Halflife 2 Movies

[dbeard]

Steam is providing movies of the upcoming HL2 game. The G-man video is pretty neat with the facial features being showcased. The facial animations were great but the bump mapping (I think it was supposed to be there on the chin at least) seemed less pronounced than some of Humus's demos. Can anyone tell if this is from the game or just some effect of post processing required to make the downloadable video?

Does anyone know which card was used to render the videos? I sure hope it was ATI because it would make that $225 purchase seem more worthwhile.

The dock movies did show the refraction/reflection action in water. With the water looking as good as it did, I was suprised that the splash of the crab entering the water seemed less convincing. Maybe it was just the angle since the viewpoint was almost directly overhead. The refraction effect is pretty neat. The surface of the water showed sky reflections until the crab started to return near the surface. As it got near the surface, it became more and more visible until the sky wasn't seen on surface. When it broke the surface, I think they even had refraction lines at the interface. Overall looked pretty good.

[BRiT]

IF the videos are the videos from a month or so ago (E3?), then it was indeed the ATI 9800 Pro video card being used.

[PaulS]

Didn't like the Docks one much, looked overly bright, washed out, and was in desparate need of AA. The rocks/mountains on the left loooked dodgy too.

Having said that, both the G-Man and Kleiners Lab videos more than made up for it. Alyx looks even better there than in the E3 stiff 8)

[Dave Baumann]

IF the videos are the videos from a month or so ago (E3?), then it was indeed the ATI 9800 Pro video card being used.

Seems that Valve are still favouring the 9800's as well:

http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=0de3d7ea91bdeae59376136c427d5f37&threadid=1298&perpage=15&pagenumber=9

Q: "I have the following: 1.7ghz Pentium 4, 1GB of PC2700 DDR Ram, plenty of hard drive space, and plan on getting one of the higher-end Geforce FX 5200's or 5600's, and I have the SB Audigy 2. Will this run ok?"

A (From Gabe): "1. I'd suggest an ATI 9800 for your setup, not NVIDIA.".

Trying to get through to them to see if he'd flesh out that responce a little - I'd asume is because of PS2 performance.

[PaulS]

He'd have been better off recommending a 9700 (or at worst a 9600 - 9500P not being available, particularly) given the fact that the guy is obviously looking at slightly cheaper options than the high-end.

[Forbidden Donut]

Yeah, the high res releases are really quite nice! Have you seen the 600 meg e3 presentation video? Basically, in case you didn't know, these high res releases are all segments of this 25 minute e3 presentation. I'm 99% sure the G-man video was using the in game graphics engine. The facial expressions and mouth synching seemed really well done, IMO.

As far as the docks video is concerned, the splash was a bit unconvincing. However, I know for a fact that the green sploches when he hits the zombie with the crowbard are simply placeholder art...so it's possible that the splash is the same.


Like has been said already, the e3 presentation was done on a high end dell running a 9800 pro 128 meg card. At halflife2.net, there is a thread in their forums dedicated to emails/replies from the valve development team, and on there gabe has been reported as recommending ATI cards over NVidia. Someone wrote an email asking if the 9700 pro would be more than sufficient, and I think he commented something along the lines of it being "actually a very strong dx9 part."

For those of you interested, the people at halflife2.net have discovered that steam seems to be caching the bink movies in advance. So, while only the docks movie has technically been released, the next movie, which is the lab scene, is already on your computer in a cache file. Using a hex editor, they've been able to extract the information for the next movie and watch it. (for more info, I would check out their forums, there are numerous threads on them) The lab video looks really really nice.

[Forbidden Donut]

Here's a little snippet of an interesting email exchange i had with Gary McTaggart who I beleieve is one of the guys involved with the source engine. It starts with some rather dissapointing news, and ends with a bit of hopeful news.

Hi Gabe,
I noticed that you and your team had been (amazingly) good about
responding to fan's emails, so I thought I would try sending you one of my
own. My question regards anti-aliasing both in the e3 demo, and as a
performance issue in general. I've read that an extra 128 megs (256
total) of video memory would be most useful in terms of extra released
content that will have large textures and whatnot. Will the extra 128
megs help at all with anti-aliasing at high(er) resolutions?

Also, it's quite obvious there was no anti-aliasing in the e3 demo,
especially with the recent steam releases of the high res bink videos.
What was the reason for this? Was it a performance issue? Was it a
hardware or driver issue?

Thanks a bunch, and keep up the great work.
Peter LaRossa
Reply:
There are problems with the way that current hardware implements FSAA. If
you enable it, you will see a lot of artifacts on polygon boundaries due to
the way that they sample texture subrects with FSAA enabled.

We are working with the hardware companies and the DirectX team to make sure
that future hardware doesn't have this problem.

(As a side note: ATI hardware actually has what we need to do FSAA, but it
isn't exposed in DirectX 9.)

Gary
My Response:
Thanks for the quick reply gary! So, as I'm reading this, this means that
no current hardware will be able to do FSAA on Half Life 2. Is this
correct? Furthermore, if ATI hardware has what you need, but it isn't
exposed in DX9, does this mean that it may be patchable in ATI drivers?
Lastly (and this may not be your place to answer) where does it become
exposed in the ATI hardware? OpenGL perhaps?

Thanks again for the quick reply!
Peter LaRossa
His Reply:
That's right. . no current hardware will be able to do FSAA with HL2 as it
is now. We may be able to get FSAA working on ATI 9500-9800 somehow.

Centroid sampling (which is the missing feature that makes FSAA work
properly) is probably exposed in OpenGL. . I'm not sure. It *is* exposed in
DirectX for hardware with pixel shader version 3.0. (All DirectX 9 hardware
so far is at most pixel shader version 2.0.) We are sticking with DirectX
for the foreseeable future.

Gary

[Dave H]

Seems that Valve are still favouring the 9800's as well:

http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=0de3d7ea91bdeae59376136c427d5f37&threadid=1298&perpage=15&pagenumber=9

Q: "I have the following: 1.7ghz Pentium 4, 1GB of PC2700 DDR Ram, plenty of hard drive space, and plan on getting one of the higher-end Geforce FX 5200's or 5600's, and I have the SB Audigy 2. Will this run ok?"

A (From Gabe): "1. I'd suggest an ATI 9800 for your setup, not NVIDIA.".

Trying to get through to them to see if he'd flesh out that responce a little - I'd asume is because of PS2 performance.

More along those lines:

I think that Valve tries very hard to support as far back with system as we humanly can, and in this case we're going back to a Pentium II 800 with 128 of RAM, but as get up to a Pentium 4 class you'll see better water and better effects. For folks who want the ultimate experience, they'll want the latest ATI card, and the fastest processor available from AMD or Intel.

A lot of gamers are paying a lot of attention to Valve now. Their publicly discussing NV3x's pixel shader performance issues (even if only by failing to recommend Nvidia's DX9 cards) could bring those problems into the gaming public's eye more effectively than just about anything short of a Carmack .plan.

This could be interesting...

[Johnny Rotten]

Whoa. The 'No FSAA' issue is really really disconcerting.The aliasing is even more noticeable when the overall visual fidelity and immersion is so very high. I hope they get this resolved for the 9700/9800's. :(

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Whoa. The 'No FSAA' issue is really really disconcerting.The aliasing is even more noticeable when the overall visual fidelity and immersion is so very high. I hope they get this resolved for the 9700/9800's. :(

Would be nice if they could make it work on the R300/350. "AA only available on ATI cards". :shock:

Wouldn't that cause some chaos in the current battle between Nvidia and ATI? :lol:

[Forbidden Donut]

Found this on the halflife2.net forums as well. Someone elses correspsondence with gary mctaggart. Is anyone else impressed with their correspondence with end users? I wrote my email and literally had a response in under 5 minutes.

1) Is this a problem that can be fixed with new drivers, or would we have to buy a whole new card to recitify it? If so, are there any cards on the horizon that would offer it?

Drivers aren't likely to fix the problem, with the exception of the ATI 9500-9800. There's hope there for being able to use FSAA properly. You are out of luck on NVidia unless either NVidia or us come up with some clever way of solving this problem.

2) Is this a problem unique to hardware + Source?

It's a problem for any app that packs small textures into larger textures. The small textures will bleed into each other if you have multisample FSAA enabled. The best thing to do right now is either buy an ATI card in the hopes that it will be solved there, or wait until the next generation of cards come out.

So this is why Valve keeps pushing ATI.


I know their are some ATI people that frequent these boards...would it be worth asking them what their take on the situation is?

[Myrmecophagavir]

Found this on the halflife2.net forums as well. Someone elses correspsondence with gary mctaggart. Is anyone else impressed with their correspondence with end users? I wrote my email and literally had a response in under 5 minutes.
What address did you use? I sent a message to contact@valvesoftware.com, which is the address on their home page, the other day but didn't get a reply. We don't want them bogged down with emails when they should be finishing up their game :)

[Forbidden Donut]

Found this on the halflife2.net forums as well. Someone elses correspsondence with gary mctaggart. Is anyone else impressed with their correspondence with end users? I wrote my email and literally had a response in under 5 minutes.
What address did you use? I sent a message to contact@valvesoftware.com, which is the address on their home page, the other day but didn't get a reply. We don't want them bogged down with emails when they should be finishing up their game :)


I used the actual employees' email addresses. They're really good and REALLY fast at responding. I'm impressed.

[dbeard]

If the interaction in this level is close to what is available in the game, I'm in. The AI seemed inspired when the "bad guy" thought to look through the window so that he could continue to shoot at you. The point of the movie was to show off the physics engine (which is havok, I think).

If the story doesn't suck, this seems to have enough new items in one package to make it revolutionary like HL1.

[Pete]

Wavey, any clarification on Gabe's recomendation of ATi over nVidia?

[Forbidden Donut]

Wavey, any clarification on Gabe's recomendation of ATi over nVidia?

While I'm not wavey, I think I can give a reasonably well educated response here. From what I've gathered from the emails posted on forums from gabe, and my own correspondence with Gary McTaggart, Valve has been working very closely with both ATI and NVidia. They chose to demo the game on a 9800 pro, and are continuing to recommend ATI hardware for the simple reason that the game runs better on the ATI card. I'm pretty sure there's not much more to it than that.

[Pete]

Thanks, that helps a l...WAIT A MINUTE, YOU'RE NOT WAVEY!

:D

I thought so, but I just wanted to be sure. I could always be patient and wait for benchmark results, but patience isn't a common virtue on web forums. ;)