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Half Life 2 - Lost Coast HDR Explained 63

Posted by Zonk from the you've-got-to-love-bloom dept.
An Anonymous Reader writes: "Valve has released some amazing new screenshots of Half Life 2: Lost Coast, showing off the new-found technical wizardry called High-Dynamic Range rendering. It is the same advanced lighting that makes Unreal 3.0 look so good, except it will be available very soon for Half Life 2. Bit-tech has written a guide to all the new stuff like Blooming and HDR Cube Maps which explains everything you can expect to see when Lost Coast comes out."
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Half Life 2 - Lost Coast HDR Explained More

Half Life 2 - Lost Coast HDR Explained

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  • Obligatory 1st Post! Personally I can't wait. HDR is a really fun thing to play around with and the current crop of games with it (if only a limited implementation) are gorgeous... and yes I'm a graphics freak.

    • Re:Can't Wait (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Cornflake917 ( 515940 )
      "I'm a graphics freak"

      In all seriousness, I welcome your graphics freakynesh. It's a sight for sore eyes. Unfortunately, I already see the ubiquitous "The gameplay sucks, we don't need better graphics" posts starting to file in.

      The truth is that this is all B.S.(goodbye karma). Improved graphics in game make it more visually appealing...not much else. But for some reason whenever a game makes a graphical improvement(or is just has good graphics for that matter) everyone screams bloody murder, complaini
      • Isn't the lost coast expansion free? Its just one level...
        • Indeed it will be free. Not sure if the term 'level' really applies with HL2 though. Technically speaking HL2 flows from map to map and has some arbitrary 'chapters' involved in the progression... but from a gameplay standpoint there isn't much to delineate 'levels' except perhaps the transition through the faulty teleporter (ie. time warp) towards the end.

          So saying that Lost Coast is only one 'level' long doesn't really hold much meaning for me. Even if it is only one 'map' in the technical sense the

    • Re:Can't Wait (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Most of the "limited implementations" of HDR are really just some cheesy bloom effects and whatnot. Not very pretty, imho, it just messes up the picture and makes it looks like your character has cataracts.

      Half-Life 2, the Unreal 3.0 engine and the likes, on the other hand, use proper HDR. And it does indeed look gorgeous. This should be fun =)
  • Looks like Valve has finally developed an amazing new technology to mimic the awesome "Contrast" knob on my 1975 Zenith.

    -Eric

    • Looks like Valve has finally developed an amazing new technology to mimic the awesome "Contrast" knob on my 1975 Zenith.

      Your contrast knob will never reveal details not present in a stand dynamic range TV signal. I suppose, being an analog signal, it concievable for such details actually be there provided some astronomical signal to noise ratio. Still, your 1975 Zeith aint gonna cut it.

      Anm

  • Not just HDR (Score:3, Funny)

    by KirkH ( 148427 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @04:48PM (#12826980)
    Uh, it's not just HDR that makes UE3 look so good.
  • With Halflife2, the graphics were not the problem. Is the gameplay being so downright boring and repetitive.

    • Amen to that: I mean, where is Team Fortress 2 guys? It was supposed to be bundled with HL 1 for god's sake. Instead of that, we get DoD: source (which isn't even out yet) as if we didn't have enough WW2 themed FPSs.

      While I'm ranting I'd like to point out that I felt UT 2003 sucked while UT 2004 is for the time being my favorite FPS. Why? Assault & Onslaught. No new graphics engines, no ultra high-res texture packs, just new toys to kill people with, and new levels to kill them in. Did epic miss the ma
    • If Half-Life 2's gameplay was too boring for you, I suspect that the FPS genre is not suitable for your taste.

      In other words, with HL2's gameplay is no worse than it's graphics.

      Have you even played Doom 3!?
      • Amen to that! I can at least remember different areas and events in HL2. Doom 3 was the same level over and over and over and over again.
      • A significant problem with HL2 is that it pretty much avoided what made HL1 so fresh. There doesn't seem to be a single enemy in HL2 that can't be, and isn't meant to be, destroyed by your basic hand-held weapons. I would have loved another tentacle beast or gargantuan scenario but HL2 was really sparse and simplistic with its puzzles.

        Here's hoping for Aftermath to rectify this.
        • You never killed enemies by taking advantage of the physics system? Did you even get to the level where you killed the mob of zombies by smashing them with those car traps? Or chopping them up by using the propeller blades. Is going around in circles to push the 3 special buttons to turn on the power beam that zaps the monster really that fun anyway? To me, killing enemies with the physgun never ceases to be entertaining. There's some pretty creative ways to kill enemies HL2. I guess I'm just easily a
          • They start to be an issue when they compell more and more players out of the game for monetary reasons:
            the suggestion that Lost Coast could need as much as two gigabytes of RAM to run HDR optimally
            not every one can upgrade his computer every 2 months.
          • Oh, there's no denying physics are entertaining. The things you mention were fun, but relatively speaking they are fairly minor or simplistic, and I also often found it easier just to shoot the baddies.

            In HL1, you could waste all your ammo and eventually kill a gargantuan, but firing up some generators and then running to a pair of giant tesla coils with the gargantuan right on your heels, and then frying it to kingdom come entertains me slightly more. Same goes for using the tactical map to take one out w

  • Laff-Hife for sure (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ignatz72 ( 891623 )
    Granted, the gameplay in HL2 seemed repetitive - but isn't that what FPS' are? Don't get me wrong, almost all I play are FPS'... BUT I was expecting these kind of graphics with HL2 out of the box. Doom3 also for that matter.

    Either way, I play them because I can shut my brain off and see the pretty things blow up and splatter!

    These new pics look A LOT like early shots and descriptions of STALKER:Oblivion Lost or :Shadows of Chernobyl or :vaporware, whatever they are calling it now. Now this game has be
    • Either way, I play them because I can shut my brain off and see the pretty things blow up and splatter!

      Wasn't the point of HL1 supposed to revolve around the player outsmarting and outthinking enemies when faced with overwhelming odds? In HL1 the most powerful guns were either obtained late or lacked a good source of ammo to be used often. (By the time you got the Gauss Cannon or Gluon Gun, you pretty much fought everything and weapons such as the Rocket Launcher and Crossbow had rare amounts of ammo throu

    • My understanding is that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is in the process of tweaking and balancing. I think they're dealing more with AI issues right now than with graphics. I'm really looking forward to this game too, so I hope that it gets finished up soon so they can release it in the Fall (just guestimating here; they don't have a speculative release date).

  • 2005 (Score:4, Funny)

    by Flunitrazepam ( 664690 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @06:02PM (#12827703) Journal
    we dont have flying cars yet, but at least we can make 'white' in video games REAL FUCKIN' WHITE
  • the graphics may look better, but does the game physics allow you to explore/utilise the environment to the same degree ?

  • HDR HL2 Renderings (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LordStraun ( 794808 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @06:44PM (#12828032)
    A month or so ago, someone took some HL2 models and rendered them with HDL. Then he put those renderings into his back-yard.

    You can see them here [facepunchstudios.com]
    • It's a shame that Valve haven't tried to add image-based lighting like that in to Lost Coast!

      The technique is certainly possible [daionet.gr.jp] to do in realtime. Perhaps we'll see something like garry's mod [garry.tv] incorporating it soon?

    • What's that got to do with HDRI, i.e. higher color precision?

      Besides, I've heard claims of HL2 using a similar fake radiosity approach before but that doesn't seem to be the case in the end. Either way, Battlefield 2 seems to do it.
      • What's that got to do with HDRI

        See that chrome ball in many of the images? It's photographed at several different exposures with the camera, then the samples of varying brightness are assembled (using a program like HDRShop [usc.edu]) into a panoramic "light probe" which interpolates between them. This light probe can be used in high end 3D rendering software for image-based lighting, or IBL, of the scene.

        The multiple photographs from the camera at different settings serve to capture the--wait for it--dynamic ra
        • I forgot to mention that, with regard to HL2's "fake radiosity"--it's not all that fake, although Valve did blow it way the hell out of proportion whenever they discussed their tech. It's simply static and misunderstood. Computed for the entirety of the map geometry offline at what's known as compile time for the level, and stored inside full color light maps for each surface.

          It doesn't, that I know of, impact the appearance of any dynamic entities in the level, with the exception of (indirectly) those th
  • ...but I still won't be buying a game that depends on being online 24/7 to reach these people's servers. Computer games should come in a box and work out of a box, and everything else (with the obvious exception of multi-user online role games) is marketing crap that destroys the long-term value of the product.

    Pity. The first episode of Half-Life rocked big time.

    • You need to go online once for a couple of minutes to activate the game. Once you've done that you can play in offline mode for as long as you like, no internet required. There are advantages and disadvantages to Steam, I'm not going to get into them all now, but at least know the facts before making a rash decision.
      • You need to go online once for a couple of minutes to activate the game.

        I stand corrected. The error had two sources: First, a friend of mine who told me so, and second, a misreading of the bold from the review at Ars Technica [arstechnica.com]:

        If Steam is having a bad day and you can't download a necessary update, you may not be able to play the game that's already installed in your computer.

        My bold, my bad. Thanks for the correction.

        • Offline mode is still problematic.

          A) If you have an internet connection running, it will not run in online mode. It may also not not let you do it if you have a LAN-only connection, or at least it takes awhile to check and see if it can connect to the Steam Servers. As well, should the Steam servers be overloaded and you try to log on, you have no ability to play offline as the key info is deleted. You have to log in successfully and quit Steam totally once, and not log in again until you intend to use it
          • I'm not buying this game until I can download patches and install them at my own discretion. In other words, I'm waiting for the non-steam version.

            Still waiting.

            No spoilers please!

    • You only need to be online once to authorize your game. You can run in 'offline mode' after that without any problems.

      Yes, it is annoying, but so too are most copy protection systems - and i'd certainly take cranky steam over horrendous starforce any day!

      • I'd actually prefer Starforce because you can at least get that to work when you don't have an unrestricted internet connection. I bought HL2 back when I had one, now I no longer do and can't play HL2.

  • HDR means floating point (Score:3, Informative)

    by spitzak ( 4019 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @09:50PM (#12829250) Homepage
    As the article states, the "blooming" effect is not HDR, it simply is blurring a white image and compositing it atop the original.

    HDR really means that floating point numbers are used instead of fixed-point integers. You can easily achieve human brightness resolution with a 16-bit number, appropriately used. The EXR standard mentioned in the article is the same as IEEE 32-bit floating point, except the exponent is reduced to 5 bits, plus 1 sign bit, and a 10 bit mantissa (plus hidden 1). This allows a range of .000035 to 32768 (ie a contrast ration of over 1 billion), plus a gradual underflow area, +/-zero, +/-infinity, a full range of negative numbers, and several NaN values, all in the same 16-bit area that many images use for fixed-point.

    The EXR 16-bit format is now a standard and Nvidia is putting it into hardware on their boards. It is likely that all texture maps will be in this form in the near future.

    Currently the final display buffer is 8 bits, and the floating point image is converted by multiplying by a constant and truncating. The first huge improvement will be to use a lookup texture to add the gamma curve of the 8-bit displays, so that the floating point data is really brightness information, this will hugely improve the realism of these exposure and lighting setups. Currently you must use a shader program for this, but I expect it will be put in hardware soon.

    More in the future are actual HDR displays. These have a contrast ratio of perhaps 80000:1, so the EXR data will still be truncated, but it well exceeds the human eye's contrast ratio (ignoring the ability of the pupil to dialate). The best technology appears to be to put a color LCD display atop a monochrome LED display.
    • No is doesn't you can perform HDR using standard 32bit textres. All that it means is that the textures aren't clamped at 100%.

      So, if in my normal 32bit texture 255,255,255,255 represents 100%, I can perform HDR by making 128,128,128,255 = 100%.
      by applying the same texture twice.

  • Whenever I see references to HDR, it always seems to be a DirectX thing.

    Now, since HDR is really just floating point chicanery ( I'm not criticizing it ) is there any intent for support in OpenGL? I do a fair bit of GL programming, and, sadly am on OS X where GL is, like, a whole *year* behind linux and windows... but it would be nice to know that the underlying mechanisms ( I suppose texture formats, pixel ops in shaders, etc ) could be exposed in GL. So that I could use them in 2031, when Apple exposes t

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