In Half-Life, NPC mouth openness updates only once in a while, in original algorithm it collects 10 samples, picking only few sampling points per frame, resulting in updates each 5-6 frames in 60 FPS, thus 10 FPS.

Many years ago, I tried interpolating the mouth to make it smoother, but never showed it to anyone.

So... yay, or nay?

https://github.com/FWGS/hlsdk-portable/tree/decay-pc2

Rebased fan made Decay PC port on top of our hlsdk-portable tree, and also fixed a few bugs along the way.

Using this SDK tree means wider support for various operating systems, CPU architectures and game engines, and minor HL bug fixes, some of which are optional.

Thanks to Vyacheslav Dzhura for publishing original mod source code: https://github.com/hoaxer/Half-Life-Decay and to code.idtech.space for saving historic HLSDK versions, which made rebasing semi-automated. Took me a day ^^

Finally added a hotkey handlers to my mainui_cpp, featuring Half-Life WON menu.

However, behavior differs from WON launcher. WON handles it on key press, which makes navigation confusing, and sometimes it might react twice or more. Like if you're in main menu, pressing 'C' to open configuration menu, and it jumps straight to controls menu instead. This is probably due to mishandled button repeat, but I'm not sure.

Instead, I do it on key release, which allows in my opinion much smoother navigation.

Not so fun facts about GoldSrc's version of Quake's ED_ParseEdict function:

1.

It first searches for classname key, and if it was found, immediately passes it to game DLL pfnKeyValue and after that uses the class name string from entvars_t::classname written by game DLL and NOT the actual value written in entities file. BECAUSE entities are exported as functions in DLL, it doesn't really allow scripting languages to add custom entities. This oversight (?) allowed scripting languages to replace the custom class name with something harmless like info_target to force the engine to create an entity. This is actually used in Custom Entities API for AMXModX by Hedgefog.

2.

However, VALVe knew that it might be not possible to export entity function and their solution was? Calling "custom" export in DLL and passing KeyValue to DLL with following parameters:

szClassName = "custom"
szKeyName = "customclass"
szValue = classname

The sad part is that it seemingly was undocumented and nobody ever used that engine feature.

3.

It has a hack to remove single trailing space in keys. Huh?

4.

It will not pass a KeyValue to a DLL if its value has the same value as the entity's class name. Do you think something missing here? Yes, it doesn't check for if the key is classname! It straight up rejects an entity pair that's value so happened to be an entity's class name.

The decompiled version from Ghidra: https://git.mentality.rip/a1batross/gist/src/branch/master/ed_parseedict.c

Just realized that our VFS has the FS_Gets function, basically fgets but for virtual layered filesystem that we have.

The function was added by Uncle Mike back in 2007 and never again ever since.

By the way, our VFS implementation has its roots in DarkPlaces. It still resembles it, though we separated archive functions, added file names caching for case-insensitive FS emulation and implemented Valve's VFileSystem009 interface.

fun fact

did you know that this API interface: https://code.idtech.space/valve/halflife-sdk/src/tag/v2.0/common/engine_launcher_api.h

Was used in WON (pre-Steam) Half-Life not only to spawn a dedicated server but also by the iconic WON main menu?

Theoretically, mod developer could make their own EXE launcher with custom UI.

https://snmetamorph.github.io/PrimeXT/docs/eng/modding_introduction/

absolutely b(i)ased introduction to Half-Life modding, calling Xash release "the most important event in modding history", by @snmetamorph

I honestly agree. Even if you have problems using Xash code, because of legal reasons, or because you're just Valve (I know my followers here ;)), it still explains the behavior of many GoldSrc API functions, that previously were barely documented.

Even if the modder don't want to support Xash, it's still possible to leverage the fact that the engine is completely buildable from the source code, meaning they can easily connect a debugger or add modern run-time instrumentation tools like AddressSantizer and UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer.