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Graphics Software Entertainment Games

HL2 - Lost Coast Playtest and Tech Details 46

Posted by Zonk from the shiiiiny dept.
Wil Harris writes "Bit-tech has been up to Valve's offices in Seattle to play through The Lost Coast, the super-duper add-on level for Half-Life 2. There is an article up talking about the technology behind the level (it's not just HDR!) as well as screenshots from throughout the level, a brief summary of the narrative, and thoughts on Valve's work. There's also a couple of cool photos of the Valve office, including a golden crowbar and Counter-Strike Barbie and Ken dolls."
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HL2 - Lost Coast Playtest and Tech Details More

HL2 - Lost Coast Playtest and Tech Details

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  • Is anyone else tired of articles on the lighting of this expansion that Valve has been taunting us with for almost a year now?

    In the wise words of Jerry: "SHOOOWWW USSSS THE GAAAMMME!!! SHOOWWWW USSS THE GAMMMMEEE!"

    • True, eye candy looks great, but that isn't all that Valve is trying to do. They are trying to build a game (expansion) that will bring even the best hardware to its knees. I quote:

      Half-Life 2: Lost Coast is Valve's reply to a series of What If questions: what if there were no limits? What if we didn't have to make sure people with mid-range systems could enjoy our games? What if the system requirements knew no bounds? Following the release of Half-Life 2 worldwide on 16th November 2004, a group of p

  • Seriously, theyve been talking about this SINGLE LEVEL for quite long enough. Once again I saw 'Lost Coast' in a /. headline and stupidly thought "Kickass, its finally coming out.. months and months behind but I can finally see what theyre talking about." At this point I just hope that I'm not seeing the level for the first time in Halflife 3.
    • Seriously, theyve been talking about this SINGLE LEVEL for quite long enough.

      I think the current conspiracy theory is that they're having to wait until ATI releases graphics cards capable of running it in all its Pixel Shader 3.0 glory. It was originally called the 'ATI level' or something like that - I've no idea if there was some financial deal behind the scenes, but ATI had better bleddy hurry up...

      Sincerely, an Nvidia user. ;-)

  • Aren't they overdoing it a bit? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Thursday September 15, 2005 @02:14PM (#13569235)
    I mean, isn't the point of HDR to make lightning more realistic? Check this out [bit-tech.net]... seems like they make granite walls out of polished chrome in the HL2 world.
    • Go outside on a bright day and cover your eyes for a minute or two. Then uncover them and stare at a white object. It will seem much brighter than it should.

      One of the big parts of HDR is representing the transition from dark areas to light areas and vice versa. The screenshots of the cathedral are commented as having been made just after leaving a dark hallway. After being in a bright area for awhile the cathedral would probably not look nearly as reflective.
  • I wonder how they managed to combine HDR and Anti-Aliasing. I remember reading an interview with some engine programmer, either someone from Epic or CryTek who stated that HDR and AA would be incompatible on current graphics cards due to lacking memory bandwidth and size. He said it would need at least about 2 GByte graphics RAM to be possible by estimation or AA being restricted to a software in-engine solution. Can somebody shed some light on that?
    • I can't really give any indication of an answer, but the article mentions that they tried four different ways of doing HDR before they found one that didn't have to exclude other graphic novelties. I'm really glad to see Valve's development method is paying off in terms of quality of their product.
    • I can't see y AA and HDR would be mutually exclusive. all AA is is rendering to a higher resoultion (on a multiplier scale, 2x res, 4x res etc) and taking the average of the pixels, and scaling it down.

  • HDR demo (Score:4, Informative)

    by PIPBoy3000 ( 619296 ) on Thursday September 15, 2005 @02:18PM (#13569273)
    If you're impatient and want to know what the fuss about high dynamic range is all about, try this demo [daionet.gr.jp]. It's quite pretty looking, far superior to the overused bloom effect in my opinion.
  • Well on an attempt to actually sound positive, this level looks amazing. HL2 was such an awesome game and looked absolutely beautiful, and this really shows the future of games. This is the next generation and this single level will really show off this new HDR Valve has put together for us.

    Now if I only had a better PC to really play this thing. Well I'll just have to wait until I get some cash.

  • HDR images (Score:2, Informative)

    by maino82 ( 851720 )
    for anyone out there interested in what this HDR business is all about, there's an HDR image builder ( http://www.anyhere.com/ [anyhere.com]) out there for mac and linux. the basic concept is that you take a series of photographs at different exposures ranging from extremely underexposed to extremely overexposed (which means this only works really well for still-life shots unfortunately) and the program can compile them into an image that would mimick fairly well what the human eye would see. this is also a good tool for
  • HL2 was a beautiful game. The action and pacing were also very well done. I enjoyed the mix of shooting and psuedo puzzles.

    But I never finished the game. Why? Because all the eye candy in the world couldn't make me put up with the frequent yet lengthy loading delays.

    Personally, I would be more impressed if they worked instead on ways to stream content on the fly so there wasn't delays for loading screens. Despite pulling you out of the immersion, it's frusterating. A necessary evil in the past, it

    • I think there was a hack to load the entire level at the beginning to eliminate load times during the middle of the stage. I stopped playing cause I couldn't stand looking at large insects for hours, ant-lion whatever.

    • But I never finished the game. Why? Because all the eye candy in the world couldn't make me put up with the frequent yet lengthy loading delays.

      ... Buy a marginally less crap PC? ;-)

      I've seen people complaining that the first of my own MINERVA [hylobatidae.org] maps takes a couple of minutes to load on less modern PCs (for 30-45 minutes of gameplay - it's a big map) while on my not-cutting-edge-PC it doesn't take long at all.

      It does take around four hours to do a full compile of metastasis_1 and a couple of minutes to build
    • Supposedly, the earlier versions of HL2 did exactly this, but unfortunately the process was an either-or situation (as it frequently is). Either you have your entire processor generating great visuals or you have the processor / etc spending half of it's time doing something else, and the inevitable glitching this may cause.

      They gave up on the glitching.

      Remember, though, that HDR is not for people who have bought HL2, or who may be about to buy HL2. This lighting and other techniques, and in fact the enti
    • The _very first_ time you load a new map, "cache" files need to be extracted/created, for sound objects, textures, 3d objects, etc.-- you can find these in your profile's folder under the Steam directory. Subsequent loads of that level will be much faster, because they are already created/extracted.

      A lot of people complained about this when HL2 came out, but I found myself waiting only about 25 seconds on average between levels. Now it's about 10 or so (with the files extracted.) Big whoop.

  • Fresh Paint (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kenp2002 ( 545495 ) on Thursday September 15, 2005 @03:26PM (#13569904) Homepage Journal
    I paint my chair red and it looks brand new

    But the years roll on and it's not so new
    So I get a new chair and it feels so sweet.
    But my chair grown old so I decide to paint it one day.

    I paint my chair red and it looks brand new

    But the years roll on and it's not so new
    So I get a new chair and it feels so sweet.
    But my chair grown old so I decide to paint it one day.

    I paint my chair red and it looks brand new

    But no matter how many chairs I get, and how many times I paint them, be it red, or black, or blue, it's still is a chair and I have grown old

    Prehaps bed is what I think I need. I've tried of chairs and want some sleep. But Perhaps I 'll get red sheets
  • "Half-Life 2: Lost Coast is Valve's reply to a series of What If questions: ...What if the system requirements knew no bounds? "

    Because having infinity as the minimum processor speed will really help.
  • TFA:
    You head up around the coast, travel through some exotic locations, kill the Combine then come back down again. All in all, you're looking at about a 15-minute experience.
    From all the press about Lost Coast, I assumed it was a mission pack / sequel. Talk about 15 minutes of fame.
    • There seem to be a lot of people confused by the fact that Valve is releasing two seperate things for HL2 this fall.

      The first is Lost Coast - a 15 minute playable tech demo that includes some side story for the HL universe based in the HL2 timeframe. It is free and targeted for high-end systems. If you don't ever play it you won't miss much as it's not insanely important to the overall story - HL3 will still make sense.

      The second is Aftermath - a full expansion. My guess is that this will take about

  • From the article, it makes it sound as though the brightness is going to adjust automatically, e.g. as you move from a light area to a dark one it will look dark for a moment until your virtual "eyes" adjust. Couldn't this cause pretty serious gameplay issues, especially if it's used in multiplayer in the future? It wouldn't be much fun to be shot at by an enemy you can't see while waiting for the brightness adjustment to catch up, or by one outside a window who's obscured by the glare of sunlight...

    • Couldn't this cause pretty serious gameplay issues, especially if it's used in multiplayer in the future? It wouldn't be much fun to be shot at by an enemy you can't see while waiting for the brightness adjustment to catch up, or by one outside a window who's obscured by the glare of sunlight...

      No, it would be awesome. It would add more depth and tactics to the game. It would make it difficult to watch bright doorways from a dark room, but also make it difficult for people on the outside to look in and see

  • I gave HL2 a miss because I was running GNU/Linux at the time and Valve made it pretty clear that they had no interest in alternative platforms.
    Well, I finally got a copy of WinXP from my school, so I borrowed HL2 from a buddy of mine.
    First of all, the thing wouldn't install because I didn't want Counter Strike. However, instead of forcing you to install it, it just blows up the installer on disc 4 of 5. Great job, Valve. I guess nobody in QA thought that there are people out there that don't play CS.
    Then I

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