Interlopers.net Forum - Half-Life 2 News & Tutorials

This seems kinda random, but its been bothering me recently. Why have NPCs in Half Life 2 and its episodes stopped blinking naturally? (Naturally, as in they are told to blink in the AI code, and not through a vcd) I was watching some of the pre-release demos for Half-Life 2, and one guy mentioned NPCs blink relative to light levels. I remember thinking "that's an interesting feature, I wonder if they kept it." So I fired up Half Life 2, and all I got was non-blinking stares from the citizens. As I started experimenting with vcds I noticed the "AI_BLINK" event. I checked github, and apparently it's supposed to stop blinking. Through my searching of github I discovered code that made NPCs blink, but not in reaction to the environment. So then I thought "well maybe this code is never used, kinda like some ai features of the npc_crow."

Then I re-watched this video (Pardon the commentator):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbcXQ5eSYmI

Notice something?

This video was made in 2012, so what happened? Anyone have any ideas as to why and how? And if so, is there a way to mod the feature back in?

Total speculation on my part, but there was quite a bit that got shifted around and screwed up in the Steampipe update. In particular, a number of sound effects and VCD files went AWOL or were relocated to where the entities that needed them could no longer find them. In particular, I know some of the VCDs for Citizen expression idles disappeared, which you'll occasionally see in the console. It's possible those VCDs used to drive the eye movement.

Riomaki wrote:Total speculation on my part, but there was quite a bit that got shifted around and screwed up in the Steampipe update. In particular, a number of sound effects and VCD files went AWOL or were relocated to where the entities that needed them could no longer find them. In particular, I know some of the VCDs for Citizen expression idles disappeared, which you'll occasionally see in the console. It's possible those VCDs used to drive the eye movement.

The steampipe update is a good point. I honestly can't remember if they blinked before the update. But I don't think its the VCDs since everyone used to blink (Alyx, G-man, Barney), and only Barney and the citizens use looping idle VCDs in their code. (look at Alyx, she has no idle expressions what so ever)