In this case, the arena is free of enemies until the player solves a puzzle, and triggers an alarm. They often have multiple entry-points for enemies, along with a gate of some kind to prevent the player moving on, until the challenge has been completed.
Arenas are built to hold the player for a period of time, and usually contain combat or some other challenge. The courtyard in front of you is a space we call an Arena. Dying from unknown threats never feels fair, and certainly isn't fun. If the player's path was to move past the bottom of the cliffside, it would be unlikely he would notice the soldiers rappelling down from above. We find that players focus their view on the direction they're travelling, so by using a cliffside, and having the player ascend it, we ensure the player will look up and be prepared for enemies.
Vertical space allows us to force the player to deal with threats from above and below. We were particularly happy with the vertical cliffside in Half-Life 1, and regretted that we didn't iterate further on that concept in Half-Life 2. The area you're currently entering is called the cliffside arena. We model the 3D character at a very high detail, then extract much of the physical information and store it in the textures. Production-wise, the fisherman was built using a similar process to the rocks you saw on the beach. You can see how the wrinkles on his cheeks, and around his eyes, are an example of how we can use normal maps to add depth. The highlights on his forehead and nose are good examples of specularity on human skin. Design-wise, the fisherman was focused on showcasing HDR, and the way light falls on human skin. This fisherman is the first character we've built using that process. By the end, we believed we'd figured out a more effective process for designing and constructing characters. The process of building characters in Half-Life 2 taught us many things. We also design the colors and values of each surface to ensure they will be correct across all exposure levels. So now, going forward, we're modelling textures in 3D packages to ensure that the physical information encoded in the texture allows HDR to correctly bounce light off the surface. In order for high dynamic range to correctly simulate the light's interaction with the surfaces around you, like these wet rocks, we needed more precise information about the surfaces than we've had in the past. The visual relationship between the sky, the water, and the rocks is something we could not achieve without HDR.
When the art team started to think about a location that would demonstrate the power of HDR, a beach was one of the first choices we made.
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