Valve offers Source360 to developers
- Thread starter MasterDisaster
- Start date
Interesting!
I wonder if they're gonna do Episodes 1-n downloadable over XBL...
I dunno what other people think, but the episodes are somewhat small to buy in a boxed form factor. Suppose you want to play them all, you'll be swapping discs at a fairly rapid pace!
Maybe Valve will include previous episodes on the same disc when they release a new one, and only unlock them if you actually have bought them... You'd need some form of CD-key system then printed on the inside of the disc case somewhere that will be saved to the HDD, so the game can keep track of which episodes you own...
I wonder if they're gonna do Episodes 1-n downloadable over XBL...
I dunno what other people think, but the episodes are somewhat small to buy in a boxed form factor. Suppose you want to play them all, you'll be swapping discs at a fairly rapid pace!Maybe Valve will include previous episodes on the same disc when they release a new one, and only unlock them if you actually have bought them... You'd need some form of CD-key system then printed on the inside of the disc case somewhere that will be saved to the HDD, so the game can keep track of which episodes you own...
Excuse my unprofessional poo-pooing, but isn't Source basically an unsalvagably inefficient POS with a single redeeming quality: character animation?
I'm not sure if this announcements really warrants any cheering. I'd prefer developers making their own engines.
I'm not sure if this announcements really warrants any cheering. I'd prefer developers making their own engines.
Dunno 'unsalvagly inefficient', it runs (much) faster than doom3-type engines on my PC... That may be due to the lack of realtime stencil shadows tho, but it sure can produce some very nice graphics regardless.
If you believe source to be unsalvagly inefficient, mind telling me/us why that would be the case?
If you believe source to be unsalvagly inefficient, mind telling me/us why that would be the case?
I don't know anyone who has touched the engine and said anything other than "it's kludgy."
From the little I've seen of it, it is a complete mess.
The only reason I can think of that HL2 even looks good is because of the texture work. Source isn't where I'd go if I wanted to make a game and license an engine, that's for sure!
Other people may have had a different experience/view... and mine isn't exactly first hand (I've not worked with it, but know a few people who have).
I'm playing Vampire: Bloodlines and have also played the Dark Messiah of Might&Magic demo. I'm just not convinced that this is an engine anyone should be inclined to license. For what these games do in terms of graphics (which isn't much), they perform very very badly. Surfaces are just all very bland and flat. If it weren't for the stereotypically tacked-on water shader, there's nothing in Bloodlines enivronment rendering that Quake 3 can't do the same but much faster.
DMoMM additionally has the ultimate POS version of HDR.
Those may be problems with the content in these games of course.
Loading times are outright terrible, and yeah, I do have 2GB RAM in my rig. The system default mouse cursor in the menus makes me shake my head in disbelief that anyone would be so cheap. Graphics configuration options are rudimentary and why tf do I need to exit and restart a game for a resolution change? On the topic of which, why tf doesn't the engine enumerate my desktop resolutions (including "exotic" stuff such as 1280x960 ...) and instead offers me only "standard" resolutions?
Character lighting, while character animation is very impressive of course, must be a joke. There's basically one light intensity value that's used for the entire character mesh. That's totally not awesome. Shadows are funny, too.
Sound OTOH is just totally fucked up. The engine just can't keep sounds synched between stereo channels.
Some of that may or may not be improved by either Valve or by licensors. But. What I've seen so far in games based on the engine doesn't inspire much confidence in Valve's leetness, at least to me.
DMoMM additionally has the ultimate POS version of HDR.
Those may be problems with the content in these games of course.
Loading times are outright terrible, and yeah, I do have 2GB RAM in my rig. The system default mouse cursor in the menus makes me shake my head in disbelief that anyone would be so cheap. Graphics configuration options are rudimentary and why tf do I need to exit and restart a game for a resolution change? On the topic of which, why tf doesn't the engine enumerate my desktop resolutions (including "exotic" stuff such as 1280x960 ...) and instead offers me only "standard" resolutions?
Character lighting, while character animation is very impressive of course, must be a joke. There's basically one light intensity value that's used for the entire character mesh. That's totally not awesome. Shadows are funny, too.
Sound OTOH is just totally fucked up. The engine just can't keep sounds synched between stereo channels.
Some of that may or may not be improved by either Valve or by licensors. But. What I've seen so far in games based on the engine doesn't inspire much confidence in Valve's leetness, at least to me.
What's the state of the cooperation between XBLive and Steam? Are they allowed to do their own thing or do they have to put everything in the XBLive scheme?I wonder if they're gonna do Episodes 1-n downloadable over XBL...
Yeah HL2:EP02 avoided tiling IIRC. But I don't know if other engines including UE3 are optimized or not either.I wonder if they have optimized their engine to use tiling
HL2 was one of the best looking games in 2004 and Valve made the right "bet" in regards to the balance of features and technology for the PCs out there to get great graphics and good performance. They have also put a lot of work into it if you haven't been following. Besides HDR they have redone their lighting/shadowing system (seems they have added fully dynamic shadows).
But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and Team Fortress 2 and Portal both look very good. As much as B3D forums focus on technology, at the end of the day it is about picking technologies that work well with your design, tools, talents and goals and producing the best image on screen -- not cramming as many whizbang buzzword technologies on screen regardless of whether they belong or aid the final IQ (or more importantly, the compromises you make in incorperating them).
Based on some of the stuff we are seeing, I disagree in some cases. Some developers just don't seem to have the time, money, skill, or general resources (like experience and R&D) to churn out game engines with great graphics, audio, physics, animation, etc. For some of these studios who want to spend 24 months working on game content and gameplay instead of half on engine development it could be a good solution.
And I'd prefer it if end-users would come and make me cups of tea. Oh, and if the attrative female ones could give me a back rub now and again too, that would be nice.
Seriously, while I've never actually looked at the internals of the source engine, I've played HL2, and I've seen several presentations by the team that made it. I'm impressed by both - I actually like the fact that they openly hack the living crap out of the lighting model just to make it look interesting rather than "accurate", and I think their approach of being a lot more subtle is easily better than the Doom3 approach - which while it may be a technical marvel, I thought looked awful aesthetically.
I haven't seen HL2 yet, because when I said I didn't want Steam in my house, I was actually serious
I know the difference between engine and content though. I'm not even trying to say that HL2 looks fugly (or Vampire or DMoMM look fugly), just that I'm seeing relatively low-fi "level" graphics, and something like that should IMO perform much better. That doesn't mean I hate the aesthetics of these games. I don't. They're nice.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
Half-Life 2 runs much better than Vampire, I haven't tried that DMoMM, so I don't know about that. HL 2 has atrocious loading times though, not only long but they occur often.
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Subtlesnake
Regular
Half-Life 2 runs extremely well - you can play it at 1024x768 with everything maxed on a 9600 pro. Episode 1 looks to be about 30% more demanding, so there's a hell of a lot of performance room left for Valve to exploit.
We know Valve are replacing their existing dynamic shadowing system with full shadow mapping in Episode 2. Also, Episode 1 does improve load times noticeably (for me, anyway).
We know Valve are replacing their existing dynamic shadowing system with full shadow mapping in Episode 2. Also, Episode 1 does improve load times noticeably (for me, anyway).
Maybe you should play the game to see what their rendering engine can do before you "unprofessionally poo-poo" it? e.g.
Matter of fact, HL2 runs comparatively great compared to D3 and FC on PCs with most features available to 9600 class GPUs in DX9. Comparing Source performance on Vampires (which was not made by Valve and was rushed out the door and then had their doors closed) is like summing up UE3 by comparing Gears of War to Frame City Killers.
Again, take a look at Portal and specifically TF2. Source has evolved and continues to do so. TF2 is one of the best looking games shown so far and HL2 and CS:S were some of the best looking games of 2004 and 2005.
There's something I'd like to point out to whoever the wonderful person is that decided to neg-rep me
Your rep comment starts with "If you have not even played the game and seen the render portion of the engine in motion". This condition is false. I have seen the engine's renderer in motion, in fact two different versions with a significant amount of development time between them, and I even mentioned both games! Way to go!
Thanks to Dr Evil and Subtlesnake for a willingness to discuss things.
Your rep comment starts with "If you have not even played the game and seen the render portion of the engine in motion". This condition is false. I have seen the engine's renderer in motion, in fact two different versions with a significant amount of development time between them, and I even mentioned both games! Way to go!
Thanks to Dr Evil and Subtlesnake for a willingness to discuss things.
Maybe. And maybe I can notice technical similarities between games that use the same engine. At least one of the similarities is shared by HL2 itself, as confirmed by Subtlesnake, so the method can't be totally wrong.
Now come on, it is no secret that Doom 3 does the stencil shadowing, and the per-pixel lighting with normal mapping, and those are significant performance costs. Far Cry outdoors is in a whole different league than HL2. HL2 uses billboards for all of its tufts of grass, for crying out loud!Acert93 said:
How can a rushed Vampire level kill performance? Vampire level geometry is BSP/PVS-friendly corridor style. Even the "outdoor" in-town settings are corridors. Sky scrapers line the one street you can walk on.Acert93 said:
You're not going to convince me that you can rush a map compile in a way that would make such maps perform badly unless the map compile tool itself is a sloppy "just make it work somehow" kind of job, which would have been my point anyway.
And DMoMM exists, too, and doesn't particularly disagree with me.
I won't argue your tastes.Acert93 said:
I'd say the unreal 2.0 engine offers better performance for similar graphical levels, and that to get halflfie 2 to look like doom 3 you'd kill its performance. I still think Halflife 2 is nice though, and its content delivery system is an awesome concept.