Overview
This Guide will teach you how to make your Half-Life experience as realistic as possible, from holstering weapons to disabling the HUD, it’s all right here.
What Is This Guide?
THIS GUIDE HAS BEEN UPDATED AS OF 2/7/2019, TO BE LESS SH!T. <3
Greetings. This guide has been developed with the goal of making your Half-Life experience as immersive as possible, whether it be for creating Machinima, or for personal enjoyment.
This guide will teach you how to disable the HUD, holster your weapons, as well as a few other neat little details which could help improve the game’s overall immersion. Without further ado, let’s begin.
Editing The “skill.cfg” File
The “skill.cfg” is responsible for controlling the finer details of gameplay. If you are new to the Half-Life franchise, I DO NOT RECOMMEND EDITING THIS FILE.
Editing the skill.cfg should only be done if you are familiar with Half-Life’s unique style of gameplay. Making random changes to this file without a strong understanding of how the game already ‘feels’ can have a drastic impact on the overall gameplay and your enjoyment of it. Edit this file at your own risk.
To edit the skill.cfg, first locate the file within your Steam directory. (You must have Half-Life installed)
For Half-Life 1: C:Program Files (x86)SteamsteamappscommonHalf-Lifevalve
For Half-Life 2: C:Program Files (x86)SteamsteamappscommonHalf-Life 2hl2cfg
I recommend you make a backup of the unedited skill.cfg before editing, for obvious reasons.
From here, simply open your respective game’s skill.cfg and play around with the settings until you are happy with the finished result. It should be noted that Half-Life 1’s variables are separated into three categories, Easy, Medium, and Hard. (1, 2, & 3) I recommend you only edit the Easy (1) settings.
If you are unsure of how you want certain enemies to respond to certain weapons, I recommend watching the series “Freeman’s Mind”, as this interpretation is fairly realistic. FM is also just great.
Holstering Weapons & Disabling The HUD
By default, it is not possible to holster your weapons or hide your HUD in Half-Life or Half-Life 2. To do this, you must use Console Commands. Luckily, this process is very quick and easy.
Firstly, launch your preferred Half-Life game. In Half-Life 1, the Console is already enabled by default. In Half-Life 2, go to ‘Options’, ‘Keyboard’, ‘Advanced’, and then click on ‘Enable Developer Console’. Once you are ingame, simply press the ‘~’ key (Directly below the ESC key) to open the Console.
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Half-Life 2’s method of holstering weapons and disabling the HUD are quite easy, so we’ll start there. Open the console and type “sv_cheats 1”. This will enable cheats in your game. Keep in mind that enabling cheats will disable Steam Achievements during your current game session.
Copy/Paste the following into your Console: bind “[key]” “impulse 200”;bind “[key]” “cl_drawhud 0”; bind “[key]” “cl_drawhud 1”
Replace the “[key]” sections with whichever buttons you prefer. Personally, I use ‘V’, ‘<‘, & ‘>’.
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Half-Life 1 is slightly more complicated, as its commands are different and it will require more work. Firstly, load into a level and QuickSave. Type “sv_cheats 1” in the Console. This will enable cheats.
Copy/Paste into Console: bind “[key]” “r_drawviewmodel 0”; bind “[key]” “r_drawviewmodel 1”
Personally, I use ‘V’ & ‘C’.
After you have done this, QuickLoad and Copy/Paste the command again. Now it should work. Unfortunately, you have to QuickSave, enable cheats, and QuickLoad every time you launch the game.
To enable/disable the HUD, Copy/Paste: bind “[key]” hud_draw 0″; bind “[key]” “hud_draw 1”
Personally, I use ‘<‘ & ‘>’.
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NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS LONG OUTDATED INFORMATION THAT WAS WRITTEN IN 2015 AT THE TIME OF THIS GUIDE’S CREATION. IT IS NOT NECESSARY, HOWEVER, I HAVE CHOSEN TO LEAVE IT IN IN CASE HALF-LIFE’S NATIVE CONSOLE COMMANDS CEASE TO FUNCTION.
As for removing the HUD, in Half-Life there is no console command that allows you to disable the HUD, which is why you’ll need to use a script. First off, go to the following directory
“C:Program Files (x86)SteamsteamappscommonHalf-Lifevalve” (without the “s) and create a new Text Document via Notepad and name it “userconfig.cfg”, once you have done that copy and paste the following text into it
alias “hudoff” “hud_draw 0;
net_graph 0;
crosshair 0;
r_drawviewmodel 0;
echo hud displays all disabled!”
alias “hudon” “hud_draw 1;
net_graph 1;
crosshair 1;
r_drawviewmodel 1;
echo hud displays all enabled!”
Once you have pasted that wall of text into the “userconfig.cfg”, save the file and launch Half-Life.
What this script does is it adds two new console commands to Half-Life, “hudon” and “hudoff”. I think you can figure out what these commands do. Simply bind the “hudon” command to a key and then bind the “hudoff” command to another key and whenever you push those two buttons your HUD will disable and reinable at will. If you find a frame rate appearing in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen that the “hudoff” command can’t remove, simply type “net_graph 0” in the console to disable it.
Obvious Shizz
If you have your HUD disabled and you don’t want to suddenly drop dead in the middle of combat, simply type “god” into the Console. If you want to be able to ‘vault’ or climb over objects that are too high to crouch jump over, simply type “noclip”. These commands can both be bound via Console, too.
For immersion purposes, avoid standing still and tanking hundreds of thousands of bullets in combat. While it is certainly reasonable to assume that the HEV Suit could withstand a few good 9mm bullets, would you really want to stand there and play ‘𝐅uck Around & Find Out’ in real life?
Worth The Wait
Well, ladies and gentlemen, there is is. After four years of procrastination, I’ve finally decided to update this initially not-so-good guide to immersion in Half-Life. (Much better name, too lazy to change it tho…)
If you’ve got any additions or questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below.
Thanks, and have fun.