Sure, but why?

Why not? That's kinda cool actually.

Moving this video to Sylvester_Ink's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

Cool. I'd be more impressed with an engine that could render that in game, especially with today's graphical detail... might be possible due to the low polygon count and lower texture quality that something like the Frostbite engine could perhaps pull it off, but with better polygon counts and texture quality would impress me.

Still the amount of work to overlap the maps at the proper spots and seal things off is fairly impressive. Undoubtedly took a great deal of time.

*music

Can we play it without its annoying loading breaks?

Adding video to channels (Music) - requested by ant.

Turn in your gaming credentials. "A true game would be asking OMG WHERE CAN I DOWNLOAD THIS!!!!111"

Fun for a multi-year 1 on 1 head on match with random spawn

OK, not a bad retort. =]

I was more asking what the advantage was. Things are broken up into levels to reduce the memory load, so slamming them all together seems backwards to me. Or was this just so show off that it could be done?

Maybe I missed something there.

The tool used only uses 400mb of RAM according to the YT comments, and I'd imagine memory is the major obstacle to loading an entire games worth of maps all at once. Well, unless you also want an entire games worth of AI running, and you want to render everything without LoD or any consideration for occlusion (but then does it matter what engine you are using?).

I was thinking with the advancement in computing power since Half Life came out, isn't it possible that you COULD load the entire map with all the AI and play it straight through with no load times?

Yes, actually John Carmack noted that back during the release of Doom 3 it was possible to load the entire game as one chunk if you had ~4gb of RAM, but back then that amount of RAM wasn't as common as it is today.
Unfortunately, crap OS design today pretty much guarantees most resources in a PC just go to running broke-ass Windows.

Essentially yes. The two barriers in 98 were less RAM and no ability to address more than 4GB of it (simplifying here).

In theory, a modern machine with a 64bit processor and a bunch of RAM could load this entire map, especially at the comparatively low detail/texture level of the original HL.

Of course, the engine would need to be written as a 64bit app. I believe Source (aka HL2 engine) has been upgraded to support 64bit, but I doubt the HL1 goldsrc engine has.

Not as much as you might think. Half-life levels have markers at the exit points that match up with markers on the map the exit point leads to so the transition from one map to another (other than the Loading freeze) is unnoticeable. It's straightforward to just place the maps based on those markers using code.

Only played that game for about 25 minutes before getting bored. But man, I love that Bach!

I think at some points the maps overlap each other. This is actually used in some speedruns of the game where you can destroy boxes containing med packs on one map and have them appear on the next map. Also, elevators are weird. Oh, and you'd probably run into a lot of invisible walls that extend much further out than the visible parts of the maps they belong to.

The title isn't entirely accurate, it's not all the maps from the game, for instance, Zen is completely missing. It's all the maps that make up the Black Mesa facility, which is still pretty epic, but it's not the entire game.

> The tool used only uses 400mb of RAM

1980's Bill Gates just rolled over in his grave