Difficulty system

[Nik1895]

Aside from different HEV Suit’s Armor functionality, devs missed another thing: difficulties work differently in HL1 and HL2.
In HL1, skill.cfg specifies exact values for every difficulty. For instance:

sk_9mmAR_bullet1 “3”
sk_9mmAR_bullet2 “4”
sk_9mmAR_bullet3 “5”

Enemy MP5 bullets do 3 damage on Easy, 4 damage on Medium and 5 damage on Hard.

In HL2, skill.cfg lists just base values used by Normal difficulty, while Easy and Hard scale some of these values (enemy health and damage received by player). To be more precise, on Easy all damage received by player is reduced by 50% and enemy health is reduced by 33%. On Hard, it’s vice versa. So let’s take this line from BMS skill.cfg:

sk_npc_dmg_9mm “4”

This makes NPC’s 9mm bullets (Glock and MP5) do 4 damage on Normal and, due to how Source engine scale, 2 damage on Easy and 6 damage on Hard.

So my question is: is it possible to replicate HL1 difficulty system? Or is HL2 difficulty system hardcoded into Source engine?

[Crypt]

Not as far as you’re able to fix.

Also, the devs didn’t “miss” it. It’s intended to be similar to HL2.

[Medkit]

I think this question reels around the “lack of balance” threads. I am sure the dev team is quite aware of the problem, and will fix things nicely on all difficulty levels.

[Crypt]

I thought he was getting at that at first, but reading it, he doesn’t seem to care about the balance, rather that the system isn’t the same as HL2.

[Ronster]

Skill config is more than likely going to be different and perhaps even not like Half life 2 and more like the original.

What is different also is that how physics react differently to damage amounts too from Half life 2. And I hope they replicate pistols being able to push headcrabs exactly like Half life 2 matched with the new damage scales.

The physics also need to be balanced in conjunction with the game balancing also.

The pistols affect on head crabs for me are the measure of the 9mm bullet ammo weather that means altering the physics of the head crab to be lighter or the damage or a bit of both this for me is the first building block in the balance chain.

It’s a tricky mix of being like Half life 1 and Half life 2 in my opinion.

If I remeber rightly I had pistol damage up at about 9 to achieve a similar affect of players pistol pushing headcrabs with bullets. but this could be to do with server / client side physics differences between the Black Mesa and Half Life 2

Once everything is balanced for the player then I could see dedicated damage scales for enemies weapons a good thing rather than multiple scale.