Weird Stuff (which is undocumented as far as I know)

NOTE: There are spoilers for some games in this document! If you haven't played them, you can go back to the home page.

Half-Life: Alyx (2020)

• Player clipping brushes use a different, earlier design of screen-fade compared to pushing the view through a solid wall. Once the view is pushed far enough, an arrow appears, pointing to the direction the view needs to go to escape the clip brush. The arrow can barely be seen against the orange screen face, and it doesn't even appear until two or three meters through a clip brush.
• Valve, for some reason, simulated Alyx's finger tendons stretching as she flexes her wrist, but only with the holographic menu hands. This doesn't happen in-game.
• The glove model used to tell the player to grab into part of the hacking minigames uses a glove model that dates back to alpha. This glove model can be seen in some footage in The Final Hours of Half-Life Alyx. In the final release, there also remains an early glove model with an early design for the gravity gloves. (NOTE: There's an example glove model uploaded somewhere on Valve's GitHub. Is this the same glove model?)
• Gordon's gloves in the post-credits scene use the beta wrist design, with a pinkish fleshy part on the wrist. From the little bit of beta gameplay footage available, Alyx used to have this pinkish part on her glove models, before the wrists were later changed to a shaded hole.
• In the section where Russell tells Alyx about his future business plans selling the gravity gloves, there are a number of pipes clipping through walls and windows. Some of the windows also have gaps between the wall and window of possibly less than 1 Hammer unit. It's theoretically possible for the player to push their view through this gap and see outside, but the incredibly small gap makes it extremely difficult to not trigger the out-of-bounds screen fade.
• After the radio dialog of Eli getting back to Russell's hideout, the door without handles to the left of the mannequin headcrab gag is covering a very rough room (probably put together once and never touched again) with spiky, low-poly brushwork, vertically rotated brick textures, and a wooden floor that has concrete on the broken parts. You can actually see these in normal gameplay, through the hole in the ceiling on the next level, outside of the room with the upgrade station. (NOTE: I haven't checked, but there might be part of an earlier version of the next level down there before the level transition.)
• In Gary's (the bandaged up Vortigaunt cooking headcrabs) kitchen, the soup pot has a clipping brush that prevents you from putting certain objects into the pot. The gutted headcrab ragdoll to the side goes in just fine, as do the headcrab hearts, garden gnome, and most of the objects lying around the kitchen, but headcrabs from earlier in the level (both alive and dead) hit the clipping brush. A fun detail is that objects that are taken out of the soup pot have a subtle steam particle effect.
• When Gary calls "Sustenance!" and throws down a cooked headcrab, being directly under the headcrab can get it stuck in the floor. This doesn't seem to happen when standing further away.
• Nearby the door that opens to a bunch of zombies, the ceiling is unclipped and the player can squeeze up there. If you bring an oil drum or some other physics object you can stand on, you can use it to boost yourself up into the rafters and go out-of-bounds. From there, you can find a small empty room, or you can climb along the roof and clamber down some other rooves to skip a combat section.
• Certain physics props (live headcrab ragdolls, a specific cardboard box model, and filled biohazard barrels) collide with the player's head. They will trigger the out-of-bounds screen fade and will bounce off of your head.
• Pushing your head into certain walls or objects will leave behind any equipment you're wearing (helmets and dust masks) attached to your head's physical hitbox. This is subtle and difficult to see on some headsets because the screen fade can cover it pretty quickly.
• Dust masks with straps are attached verbatim to the player's face, with the camera's frustum near clipping being the only thing that hides most of the straps. You can see a part of the strap at the top of your view. It's easier to spot against a helmet.
• At certain angles, Alyx's hand and wrist bones twist in opposite directions to line up with the mouth-covering pose.
• The ModelDoc tool seems to have modified, early versions of the subway levels that are used for example lighting. (NOTE: I'm not sure if these are real maps that can be loaded in-game or something hardcoded into ModelDoc.)
• Xen grenade spawners have a limit to how many grenades they will spawn, and if that limit is exceeded then an existing grenade will disappear using the Bugbait squeeze sounds from Half-Life 2.
• The Combine cabinet that spawns grenades near a grenade-throwing puzzle doesn't have a limit. It will keep spawning grenades if you take them out of the cabinet and look away, as long as the puzzle is unsolved.
• You can become super tall be enabling the standing toggle option, crouching as low down as you can, and then pressing the stand button. You can use this to peek above things you normally couldn't.
• In the starting level of Is or Will Be, near the upgrade station, the pipe with an antlion grub and equipment crate can be clipped into using the lean/walk-and-turn exploit. When I tried this, I got softlocked inside the pipe and couldn't get out without loading an earlier save.
• In the room below the puzzle where you use a crane to move a pipe and some wood, there's a vent with a resin piece in it. Deeper into the same vent is a headcrab and another piece of resin on the edge of a vertical section of the vent. (I was either too tall when crouched, or maybe the player hitbox is always too tall, so I couldn't teleport or use smooth movement to get into the vent. I had to use the lean-and-turn exploit to climb through the vent.)
• The Vortigaunt that Alyx frees at the end of The Northern Star jumps onto the roof and vanishes with a few footstep noises at the end of his cutscene.
• If you use the lean-and-turn exploit to hover far enough over ledge, the game will enable fall physics and potentially kill you if you were high enough.
• The crows that occasionally turn up throughout the game use the old Half-Life 2 crow model. In the game files is an unused "crow" model, which is just a pigeon painted black. Half-Life 2's pigeon model also exists in the game files and is used for the unused npc_pigeon entity.
• This isn't particularly difficult to miss, but Russell will begrudgingly manually explain some exposition to Alyx if the player refuses to look out the train station window and at the Vault.
• On the computer monitor next to the TF2 Scout figurine in Russell's hideout, there is a made-up DOS disk diagnostic tool with a menu option labeled "Diagnistic".
• Vortigaunts have a weird, long tongue that is normally really difficult to see in-game. The Vortigaunt's mouth design in general is really weird. They have all of their teeth at the front of their mouth and don't have any teeth further back in their mouth. (NOTE: I believe the Vortigaunt models also have a stick-tongue-out vertex morph that's never used in-game.)

Mirror's Edge (2009)

• The un-disable-able tutorial popups eat inputs and bring you to a complete halt.
• Faith's elbow brace isn't rendered properly, so you will only ever see the ambient occlusion shadows it casts onto her skin (unless you clip the camera through her arm). This seems to have been a mistake where the artist didn't notice the brace had backwards-facing triangles because the brace and its shadow are both black. In concept art, the brace looks to be one solid piece of thin black fabric, though the texture on her in-game model has stitches and thicker dark gray fabric. (Her third person model has the correct arm brace, this seems to be a viewmodel-specific issue.)
• In the 'attract' demo video, all world textures and lightmaps are considerably higher resolution than in the final build. The textures and lightmaps were most likely compressed to fit on disc media and the limited VRAM the consoles and computers of the time had.

Fallout: New Vegas (2010)

• The compass points to the left side of the NESW letters rather than the center.
• The out-of-bounds area of the map is extremely large. Most of it can never be seen in regular gameplay (even above the mountains) because of fog.
• A few small patches of the out-of-bounds terrain use different textures. The final border to the empty, unmapped area fades into another different texture, before suddenly dropping off ~100m into a (possibly infinite?) ~3m meter deep ocean.
• The south side of the Mojave Outpost western fence would be easy to climb over without the invisible wall.

E3 2010 Trailer

• Higher quality textures and models than what we got in retail.
• Securitron monitors are very shiny, whereas in retail there is barely any shininess at all.
• There is a scene showing the Strip with all of the lights turned off (except for some spotlamps on the Lucky 38? Maybe an oversight).

Minecraft (Beta, 2011)

Minecraft was (is?) a disappointment held together with duct tape and chewing gum. The game is horribly inefficient, buggy, poorly designed, and EXTREMELY complex if trying to create an independent reimplementation. Over the years, it started suffering from feature creep, probably to continue attracting people that like novelty.

If you want a similar game but with a net protocol that's easier to play and tinker with, check out ClassiCube.

• In the language files, there are empty remnants of item descriptions. It is unknown if these were ever actually implemented internally and then scrapped, or if they were added to the language file and forgotten about; no remnant code for this feature remains. A basic recreation of this feature reveals the normal item tooltips are actually spaced roughly about where the center between two lines of text would be.
• In Beta 1.5 the network protocol mysteriously transitioned from "Modified UTF-8" to UTF-16. This makes determining a client or server's version needlessly difficult because the protocol version integer is only sent after a text-based authentication handshake. Minecraft Beta is also incapable of properly displaying any codepoints above ASCII, so every character in a networked string is always prefixed with a useless zero byte.
• In beta 1.7, leftover code suggests the achievements and statistics windows were originally going to be opened by buttons in the inventory screen.
• For a while in beta, entities were supposed to have different movement speeds, but the speed variable was left out of the movement calculation.

ClassiCube, an extended reimplementation of Minecraft Classic.

Minecraft Classic network protocol

java.io.DataInput's "Modified UTF-8", which is UTF-16 (including its weird surrogates) encoded as UTF-8, except for ASCII NUL, which is represented as C0 80.

Spore (2008)

A lot of this game gives me 'lost/had to rewrite ⅔ of the source tree' vibes. The procedural planets, metaball-based creature models, and usage of MS Trebuchet in the UI seem to be the only similarities between what Will Wright showed off at GDC 2005 and what was released on store shelves.

Will Wright apparently prototyped an actual evolution simulator but later went with letting the player influence their creature directly so the player wouldn't be bored just staring at the creatures doing things on their own. Why Maxis still went with the idea of marketing it as a tool for teaching evolution rather than a sandbox god game like most other games of its kind is beyond me.

Spore's extreme scope in design and constant nagging from EA executives doomed it to being a long-delayed disappointment. Since Maxis was shut down (it technically still exists, but the new one is only related by name and exists exclusively to support The Sims 4), it is possible the Spore source tree was deleted and is gone forever.

On the extremely off-chance the source tree does ever see the light of day, I hope whoever makes it public also includes the CVS/SVN/Perforce metadata so we can see the full development history and possibly even get a build of the GDC '05-era source into a fully-functional state. RenderWare is the primary obstacle in the way of any kind of legal source publication.

• The tribe editor has an indented space in the bottom-center of the screen for what would be a name text field in the other editors. In the release build, NPC tribes are simply named after their colors and the player's tribe is just '(creature name) Tribe'. Maybe tribes were planned to have procedural names like cities in Civilisation Stage?
• The creature texturing algorithm has buggy ambient occlusion that leaves black lines across a creature's skin and often leaves mouth parts full of ugly black pixels.
• Camera control with WASD in Tribe Stage and Civilisation Stage is weirdly slippery and is prone to weird bent and curved motion when the keys are released. Right-click camera control doesn't suffer from this issue.
• In the tribe outfit editor, the 'Abilities' icon and the 'Health' icon both erroneously use the 'Gathering' tooltip text. The Abilities section doesn't seem to have been used for anything in Tribe Stage, and doesn't show any of the abilities that would be visible in the Creature editor.
• In near-final prerelease screenshots, toggled buttons are green rather than yellow in the release build and editor text fields appear to be directly editable rather than being buttons that open a panel.
• There is a one-pixel gap in the bottom UI bar of editors, to the left of the green save and red discard buttons.
• The tooltips over Tribe Stage and Civilisation Stage special ability buttons are pushed around by the buttons' bouncing animation when moused over.
• The model and texture LOD, even at highest settings, is extremely aggressive. Most objects become blurry, bumpy messes at relatively short distances. The LOD system might have been designed with lower resolution displays in mind, not accounting for higher resolutions.
• Almost every editor part in the game has a very noticable transition between its icon and the spinning preview. Some parts even have slightly different models to what is shown on the icon.
• The Civilisation and Space Stage dialog popups appear a fixed distance from the bottom of the screen at higher resolutions.
• The dialog options in Civilisation Stage are extremely simple, with the only options being 'insult', 'praise', and 'give gift'.
• Some of the Spore prototypes available use sound effects from the GDC '05 beta.
• The creatures on the box art were most likely painted over, because they are far too smooth and uniform to have been direct screenshots. The green guy on the left with a big eye and hard hat isn't even possible to create in-game because there is no eye part like that.
• The single new option GA added to the 'Detail' section of the creature paint editor has a model with its feet slightly further apart compared to the base game paint models. Weirdly, the creature parts GA added actually line up with their icons, unlike the base game parts.

Early Trailers

• The (possibly very early) 2007 Spore trailer (uploaded to YouTube on 29-05-2008) only shows GDC '05-era content, even though other screenshots from 2007 are more similar in appearance to the final build than the GDC beta.
• The E3 2008 Spore trailer (uploaded to YouTube on 14-07-2008) has a white-backgrounded name text field in the Creature editor, and the editor mode buttons at the top-center are green, while the part tab buttons are yellow. The 'save without exit' and 'share' buttons at the bottom-right do not yet exist, though there is a weird slightly darker portion of the bottom bar to the right of the undo and redo buttons. The cutscene with a town hall before the Civilisation Stage starts has no paved road beneath the town hall, and it is sitting on a patch of dirt. The Tribe Stage pet pen which was left in this cutscene (probably by accident) is visible at this stage as well. The Space Stage distance-limit-circle-thing is pale orange-yellow rather than the plain white in the release build. The nebulas in Space Stage are a lot more visible. The space civilisation colors seem to be a lot more saturated as well, though this might just be someone turning up the contrast in editing. The 'Coming September 7th' text at the end mostly uses a font similar to the logo's font (it seems slightly wider?), except for the number 7, which appears to be Arial Rounded.
• The other trailer (YouTube KTWXdxQLI6U) has nothing related to the actual game at all, besides a few stock sounds.
• Some of the textures in beta screenshots appear far higher resolution than the final release. They were most likely compressed to fit the game on DVDs and the limited VRAM computers had at the time.

GDC '05 Presentation

• GDC '05-era screenshots appear to have a lot more hand-modeled assets for things rather than ones made in in-game editors.
• The things in Cell Stage that look kinda like weird mesh bottlecaps appear to have originally been enemies in the GDC '05 demo.
• Creatures in the editor had ribs. In retail, there is only a spine.
• Hand parts appear to have been attachable anywhere, rather than only at the end of limb parts.
• Attack animations appear to have been procedural rather than hand-made.
• The hopper that the Willosaur drags around appears to have ragdoll physics.
• It's unclear if the 'procedural mating' is supposed to be an actual mating animation or the Willosaur just meandering about.
• "Tweety Bird" demonstrates the animation system compensating for excess weight, which is not done in retail.
• Creature walking speed was determined by the creature's legs and feet, rather than a generic 'speed' stat.
• The tribe stage appears to have an empty pet pen, even at this early stage.
• The Willosaurs automatically pick up spears and play a drum on their own, rather than needing to be ordered to.
• The flutey music that plays over the city stage demo is available in high quality in one of the available prototypes.
• Will mentions the 'store' (or Sporepedia as it would later be called) would try to match 'styles' when serving UGC.
• The city stage camera can get much closer to and further from the ground than in retail.
• Will mentions that the different vehicle parts allow it to travel in different ways, rather than having entirely separate vehicle categories as in retail.
• There doesn't seem to have been a distinct space stage at this point, as Will buys a spaceship in city stage and immediately gains control of it.
• The spaceship appears to just be an overlay and uses the default city stage camera controls.
• It appears that hovering over a planet would have shown a map in a panel on the right of the screen.
• The music audible after Will says "can we bring up the volume on this machine" is available in high quality in one of the available prototypes.
• The bubble that appears over the colony city Will spawns appears to be glass, rather than a purple force field as in retail.
• Will mentions cities being placable underwater.
• The central star in a solar system was a navigable target, unlike in retail.
• Black holes and nebulae had special sound effects when hovered.
• Will mentions blue giant stars being dangerous, which isn't the case in retail.
• Will says that the world he is visiting is UGC rather than procedurally generated.
• He also mentions 'personality sliders' that players would get to set on their creatures.
• Some of the sound effects that play when Will is attacked by the alien city are available in one of the prototypes.

2007 IGN Demo

• The mouse cursor in the IGN demo is green, rather than blue. The cursor then turns blue once the commentator takes control of a creature.
• The presenter mentions that certain creature parts affect the creature's 'personality'. He then demonstrates that a 'social' species of creature attacks him after he kills one.
• Nests were made as part of the mating process, rather than nests being a central hub like in retail.
• 'Sense' and 'Stealth' are two creature stats that are not in retail.
• Strangely, 'Herbivore' and 'Carnivore' are on 5-star ratings, rather than the trinary 'Herbivore/Carnivore/Omnivore' thing that's in the top right in retail.
• There is also a ⅔-filled brain icon in the top right of the creature editor.
• It appears most of the mouth parts in retail were modeled at this stage, though they're not organised the same way in the part palette.
• At this point in development, the ribs that were shown in 2005 are gone and the creature editor spine appears similar to retail. The spine had no arrow handles for changing its size, with the presenter grabbing the first and last vertebrae instead.
• The part editor list appears to actually be using models instead of pre-rendered sprites, as there is no noticable pop in quality like in retail.
• Parts sometimes render on top of the tooltips.
• "The Froggening 🧬150" in retail was called "Bufo Bufo $160".
• "The Geckoning 🧬75" was called "Dicamptodon E... $40".
• The unknown-named eye part which became "Wide Eyed 🧬10" in retail is sold for 48 DNA.
• The unknown-named part which became "Ungulot 🧬75" is sold for 24 DNA.
• The part that became "Feelyfrond 🧬10" is deleted and does not give back any DNA points.
• A part which appears to have become "Felizard 🧬10" is called "Iguana Iguana $10".
• The part which appears to have become "Coygamine 🧬10" is called "Tamias Minimu... $10".
• The part which appears to have become "LarvEye 🧬10" is called "Arachnida Ocu... $10".
• An eye part which seems to have been replaced with "Stalkgazer 🧬10" is called "Nivis Hominis $10".
• The part which became "Furtive 🧬10" is called "Hominini Ocul... $60".
• The part which became "Grumpeye 🧬10" is called "Rhinoceros Un... $30".
• The part which became "Wizened 🧬10" is called "Dermochelys C... $30".
• The part that became "Grinnace 🧬75" is called "Simia Pygmaeu... $30, 10 Basic Bite Damage".
• The part which became "Splatypus 🧬75" is called "Anas Platyrhy... $30, 10 Basic Bite Damage".
• The part which became "Buzzbeak 🧬75" is called "Vultur $30, 10 Basic Bite Damage".
• There is a very limited selection of creature paint options, and the color swatches do not expand out like in retail, though they still work the same way for picking different color shades.
• The "Screeble" creature is demonstrated moving its head to face the mouse cursor. In retail creatures usually do not move their head, and instead turn their whole body to face something.
• The presenter talks about how "rows of parts" would be unlocked after collecting enough DNA points to fill a "brain" meter, and how upgrading four times lets the player advance to the tribal stage.
• The presenter mentions 'inventing' firepits, where in retail they are just a decorative part of the tribe building.
• The presenter shows screenshots of the tribe hut editor and the plant editor.
• A screenshot of the 'city' stage shows what appears to be an intermediate stage between a tribe and a new city. Possibly this is some kind of suburban farming plot?
• The parts shown in the vehicle editor don't look too different to the ones in retail.
• The presenter mentions how "civilisation stage" comes after "city stage", implying there was another stage inbetween Tribe and Civilisation which was scrapped.
• The presenter talks about how there is an 'aesthetic matching' system that tries to find similar looking creations to the main city hall, something Will also mentioned in 2005.
• A button labeled 'Buy UFO' appears to use pixelated Tahoma, rather than Trebuchet MS.
• There is a cutscene after the commentator picks a UFO.
• At this point in development, spaceships control like in retail, as opposed to just being an overlay for the civilisation stage camera controls as in the GDC demo.
• The sidebar that was visible in the GDC demo of the solar system view is gone and is replaced with tooltips.
• The presenter hovers over two planets which appear to be named "Lamstas" and "Catlor".
• The spaceship tool tooltip also appears to use pixelated Tahoma.
• The laser is listed as "Laser, Use Cost: 10" and appears to make the same sound effects as in retail.
• A tool which doesn't appear in retail, called "Pulse, Use Cost: 1" is demonstrated.
• The abduction beam functions as in retail but has a very different sound effect.
• The presentor drops a creature halfway up the tractor beam, and demonstrates that at this point in development blood and gibs were still in the game.
• There are only a handful of terraforming tools available, including "Lower Water, Use Cost: 20" which doesn't appear in retail.
• The galaxy in this build seems to be far, far larger than the one in retail.
• There is no distance limit circle, as in retail.
• A comms dialog pops up, very different to retail, appearing more like a hologram than a TV screen. A creature says "Enemy! We Greevils will repay your aggression. You better run home to defend YOUR homeworld." There are three dialog options, "You're bluffing.", "Oops, it was a mistake. Sorry.", and "Kiss my ufo."
• The presenter zooms all the way out in the galaxy view and shows the galaxy is very different to retail. Possibly the galaxy itself was procedurally generated at this point, rather than static like in retail.