

They judiciously use the word "stream" though.



Hooking your TV up to your PC is not streaming. It must need this Steam Box to work.

If you hook your TV up to an Apple TV or a Roku, is that not streaming? It's still streaming because the game is being decoded on a more powerful PC and then sent to a Linux computer next to your TV. The rumour is that there will be different versions of the Steam box, with one cheap version that will just do the streaming and another that will actually play games locally but in any case you could just install the Steam OS on whatever computer you want and use that.

MadYaker

MadYaker wrote: »

Here, start another feckin thread to talk about the steam OS/steambox announcements because theres no way they're announcing HL3.

The planet thing on the announcement page started out blue and after the first announcement it turned purple.

If it keeps going that way it'll be pink at the next announcement and orange for the last one. And an orange circle is the HL logo.