PBCharacterMovement

Due to a variety of factors that included work on a newer version of their signature game engine, Valve postponed the release of the third installment in the Half-Life 2’s episodic series indefinitely, leaving many fans speculating how the story would evolve after the cliffhanger with which Episode 2 ended.

Roughly a year after leaving the company, Marc Laidlaw, the main writer behind the critically acclaimed title, released an unofficial blog post detailing the follow-up of the main game, prompting some fans to recreate the story in the form of mods, ultimately leading to the development of tools such as PBCharacterMovement.

Despite its age, the latest version of Valve’s Source game engine still holds up considerably well nowadays, thanks in part to its support for complex facial animations, interactive physics mechanics and dynamic lighting system. However, in an attempt to make use of the latest technologies designed to increase the degree of realism that a game can be capable of, the team behind Project Borealis decided to adopt the Unreal Engine as the basis of their fan-made Episode 3 mod.

Since longtime players have already become accustomed to Half-Life’s specifically fast-paced movement system, the developers decided to bring it over and release it in the form of a plugin with an open-source license, so that any other fans eager to follow in their footsteps can have an easier time making end-users feel more familiar when exploring a different take on Valve’s mesmerizing sci-fi universe.

As a result, most of the characteristics that define the Source engine’s walking mechanics are present within the plugin at hand, ultimately allowing players to quickly jump forward in a precise sequence to gain momentum and traverse the environment at blazing fast speeds through the speedrunning technique known as bunny-hopping, easily enter cramped spaces such as air ducts or ventilation shafts with the smooth crouch-jumping system and ramp sliding to make use of puzzle-based mechanics when advancing throughout the levels.

Whether you want to reinvigorate the Half-Life universe by porting or creating a mod within the newer Unreal Engine, or you simply wish to speedrun various community-built maps with the Source engine’s signature bunny-hopping mechanics, PBCharacterMovement may be the right tool for your use-case, given its faithful recreation of the original iteration in a completely different system.