Was Halo the first game with a flashlight?

[zinfamous]

I seem to recall using a flashlight in Half Life. Hopefully, someone can confirm that for me?

PS Halo was nothing special. It was 5-10 years old at its release by PC standards. Not sure why people foamed at the mouth over it. Oh yeah, the easily swayed mouthbreathing mainstream. Only reason for Halos success was being poor teen console only gamers without PCs first FPS experience and that was just so incredible to them.

 

[Elcs]

Half Life had a flashlight?

I'm sure it had a crowbar.

 

[zinfamous]

Deus Ex also had the flashlight/suit dealy.

 

[KeithTalent]

The Bard's Tale had a torch. That's like a luddite's flashlight.

KT

 

[zinfamous]

The Bard's Tale had a torch. That's like a luddite's flashlight.

KT

unless you speak british or canadian, in which case a flashlight = torch, right?
:hmm:

 

[KeithTalent]

unless you speak british or canadian, in which case a flashlight = torch, right?
:hmm:

Good point, but definitely not Canadian, that is a UK thing only. Us colonial commoners know better.

KT

 

[zinfamous]

Good point, but definitely not Canadian, that is a UK thing only. Us colonial commoners know better.

KT

so no loos, either? I guess it's a start. Your people really need to work on the excessive use of "u", though.

 

[meob]

Quake II even, if you count a projected spotlight texture as per pixel lightning. Which is what all games were doing prior to Doom 3 generation engines and the rapid programmable GPU advancements of the time of Doom 3 sped up the adoption of "real lighting". Before 6800 series and Doom 3 GPUs werent powerful enough for true general lighting and shadow formulas and nearly all low vertex count non vertex dynamic lighting before then was just projected texture maps. The map is a simple spot light circle that is scaled and projected in the texture transform matrix based on a surfaces distance and alignment as it slices the invisible sphere that represents the light. Any plane that slices a sphere creates a circle, so its very straight forward to project a circular light texture to surfaces intersecting the light sphere to generate per pixel dynamic lighting.

PS Halo was nothing special. It was 5-10 years old at its release by PC standards. Not sure why people foamed at the mouth over it. Oh yeah, the easily swayed mouthbreathing mainstream. Only reason for Halos success was being poor teen console only gamers without PCs first FPS experience and that was just so incredible to them.

actually, as far as single player fps's go, halo was and is a very good game. it was not technically impressive as an xbox port, but it was a very good fps. just because it was successful on the xbox shouldn't take away from that. halo, fear 1, and hl2 are probably still the best single player fps's on the pc imo.

it's unfortunate bungie was bought by microsoft as the series probably would have been superior if it stayed pc/max exclusive.

 

[futurefields]

Pretty sure the flashlight in Halo is per pixel shader

Not sure if the flashlight in Q2 or HL1 are per pixel shader LOL

 

[futurefields]

A projected texture is NOT what im talking about LOL

 

[KeithTalent]

so no loos, either? I guess it's a start. Your people really need to work on the excessive use of "u", though.

I say loo, but I am in the minority. Picked it up from an attractive redhead I dated; it stuck. The 'u' is the best letter in the alphabet, you guys are really missing out.

KT

 

[QueBert]

YEAP ATARI DID IT

 

[El Guaraguao]

I didnt get around to pc gaming until the early 2000s. I grew up with consoles. I remember a cheat code for Turok 2 that pretty much eliminated all the lights in the game. You had to use flare to navigate around the map. I was blown away by the lighting effects from the flare. It also added a shock factor when you heard those man-dinos trying to get you. Good stuff.

 

[shortylickens]

I agree with above Fabio looking dude.
Consoles have always been way behind. The multiplayer everybody loved in Goldeneye was old news to DOS gamers who had Doom.

As was 3D, digital audio for music and real life sound effects, texture mapping, garoud lighting, and a crapload of other stuff.

Only thing the consoles did faster was increase the bit path, and the clock speeds were so ridiculously low it didnt matter. (N64, Atari Jaguar, Neo Geo)

 

[mikeymikec]

unless you speak british or canadian, in which case a flashlight = torch, right?
:hmm:

I'm British and flashlight/torch are interchangeable; you wouldn't get any weird looks for using either word here (assuming that the context isn't weird!).

 

[Fox5]

The only shaders I recall from halo was the water. I believe the first shadered flashlight was far cry 1.

Not sure about the Xbox Halo, but Halo PC had shaders on like every surface, and the flashlight interacted with them. It killed the framerate wehn the flashlight was turned on.

Despite what haters say, Halo was one of the most graphically advanced games even when it came out on PC in like 2003. That said, other games looked better even if the per pixel shaders weren't as advanced.

The multiplayer everybody loved in Goldeneye was old news to DOS gamers who had Doom.

At the very least, you need to jump forward to Quake 1 to have anything comparable to the fully 3d Goldeneye.

As was 3D, digital audio for music and real life sound effects, texture mapping, garoud lighting, and a crapload of other stuff.

Games going back to the 1980s were 3d. Both SNES and Genesis had fully 3d games however.
Digital audio... I don't even know what that means in this context.
As far as the rest, N64 in 1996 had all of that. So did Playstation in 1995.

 

[alcoholbob]

Doom 3 was probably the first game where you had to multi-task between fighting and trying to see with a flashlight. Even Resident Evil games aren't that mean.

 

[shortylickens]

Doom 3 was probably the first game where you had to multi-task between fighting and trying to see with a flashlight. Even Resident Evil games aren't that mean.

Doom 3 was failure for a lot of reasons.
But it did entertain plenty of people so we stopped complaining about it years ago.

 

[Fayd]

I seem to recall using a flashlight in Half Life. Hopefully, someone can confirm that for me?

why does he look like khan?

 

[sandorski]

I'm British and flashlight/torch are interchangeable; you wouldn't get any weird looks for using either word here (assuming that the context isn't weird!).

Just to add: Canadians don't use Torch, we use Flashlight.

 

[EDUSAN]

Half life had a flashlight, i can confirm that...

btw... Halo was not a bad game as everyone seems to be saying.
I remember playing the Pc version (never had a console of my own) and i liked it! and i didnt even have the hardware to play it at max graphics. If Halo 2 would have been released on PC i would have played it also.

It might not have been such a great game as to deserve the worshipping that some console gamers made of it, but it was far from being a bad game

 

[Juncar]

Just so you know, they did release Halo 2 for Windows too

 

[EDUSAN]

Just so you know, they did release Halo 2 for Windows too

OMG REALLY? LOOOOOOOOL

dont tell me they released gears of war 2 also...

 

[KeithTalent]

Halo 2 was a Vista exclusive. Not sure what happens with it now though.

KT

 

[Juncar]

You can get it to work on XP through some 3rd party patch. I can personally confirm that Halo 2 works on Windows 7. Played through the campaign already, works totally fine.