Mini Thumper

[I love HLBeta]

Did you know that huge thing from Half-Life 2 that helping stop the antlions was supposed to appear in the game? And I'm talking about Thumper (Restrictor) now.

Model from Half-Life 2

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Digging through the files, I found six sound files for Thumper. Looking into soundevents_mechanical_units.vsndevts_c reveals that this is not actually the same Thumper from Half-Life 2, but a smaller version of it - Mini Thumper.

SoundCloud

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soundevents_mechanical_units.vsndevts_c

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If we replace the readonly_tools_asset_info.bin file with the original one, we will find something interesting.
In the search appears model combine_thumper_articulated, which (I say this with absolute certainty, because it is not in the Half-Life 2 files) is the model of the new Thumper, which was supposed to be in Half-Life: Alyx.

combine_thumper_articulated

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Unfortunately, there is no model itself, but we can see the files it used and on which maps this model was located.

Referencing or dependings on combine_thumper_articulated

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This is all that the developers have created for Mini Thumper.

My guesses
I think Thumper was about the size of a fire hydrant and we could keep it in our glove pockets. It would have to be recharged from time to time, but if you overcharge it, it would explode.

In my opinion Thumper was pretty useless and would only add unnecessary action to the player.

[mizaska]

the soundcloud links dont seem to be working, however this is interesting as in the hl2 beta there was a really similar weapon with the same name, just wanted to point that out, it seems like they wanted to bring it back for half life alyx, it wouldve also most likely functioned similar to it being able to only carry one at a time, and putting it on the ground