Porting Half Life To Pandora

[Brotasmo]

Half-Life runs on GoldSrc, which is a modification of the Quake engine. Since Quake is runnable on the Pandora would it not be possible to run GoldSrc, and in turn Half-Life? I don't have much knowledge on programing, so anyone correct me if I'm wrong or if they think they could take on the project.

 

[SomeGuy99]

It's closed source it seems.

You would have to email Valve and wish upon a star.

 

[lulzfish]

Sorry, all of Valve's stuff is closed-source, and GoldSrc makes pretty extensive changes to Quake.

It is not possible for a programmer to do. Valve would have to volunteer the source code or volunteer to port it themselves. So it's not happening unless the Pandora becomes insanely popular. Valve just recently ported Source to OS X, so we'd need a market about the size of Apple x86s to get their attention. Probably bigger, since the market for old GoldSrc games is much smaller than for modern Source games.

So, no, it's... no. Not happening. No. Never.
Sorry. It's a good game. But it's not happening.

Edit: That reminds me, since none of Valve's stuff has even been ported to x86 Linux, an ARM Linux port would require a huge effort from Valve for a small market on a platform that almost nobody owns.

You can try e-mailing them, but they will say no, 100% odds.

 

[SomeGuy99]

What if he has a magic lamp?

 

[renwils]

In the remote possibility of someone adding WinCE support to nullDC AND porting it to the Pandora AND it runs well, there was an unreleased beta of Half-Life for Dreamcast floating around on the web at some point.

 

[Brotasmo]

Now, what about converting the half life maps/npcs/etc to quake (1,2, or 3) engine

 

[Brotasmo]

piracy?

what do you mean piracy?

 

[bzar]

Theoretically one could convert the HL maps to quake format, but it wouldn't be HL on a quake engine. It would be Quake on gimped HL maps. GoldSrc adds fcuntionality, so the maps wouldn't work the same way. You would basically be playing quake in a defunct HL setting. Not worth the effort IMO.

 

[mali]

Regarding running half-life through quake, there was a project trying to accomplish that. I posted links somewhere. The project wasn't finished yet and last time I checked there was no progress any more.

edit:

Not much todo with this topic, but I want to post it somewhere at least, because it is somewhat exciting

http://www.pocketplayers.info/Joomla/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=32&func=view&catid=11&id=4077#4077

http://www.quakeone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4030
http://www.quakeone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3997
Quake-Life(Half-life MOD for Quake)

 

[r00tw00t]

Half-Life runs on GoldSrc, which is a modification of the Quake engine. Since Quake is runnable on the Pandora would it not be possible to run GoldSrc, and in turn Half-Life? I don't have much knowledge on programing, so anyone correct me if I'm wrong or if they think they could take on the project.

Half-Life is an old game. If it was possible to port you don't think it should have been done already?

 

[arrrgh]

Goldsrc is a surprisingly popular engine because of Counter-Strike - the original is one of the most played games on Steam. It's unlikely that Valve would release the engine source code, not least because all of the goldsrc games on Steam have been slightly modified from the original CD version to work correctly with Steam, so even if they did release the sourcecode you would have to dig up your old CD copy of HL to play.

 

[femngi]

In the remote possibility of someone adding WinCE support to nullDC AND porting it to the Pandora AND it runs well, there was an unreleased beta of Half-Life for Dreamcast floating around on the web at some point.

I remember this has already been addressed by the NullDC team and said to be virtually impossible.

 

[WizardStan]

Half-Life runs on GoldSrc, which is a modification of the Quake engine. Since Quake is runnable on the Pandora would it not be possible to run GoldSrc, and in turn Half-Life? I don't have much knowledge on programing, so anyone correct me if I'm wrong or if they think they could take on the project.

Ever watch a movie that says "based on <some book>" and then read the book and realized how different they actually are? Yeah, that's kind of how GoldSrc relates to Quake. Quake may be open source, but they added so much stuff to GoldSrc that it no longer really resembles Quake.

 

[Brotasmo]

I understand the difficulty, but if i could get enough people interested in this it might gain some relevance. also, would a port to Linux then Pandora be easier? (setting aside the closed source nature of GoldSrc)

 

[Brotasmo]

Regarding running half-life through quake, there was a project trying to accomplish that. I posted links somewhere. The project wasn't finished yet and last time I checked there was no progress any more.

edit:

Not much todo with this topic, but I want to post it somewhere at least, because it is somewhat exciting

http://www.pocketplayers.info/Joomla/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=32&func=view&catid=11&id=4077#4077

http://www.quakeone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4030
http://www.quakeone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3997
Quake-Life(Half-life MOD for Quake)

it looks as though this one is finished. maybe? ill test this later http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-help/servers-coding/4030-quake-life-source-open.html

 

[cbox]

Not unless Steam releases the source, and they haven't released the source of any of their games yet.

However, I've heard rumours of Steam for iPad, if that were to happen, the iPad uses the same basic chipset as the Pandora, so there could be some hacking involved there to get Steam working on the Pandora.

 

[lulzfish]

I understand the difficulty, but if i could get enough people interested in this it might gain some relevance. also, would a port to Linux then Pandora be easier? (setting aside the closed source nature of GoldSrc)

Just reverse-engineering all the file formats and protocols involved in GoldSrc would be 99% of your effort.
The other 100% would be legal issues.

Then, yes, it would be slightly harder to make it run on Pandora than on desktop Linux, and x86 Linux has more developers available.

Maybe you could try something simple like Lego Rock Raiders first. To get an idea of how ridiculously difficult it would be.

 

[Brotasmo]

i GET IT don't be so negative sheesh...anyway, I'm going to try the quake mods and see if they are worth it.

 

[second exodous]

I wouldn't even bother even thinking of this until Steam is released on Linux. It's been on Mac for a month or so now and they just got everything in the Orange Box running on Mac last Wednesday. I don't know if they are only porting a few titles a month to ensure continued growth of Steam use on Mac or if they are really taking that long porting every title(I'd think they would have everything Source based ported by now). I'd be surprised if they port HL1 to mac at all.

It might happen when Steam runs on Linux, GoldSrc being ported to Linux that is, but I wouldn't count on it. If it did happen there would be another step to for Valve to get GoldSrc to run on an ARM platform.

I just wouldn't count on it, I love HL1, it is by far my fav computer game of all time but I'm done dreaming of running it on a handheld for the next 10 years or so.

 

[SomeGuy99]

I understand the difficulty, but if i could get enough people interested in this it might gain some relevance. also, would a port to Linux then Pandora be easier? (setting aside the closed source nature of GoldSrc)

It's possible, you just have to willing to sleep with Gabe Newell. Remember to film it for blackmail purposes.