Does anyone know what these extensions are in the Portal save file? There are three of them. .hl1 .hl2 and .hl3 Is this refering to half-life 1, 2, and 3? Three obviously not being released yet.

Or could it be .hl1 is half-life 2 .hl2 is episode 1 and .hl3 is episode 2?

They're probably just temporary lock files or version of the same file saved multiple times for redundancy, hence why they are sequental.

They might be different formats of the save game data, hl1 = goldsrc, hl2 = source, and hl3 = orange box source.

Don't think they're redundant versions as they are very different size files. I tried opening them with Word, WordPad and NotePad and of course it's mostly garbled characters but there are a few words you can make out. Looks like it lists various game settings and resources. There's stuff like func_walltoggle and decal list in there.

I bet they each store different data then, like entity positions and AI and stuff.

There is a surprising lack of information on the save game data structure on the Valve wiki.

msleeper wrote:
I bet they each store different data then, like entity positions and AI and stuff.

If thats the case, what would the letters 'hl' stand for? I had assumed they ment half life, but obviously I'm wrong.

I'm just trying to learn as much about this stuff as possible.

It probably originated from Half-Life 1 as "hl" and there was no reason to change it.

Frankly, if you're looking to learn stuff, I think you're barking up the wrong tree. I don't think there is much of anything useful to learn in the save game files. I did some more searching, there is like ZERO information on the data structure there so I don't even think you can do anything useful.

Thanks anyway.