Post#6 » Mon May 30, 2022 3:21 pm
The latest release was still pretty much the 2003 leak just people got the saves working which originally didn't. It was thrice checked and it was found that the whole "HLDC rip used downsampled audio" was nothing more than a rumor. My friend who actually runs the Combine OverWiki, compared the files in the release we got a few years ago and the original 2003 leak, with identical audio. I think people just naturally assumed that such an early release from all those years ago would have undoubtedly had audio downsampled. But this indeed was not the case, we always just looked at how small the game was, I mean it took up less than 200mb on disc. But no, it really was just wishful thinking us diehard fans were hoping would be true.
About the SDK and stuff for more complex mods, sure that is why it is not possible to get the more complex mods working, not to mention the hard limit on the memory. But that doesn't mean these new betas aren't super interesting for HLDC fans. We know that a Katana build exists out there, something using the official SDK. Imagine if the full source to that was released and we could really optimize the engine on DC. No more Windows CE overhead eating up all that RAM. But that is a double-edged sword as the sheer fact the game was Windows CE, to begin with, made it highly moddable. Doubt we would have seen such a lively and passionate community for the game on DC without the thriving modding scene with that game. Still to this day no other console can really do HL1 mods. You can say sure there is Xash3D port for other consoles but that is not really the same thing. Not to mention it is still in alpha since even on OG Xbox it can not fully fit into the memory. So the fact they were still able to manage to give the game all-new HD content in the form of brand new higher-res models and update environments and still run on a console with 16mb memory is pretty amazing.
Also, one of these days, when I have free time and am not constantly working my ass off every day at my job then I hope to have some free time to make mods or port them from PC to this game on DC. But life just seems to keep getting in the way.
P.S. Oh I almost forgot, there was a version somebody made of the game back at Assembler where they took and ported the original 1998 PC assets over to the game, and it did WONDERS for overall game performance. I always noticed how well early mods like They Hunger managed to run better for the most part than the official game, but it is down to it using assets that work more within the parameters of the original PC engine better. So it is a breeze to run it like that on DC. However, unfortunately that build was lost to the internet and time and I didn't have the hindsight to back that up and all the other mods until around the time Theisozone was getting ready to shut down. In addition to that version that used PC assets, the same person ported over the PS2 assets to see how well they would run in our engine, and the results were as you would probably have expected, it ran considerably worse. But it was cool to see nontheless. Both versions were again lost to time and it was from back before 2018 at least when I got serious about archiving homebrew and community-made content for the DC.