Green "radiation" textures

[Hezus]

The only way to get rid of the green glow is to set your display to black and white Or find an old CRT from the 80’s… although many of them where green on black, lol.

From a design standpoint, the great lighting effect of the green glow pretty much overrules the concern about realism, imho. And if you’re really concerned about realism, you shouldn’t play Half-life or probably any game at all. There is always something to complain about…

[ac3d]

edit: quack

[Mr_Someguy]

I’m just going to assume that for safety reasons, Black Mesa adds a glowing green chemical to hazardous waste so any leaks or spills are instantly recognised by even the dullest workers.

[Dotard]

@Mr. Someguy

I’m just going to assume that for safety reasons, Black Mesa adds a glowing green chemical to hazardous waste so any leaks or spills are instantly recognised by even the dullest players.

fixed

[NemetZzZ]

If you think of it this way, you better know that barrels/crates full of something explosive/incendiary don’t go boom when you shoot them with a pistol or hit with a crowbar.
It’s more of a design element, you know.
And the green glow may be just a safety measure after all, as proposed by Mr. Someguy.

[fuegerstef]

@NemetZzZ

If you think of it this way, you better know that barrels/crates full of something explosive/incendiary don’t go boom when you shoot them with a pistol or hit with a crowbar.

This.

Also:
You cannot carry all weapons at once without sticking it where the sun don’t shine.

Resonance Cascades haven’t been proven to be real either.

Have I mentioned that in real life you can move your arm to the left and right and it is not always aligned with the direction you look at?

Conclusion: If you want to mod a game to be realistic and take out everything that makes it interesting you will have to mod it until it is easier and more playable and more interesting to just go outside and take a walk.

[cdoublejj]

@Akaihiryuu

My only disappointment with this mod (disappointment is actually too harsh of a word, I just can’t think of anything else) was the use of the “green glowing” textures for the radiation areas. Unforunately, this is based on a misconception by the public that goes back to the 1940’s.

The only exposure a lot of people had to radiation was “radioactive” watch dials. Watch dials were made of flourescent materials and painted with a radium-laced paint. There was not much radium (and in fact, the watches were safe to own and use - radioactivity was actually very low) - but it of course interacted with the flourescent materials and caused a green glow. This is how early “glow in the dark” watches were made. Unfortunately, it made a lasting correlation in the public mind, that sources of radiation glow green, when in fact they do not.

The original Half-Life sadly fell prey to this misconception. However, Half-Life 2, which predates this mod by 8 years, did not. I was actually pleasantly surprised when the “radioactive” areas of Half-Life 2 were given MUCH more realistic textures. If you’ve seen what REAL radioactive waste looks like, Half-Life 2 actually comes pretty close to the mark, or close enough considering the limits of 3D engines and hardware in 2004 when it was made. There was actually a little bit of a glow to some of Half-Life 2’s textures, where in real life there would not be, but it overall wasn’t too bad.

What I’m wondering is…since this is a Source game, if it would be possible to change/copy some files around and have it use the Half-Life 2 textures for the radioactive areas, rather than the green glow. This is really nothing more than a minor nitpick in a very well done mod, but as someone who does understand radiation and KNOWS that radioactive substances do not glow green, I find the green glowing water to be a distraction.

Here is a video that shows what real radioactive waste looks like. It’s low resolution, but this is why I said Half-Life 2 came pretty close to the mark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2mYstiYhJs&feature=endscreen&NR=1

I found that very informative. TIL that what radioactive waste really looks like. As with all games, it is a game but, never the less he does have a point.

[Akaihiryuu]

@cdoublejj

I found that very informative. TIL that what radioactive waste really looks like. As with all games, it is a game but, never the less he does have a point.

Well, when I wrote the original post, I didn’t realize that the lighting in those areas was dependent on the green glow. So sadly that rules out using the HL2 textures. And it wasn’t the lack of realism that bothered me…it was more the fact that it was in a way a step back from HL2 which used more realistic textures. I was hoping for the mod to have more of a HL2 feel, while keeping the same story/tension as HL.

But if you want to learn more about radioactive waste, it’s neat to read about the processes that produce it. It doesn’t come from nuclear power. Spent fuel rods from nucelar power are usually stored underwater for a cooling period, and then moved to dry casks (filled with a noble gas like argon or xenon to prevent chemical reactions).

Radioactive waste is actually what is left over from producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. The fuel pellets are dissolved in concentrated nitric acid, then mixed with a solution of tributyl phosphate in kerosene, this forms a complex which removes most of the uranium and plutonium from solution, leaving the other nasty radioisotopes behind (primarily Cs-137 and I-131, at least those are the most dangerous two). This gunk left over (basically, a mixture of nitrate sales of Cs-137 and I-131 in nitric acid, mixed with kerosene) is dumped in underground tanks. To prevent the acid from eating through the tanks (which it would eventually do), alkaline substances are added to neutralize the acid. Unfortunately since acid + base = salt + water, this cases the radioactive salts to precipitate out and harden. So what you are left with in the end: mounts of radioactive salt, mixed with water and kerosene. That’s simplified a bit, but it’s a nasty organic soup that can undergo a lot of chemical reactions, and release all kinds of toxic organic substances (even if the radioactive material doesn’t escape). At one point one of the vents on a Hanford tank was sampled, and there were over 1200 different chemicals coming out. There are filters to trap all the radioactive particles, so no radioactivity escapes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUREX

So not only is it dangerously radioactive, it is also extremely chemically toxic. This stuff is some of the most nasty material in existence in the universe, totally destrutive to all forms of life that we know of except for a couple species of extremophile bacteria (some have even been found living in the tanks), and a couple species of radiotrophic fungi that have actually evolved to live on gamma radiation. Interestingly enough, some of the extremophile bacteria is capable of actually eating the organic waste and leaving chemically inert substances behind. Obviously it’s still radioactive, but removing the chemical toxicity helps a lot.

But the waste is so dangerous that all work in the tanks has to be done by remote controlled robots. There is literally NO shielding that could protect someone from direct exposure. Thick concrete and distance (inverse square law) is the only protection.

[cdoublejj]

don’t we have to keep generating this stuff to make more “fuel”? seems kind of counter productive.