Half-life Source Quadrilogy System Requirements

[Heike Fallago]

Hmma prequal to the Alien series? Let me guess. The plot should go like this judging by the trailers: the crew of Prometheus, who are watched by the Weyland company from the Aliens quadrilogy, are on some sort of archeological discovery about ancient human civilizations being aware of the existence of alien life forms, which are in fact the Space Jockeys. The Space Jockeys are what appears to be members of an ancient empire that died off many years ago. Whatever was left of the empire retreated to LV-416. They embark on a journey of discovery and find LV-416. There, they discover the Space Jockeys' habitat. After the first encounter with the Space Jockeys' habitat becomes chaotic (possibly one of the crew becomes impregnated or something as in Alien), they discover the derelict spacecraft from Alien. They learn that the Space Jockeys are planning on shipping unhatched "facehungers" to Earth using the spacecraft and destroy Earth with these biological weapons. Whatever is left of the crew then sacrifice themselves to prevent the spacecraft from departing LV-416. Before they die, a transmission is sent from the planet as a warning to humanity. The transmission cuts short due to some other problems and Weyland keeps the information of this whole mission in secret. Then, several centuries later, Weyland decides to recover whatever Prometheus collected and sends their best crew, Ripley's mining team, over to the planet while disguising this "special mission" as a typical mining operation. To make sure it progresses well, they insert an android named "Ash" into Ripley's team and commands Ash to do whatever is necessary to retrieve their "package", even at the expense of the crew's lives. From there, it sets the stage for the Alien quadrilogy. The End. - Kenny99 03:03, 13 May 2012 (CDT)

So by that logic in barely half a century, this awesome and very contemporary rifle that was made for the new movie prequel, turns into the Pulse Rifle, which looks like what the 80s thought future weapons will look like. Though to be honest, the Storm Rifle looks like the Pulse rifle in a different color scheme with a longer barrel and an optic, and it first 5.56 instead of 10mm. Excalibur01 11:32, 18 May 2012 (CDT)

"Alien" was suppose to take place right after the United States Tricentennial. That is what the red and white triangular shaped patch on their uniforms represented. Depending on the travel time in suspended animation (in the Aliens universe, it takes time to travel between the stars), about 2077 to 2079 is when "Alien" took place, a century after the movie was filmed. --Krel 21:17, 18 May 2012 (CDT)

No, many canon sources state that "Aliens" & "Alien 3" are set in 2179. Ripley had been drifting for 57 years since "Alien" so that gives you the year 2122. Regardless of whether Ridley Scott intended Alien to be set in 2079, subsequent films gave a specific date for their setting, therefore it is easy to give "Alien" a definitive date by working backward. It can be assumed that Ridley Scott then moved his original "Alien" date of "late 21st century" to this movie in order not to break established canon. --Burton123 06:06, 20 May 2012 (CDT)

Yes, the costume designer says that the patches commemorated America's Tricentennial, and I believe that it was also stated as such in the making of Alien book. Although I don't believe that the movie ever stated a year, just that they spent an extra ten months in transit, with the same going home. But I'm going to be obstinate and stick with the costume designer, 2079. :) --Krel 23:39, 21 May 2012 (CDT)

Wow! I thought that, that site went away years ago, thanks. I don't think that you can really compare the time line of this movie to "Alien" films. I have read that Ridley Scott has said that it isn't a prequel to "Alien", but rather a movie that uses the Alien universe, but with changes. --Krel 22:38, 24 May 2012 (CDT)

According to official Weyland Industries website made to promote the film, Weyland-Yutani Corporation made some significant breakthroughs in firearm technology during the XXI century, all incorporated in its signature Storm assault rifle, marketed worldwide and supplied to Colonial Marine force. Firstly, they somehow perfected the barrel rifling method in 2024, resulting in triple the speed and double the accuracy of conventional rifles. Secondly, Weyland introduced a targeting system that is able to identify and track its targets 500 km away, and also compensate for any and all ballistic factors (including different atmospheric pressure and density in off-world environment). Thirdly, a new 5.56 round was developed, with a bullet made of off-world materials (or, alternatively, uranium carbide) and able to travel quickly and almost indefinitely. The modern Storm rifle of 2073 is extremely light (1.3 kg), being made of micro-perforated titanum alloy, and is supposedly equipped with an underbarrel pump-action 30mm grenade launcher. Otherwise, it is quite conventional and somewhat cumbersome, with a long barrel, massive high-capacity magazine and a partly collapsible stock. It is modeled after the also fictional M41A Pulse Rifle used in James Cameron's Aliens film (which is in turn based on a M1A1 Thompson with cut-down Remington 870 shotgun and plastic molding added), although with a civilian-length barrel.

Secondly, Weyland introduced a targeting system that is able to identify and track its targets 500 km away, and also compensate for any and all ballistic factors (including different atmospheric pressure and density in off-world environment). Thirdly, a new 5.56 round was developed, with a bullet made of off-world materials (or, alternatively, uranium carbide) and able to travel quickly and almost indefinitely. The modern Storm rifle of 2073 is extremely light (1.3 kg), being made of micro-perforated titanum alloy, and is supposedly equipped with an underbarrel pump-action 30mm grenade launcher

Please tell me someone isn't serious. Am I supposed to belive that a rifle is able to track a target 300 miles away??? That's way, way, over the horizon. And 1.3 kg weight? Is it made of air? That's less than 3 pounds, or slightly heavier than an M1911 and lighter than any rifle in history. What idiot wrote the specs on this thing? Does it have a "barrel thing that goes up" as well?--Mandolin 18:18, 24 May 2012 (CDT)

I've been developing games for well over 30 years and I'm responsible for several huge franchises. Most notably The Bard's Tale, Dragon Wars, Out of This World-- I'm one of the programmers on that. Pretty much I'm a classic gamer.

To put it in perspective, I'm one of the founders of Interplay. When it was Jay [Patel], Troy [Worrell], Brian Fargo, and myself, we founded the company and I was the one who wrote most of the games for Interplay for our first five years of existence. Like, I wrote Mindshadow, Tracer Sanction, Tass Times in Tonetown, Borrowed Time. Did the technology behind Bard's Tale I and II. I wrote Bard's Tale III.

Did ports for all of our games. I did ports -- under the Interplay banner, I did Racing Destruction Set for the Atari 800. But, see, these are all things I did to generate money so that we wouldn't go out of business. [Laughs.] And so we would be able to start doing things that, you know, later one was like Battle Chess, which was one of the first games we did that was actually published by Interplay and not by someone else.

Whoever is running the project is either incompetent or they had their hands tied to the point where they had never had a chance. An example would be an Interplay game we worked on called Star Trek: Secret of Vulcan Fury. It was a Star Trek game that we were doing in the early '90s and it was ahead of its time in the sense that the game was almost all cinematics. We did 3D models of all the cast members, like Leonard Nimoy, WIlliam Shatner, DeForest Kelley, etc. We had them all come in and record their lines.

The problem was that because they were cut using bleeding-edge technology, no one had ever actually sat down to say, "How much would this cost per minute to generate this footage?" No one had ever done that.

They made a model of Spock in 3D. They rendered it, they did some human facial motion. They said, "This is great." They greenlit the project without anybody ever actually saying, "Well, we did this demo by using 50 computers in an array in the back room and it took an hour to render two seconds of scenery."

Remember, this is back in 1990, which is a significant amount of CPU time just to do the simplest of renderings. And nobody ever said, "Well, let's see. The game's going to use approximately two hours of footage, so if it takes us about an hour to generate a second of footage with 50 computers, multiply that out -- that's a lot of money and CPUs in order to render two hours of footage."

The problem, though, is that for a majority of people who create a game, you don't have to know one line of math. Like, in example of Vulcan Fury, the writing was done by D.C. Fontana. She was one of the writers of the original series, and she did was give us a movie script. Just like saying, "Hey, write me script suitable for TV series. The only difference, though, is that after each scene, if there's a decision tree, write each individual scene. So, like, what if you go up to Spock and you don't have this? Spock's going to say this. Write those lines. If you do have it, then what does Spock do?"

Is it just really difficult to predict what costs of a game might be because it just may not work as predicted and it takes time to figure out how to pivot? How do the costs end up creeping so much?

Costs creep because very few people actually sit down and pre-plan it all. A good example is, like, when you do a major motion picture -- people have done motion pictures so many times now it's a science. It's an exact science: you get the script, you lay out storyboards, you figure out each scene, and then you even figure out a budget saying, "This scene we'll just set up in this one set, these 12 scenes in this one set. That set cost us this much money. These scenes need CG, this is how much we think it's gonna cost" and then you send it off to bids for CG. It just -- as you create the film, before even the camera rolls, you already know every single shot from the beginning of the film to the end of the film, how it's pacing, how you feel it's going to be the length, you have a really good idea of what the budget's going to be like.

3a8082e126