Early Level Load Glitch

This article contains information that is out of date or is missing latest research. You can help by renewing it.

This article is a stub. You can help by expanding it.

Early Level Load Glitch

Discoverer(s)	Many
Games	Half-Life: Opposing Force Half-Life: Blue Shift Half-Life 2 Episode Two Portal Portal 2 Black Mesa
Engine	GoldSrc Source Engine OrangeBox Engine

This is a glitch that breaks some in-game/map mechanics during the level-load.

How-to

To achieve this glitch, you have to enter the changelevel trigger and pause the game right after the loading is over - 1 tick in the newly loaded map (also known as 0.0s _2 demo). Once paused, save the game and reload the save. Doing this can break some mechanics in some maps allowing you to complete them faster or softlocking the game.

Explanation

After loading textures and models, as a final step the engine will start to prepare entities which will apply changes to certain objects in the world. If saved before this step, these changes won't be applied, resulting in some interesting glitches.

Notable effects/uses

• Boot Camp - You can skip the freeze at the very beginning of the chapter and save more than a minute.
• d3_breen_01 - Doing this glitch will make Breen disappear in the middle of the cutscene causing the game to throw the game over screen.