Half-Life was inspired by the FPS games Doom (1993) and Quake (1996),[12][page needed] Stephen King's 1980 novella The Mist, and a 1963 episode of The Outer Limits titled "The Borderland".[13] According to the designer Harry Teasley, Doom was a major influence and the team wanted Half-Life to "scare you like Doom did". The project had the working title Quiver, after the Arrowhead military base from The Mist.[14] The name Half-Life was chosen because it was evocative of the theme, not clichéd, and had a corresponding visual symbol: the Greek letter λ (lower-case lambda), which represents the decay constant in the half-life equation.[12][page needed] According to the designer Brett Johnson, the level design was inspired by environments in the manga series Akira.[15]
The final portion of the game, taking place in the alien world of Xen, was generally considered the weakest. Besides introducing a wholly new and alien setting, it also featured a number of low-gravity jumping puzzles. The GoldSrc engine did not provide as much precise control for the player during jumping, making these jumps difficult and often with Freeman falling into a void and the player restarting the game.[65][66] Wired's Julie Muncy called the Xen sequence "an abbreviated, unpleasant stop on an alien world with bad platforming and a boss fight against what appeared, by all accounts, to be a giant floating infant".[67] The Electric Playground said that Half-Life was an "immersive and engaging entertainment experience" in its first half and that it "peaked too soon".[68]
Jeff Lundrigan reviewed the PlayStation 2 version for Next Generation, rating it three out of five, and wrote that "it may be getting old, but there's still a surprising amount of life in Half-Life".[62] The PlayStation 2 version was a nominee for The Electric Playground's 2001 Blister Awards for "Best Console Shooter Game", but lost to Halo: Combat Evolved for Xbox.[72]
After maintaining the 16th place for May in the US,[109] Half-Life exited PC Data's monthly top 20 in June.[110] Half-Life became the fifth-bestselling PC game of the first half of 1999 in the US.[111] Its domestic sales during 1999 reached 290,000 copies by the end of September.[112] During 1999, it was the fifth-best-selling PC game in the US, with sales of 445,123 copies. These sales brought in revenues of $16.6 million, the sixth-highest gross that year for a PC game in the US.[113] The following year, it was the 16th-bestselling PC game in the US, selling another 286,593 copies and earning $8.98 million.[114]
Half-life (symbol t) is the time required for a quantity (of substance) to reduce to half of its initial value. The term is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay or how long stable atoms survive. The term is also used more generally to characterize any type of exponential (or, rarely, non-exponential) decay. For example, the medical sciences refer to the biological half-life of drugs and other chemicals in the human body. The converse of half-life (in exponential growth) is doubling time.
The original term, half-life period, dating to Ernest Rutherford's discovery of the principle in 1907, was shortened to half-life in the early 1950s.[1] Rutherford applied the principle of a radioactive element's half-life in studies of age determination of rocks by measuring the decay period of radium to lead-206.
Half-life is constant over the lifetime of an exponentially decaying quantity, and it is a characteristic unit for the exponential decay equation. The accompanying table shows the reduction of a quantity as a function of the number of half-lives elapsed.
A half-life often describes the decay of discrete entities, such as radioactive atoms. In that case, it does not work to use the definition that states "half-life is the time required for exactly half of the entities to decay". For example, if there is just one radioactive atom, and its half-life is one second, there will not be "half of an atom" left after one second.
Instead, the half-life is defined in terms of probability: "Half-life is the time required for exactly half of the entities to decay on average". In other words, the probability of a radioactive atom decaying within its half-life is 50%.[2]
For example, the accompanying image is a simulation of many identical atoms undergoing radioactive decay. Note that after one half-life there are not exactly one-half of the atoms remaining, only approximately, because of the random variation in the process. Nevertheless, when there are many identical atoms decaying (right boxes), the law of large numbers suggests that it is a very good approximation to say that half of the atoms remain after one half-life.
The term "half-life" is almost exclusively used for decay processes that are exponential (such as radioactive decay or the other examples above), or approximately exponential (such as biological half-life discussed below). In a decay process that is not even close to exponential, the half-life will change dramatically while the decay is happening. In this situation it is generally uncommon to talk about half-life in the first place, but sometimes people will describe the decay in terms of its "first half-life", "second half-life", etc., where the first half-life is defined as the time required for decay from the initial value to 50%, the second half-life is from 50% to 25%, and so on.[7]
A biological half-life or elimination half-life is the time it takes for a substance (drug, radioactive nuclide, or other) to lose one-half of its pharmacologic, physiologic, or radiological activity. In a medical context, the half-life may also describe the time that it takes for the concentration of a substance in blood plasma to reach one-half of its steady-state value (the "plasma half-life").
For example, the biological half-life of water in a human being is about 9 to 10 days,[9] though this can be altered by behavior and other conditions. The biological half-life of caesium in human beings is between one and four months.
The concept of a half-life has also been utilized for pesticides in plants,[10] and certain authors maintain that pesticide risk and impact assessment models rely on and are sensitive to information describing dissipation from plants.[11]
In epidemiology, the concept of half-life can refer to the length of time for the number of incident cases in a disease outbreak to drop by half, particularly if the dynamics of the outbreak can be modeled exponentially.[12][13]
The effects of caffeine on women have been examined in the context of its effects on menstrual function, interactions with oral contraceptives, pregnancy and fetal health, and postmenopausal health. Earlier studies suggested that elimination of caffeine may vary across the menstrual cycle, with elimination being about 25 percent longer in the luteal phase (Balogh et al., 1987). More recent studies, however, indicate no significant effects on caffeine pharmacokinetics across phases of the menstrual cycle in healthy, nonsmoking women who are not using oral contraceptives (Kamimori et al., 1999). Decreased paraxanthine or caffeine metabolic rates in healthy postmenopausal women on estrogen replacement therapy suggest that exogenous estrogen in older women may inhibit caffeine metabolism through the P450 isozyme CYP1A2, an isozyme common to both estrogen and caffeine metabolism (Pollock et al., 1999). Additionally, it is known that oral contraceptive use can double caffeine half-life (Abernethy and Todd, 1985; Patwardhan et al., 1980). The effects of newer oral contraceptives on caffeine half-life have not been studied.
The original code name for Half-Life was Quiver, after the Arrowhead military base from Stephen King's novella The Mist, which served as an early inspiration for the game. Gabe Newell explained in an interview that the name Half-Life was chosen because it was evocative of the theme, not clichéd, and had a corresponding visual symbol: the Greek letter lambda, which represents the decay constant in the half-life equation.
Although it has never officially been released, the Dreamcast version was leaked onto the Internet, and was proven fully playable. The leak contains the full versions of Half-Life and Blue Shift, both with an early version of the High Definition Pack (it was from this port that the pack was spawned). Although, the leak has a somewhat inconsistent frame rate (though never to the point of unplayability) and lengthier load times when the player moves from area to area (around ten seconds, while today's average PC can load an area in around one and a half). In addition, there are some saving problems; the number of blocks required to save on a VMU increases rapidly as the player reaches the end of a level, then drops at the start of the next. While the game allows the player to remove files to increase space, sometimes it still isn't enough.
Half-Life's code has been released and is being used as a base for many multiplayer mods such as the immensely popular Counter-Strike. Other popular multiplayer mods include Team Fortress Classic, Day of Defeat, Deathmatch Classic, Action Half-Life, Firearms, and Natural Selection. Team Fortress Classic and Deathmatch Classic were both developed in-house at Valve Software. Some mods, such as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, that began life as the work of independent developers (self-termed "modders"), later on received aid from Valve. There was even a free team-based multiplayer mod called Underworld Bloodline created to promote the Sony Pictures film Underworld.
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