Bugs:Half-Life: Source

This page details bugs of Half-Life: Source.

This page documents bugs found in Half-Life: Source only. Some similar bugs exist in the original but since they are much worse here, they might be documented as well. For bugs found specifically in Half-Life Deathmatch: Source, please visit its page.

This article is a work in progress. ...Well, all the articles here are, in a way. But this one moreso, and the article may contain incomplete information and editor's notes.

Half-Life: Source became pretty infamous for the many bugs it introduced, many of which weren't present in the original game. But you see it wasn't always like this...

Continuous updates of the Source engine have led to the game becoming buggy, with the game being moved into the Source 2013 Singleplayer engine branch as a part of the 2013 SteamPipe update to Steam having introduced many of the bugs that Half-Life: Source has become infamous for. Despite the game receiving some updates in the same year, such as native support for Mac and Linux, Valve never bothered updating the game farther, allowing it to become more broken and messier in the ensuing years.

Valve is unlikely to ever fix these problems, and most likely never will seeing that they now consider the GoldSrc original post-25th anniversary update to be the definitive way of playing Half-Life.

To do: Stuff from here is a good start, but there is likely much more that needs to be documented. More examples can be found in this Steam discussion here and the YouTube video to the right. Some bugs may actually be from the original game, so be sure to check the original game as well before added things to this page. Demonstrate bugs with examples. Verity how much these are actual bugs or if they were changes made by Valve. Use the Valve Developer Community wiki to help explain quirks with the engine or stuff overall.

General

• Some corpses will be static, when they are supposed to have ragdoll physics.
• Nearly every metallic and tile surface in the game is extremely shiny, and they all use only one pre-made cubemap across all maps. This includes some weapons, such as the Crowbar.

Weapons

• The Colt Python/.357 Magnum Revolver has its zoom function active in singleplayer, which was only intended for multiplayer.
• Snarks will have the wrong model when they are being picked up.

NPCs

• The hologram of Gina Cross in the Hazard Course has broken animations.
• Scientists will get stuck in an animation loop between running away and getting scared. They also don't comment about smells anymore.
• Barneys/Security Guards fire their Glocks at a significantly faster fire rate, only when the player provokes them by friendly fire.
• The Security Guard Vests don't reduce damage to them.
• A dead security guard seen in Unforeseen Consequences can be revived by shooting him, he will then thank you for your actions by shooting you.
• Shooting a scientist at the start of We've Got Hostiles will cause him to open the door to the office in a panic, allowing you to skip the chapter entirely.
• Scientists and Barneys/Security Guards will sometimes randomly play their "pain" sounds, long after they have been actually hurt.

Enemies

• Infamously, the AH-64 Apache helicopter can be safely defeated with any weapon, including a mere pistol.
• The tongues of Barnacles don't render properly. They will render with an incorrect length.
• The HECU soldier that kills a scientist in We've Got Hostiles will instead target the player, ruining an otherwise crucial scene.
• One of the Tentacles in Blast Pit cannot harm you or the Security Guard. This is also the case for the Tentacles that appear in Surface Tension and Interloper.
• The fight in Gonarch's Lair against the titular giant headcrab is significantly broken. Gonarch will barely put up a fight, the textures of its lobbed attack are missing, and explosives are ineffective against it.
• The hitboxes on Houndeyes are offset and their eyelids don't shut when they sleep. When they attack, a loud screeching sound will play.
• HECU Soldiers don't fear MP5 Grenades and their helmets don't show the bullet proof decal and instead show the flesh decal, making it look like damage is taken.
• The Nihilanth's portal ball projectile in the fourth room's ceiling can often teleport the Gordon back to the first room repeatedly.

Sounds

• Footsteps, buttons and even doors sometimes don't use Half-Life sounds and often use Half-Life 2 / General Source ones instead.
• The crowbar will use its sound for hitting metal, even on objects or surfaces that aren't metallic. The only instance this doesn't occur is when the crowbar hits NPCs, enemies, and doors... for some reason.
• The shotgun has broken sounds for its secondary attack despite the sounds existing in the game files.

Maps

• A weird and rather infamous graphical glitch on map c2a4c in Residue Processing. This is due to the water in the tanks. When the map was compiled, the water material used _DX7 shader. Later, Valve updated the water material to use _DX9 shader but forgot to recompile the map afterwards. Changing the water material's shader to 'Water_dx7' fixes this. This infamous graphical glitch can also be fixed by turning off Multicore Rendering in the settings, if you don't feel like modifying the water shader.
• The skyboxes in Surface Tension will glitch out, causing everything to violently glitch about in the area.
• The helicopter floats above the ground in c0a0b.
• The infamous scientist floating on a chair can be found in c1a0b.
• Buttons on certain maps can be pressed more than once. One example is in "Questionable Ethics", where the player can press the experiment buttons more than once, causing said experiments to go off multiple times.

Miscellaneous

• The Grunt-o-Matic (impulse 76) doesn't work and will attempt to spawn a nonexistent NPC_human_grunt entity instead of the correct monster_human_grunt entity.