Actually, Half-Life's hitboxes were awful. They were fine with the original game, but CS and DoD proved that any real attempt to push them much further than that and truly add any real degree of precision would either be disastrous or at least messy.
i got to disagree. having been a regular cs and cod player in the early betas i find the hitbox system good enough in most cases. later betas of cs used larger hitboxes to increase gameplay speed, using a hitbox for each bone (for example upper and lower arms and legs left and right, lower torso, upper torso, neck and head) are very close to the actuall model dimensions. and since you can use more then just one box per bone or uttilize hitspheres instead of boxes where possible, you achive an allmost perfect hit detection, just as it is used in pretty much all games but doom3 out there, ofp and aa use hitboxes just as well, and i never heard anybody complain. per-poly hit detection is possible and natively supported by ut since '2003, but its a waste of recources imo, i don't need to differenciate between beeing hit in either nose or eye, saying its the head should be all the game needs to know imo.
As for modability, Doom 3 really remains an unknown
it got no map editor, it got radiant. enough cons for me
Also, I really don't see how Unreal Tournament was more flexible than Half-Life. If anything, my experience points in the exact opposite direction.
nope. in halflife you have no true modular system you could use to extend existing code, you have to completeley rewrite everything you want to change. thats the reason for all halflife mods playing rather simmular, because they mainly replace the models, tweak a few settings and add some new gameplay goals. mods like alienswarm or the sidescolling shooter for ut2003 and a topscrolling one for ut99 whose names i forgot would be completely impossible. have a look at quake 3 for example, the few total conversion feel very q3ish imo. the modular system the unreal series utilizes is a lot mor flexible and can be adjusted according to your needs easily, in addition to mutators it offers a lot more possibilitys for a mod as well. up to now the only con of the unreal series in this department was the folder structure, where everything was placed into the root folders by default, but 2004 offers a usefull folderstructure simmular out of the box, where every mod can have its own folder.
all in all modding a quake based engine such as halflife is a lot more problematic then a unreal based one, whats a mod in ut is your standart fullsize mod for the former ones.
not to mention the horrible radiant series mapeditor slowing down the mapping to a level where everybody uses the same textures and very limited mapping concepts. words can't discribe how much i dislike this editor. i worked with it back when halflife was released, and i also did a few maps for quake3, but i stand by my point that its an extremely clumsy and unflexible toolset that limits the variety of mapthemes quite a lot.
halflife2 uses a new engine, so we can hope for a decent sdk including a real mapeditor, but chances are there they'll go for a solution simmular to hl1 to not scare away the existing modcommunity. halflife does not need new mod teams as much as other games do, they got a established community allready.
