Half-Life 2 graphics... so far

Things look a lot shinier in the HalfLife2 - DirectX9 Lighting Effects Demo released last year than in the final version of the game.

 

Mmmm you can't see bump maps even if u try setting it all to high? For a while, before your PC melts down?

There's a lot of bump maps, makes the surfaces look very realistic sometimes, especially with the light thing on.

 

Which VGA?
However, for high detail textures you need 1 gb of ram...

 

You don't need 1 gig of RAM for high tex.

 

tiles, aliens, ant-lions, head-crabs, corpses, boat, buggy all have bump mapping, and done very well, especailly the aliens (vortigons?).

'Shiny' bump-mapping only seems to come into effect when the torch is on a surface.

Other than some bland, low rez textures on rocks and walls, I have to say the textures on the environment are much better than D3 IMO, noticeboards, signs etc are readable. computer displays are sharp, panels and switches stand out, so many of D3's panels etc were very low rez.

However, I was hoping for more detailed textures onfloors wall, when bumpmaps weren't being used.

 

The game sets high detail textures as "recommended" (for your system) only if detects 1 gb of ram or more. Sure, you can force high tex even with less ram -----> texture trashing and swapping...

 

I think even 1GB RAM is over the top, cause with that amount of RAM i have HL2 running at the same time as some bittorrent downloads, MSN messenger (which very irritatingly pops up with a message every once in a while, saying whoever has just logged on...) and other programs, and i run it just fine at high settings and 8AF 4AA... Stutters sometimes when entering new areas and such, but for a fraction of a second...

 

HAHA I forgot about that, and yes that showed that they too could have ridiculous shiny effects, such as a rusy metal roof that was spit shined. Too bad they did not include all those advertised effects as an option at least. Perhaps it was too difficult to fufill their promises...ATI levels? oh nevermind just PR crap...

 

They added all the HDR stuff to the source engine late in the game, and I seem to remember them saying they didn't want to go back and redo everything to make everything suitable for the HDR effects, so they left it out of the game. Could be in the ATI levels when they're out ... you never know.

 

I can't find it now, but somebody posted a picture that used a cosole setting to show the bump/normal mapped areas in color.... and you'd be surprised how much bumpmapping was in each scene. It is subtle in a lot of cases... which in a lot of cases makes it more realistic. It isn't clobbering you over the head with its 'bumpiness' on everything.

 

There is bump mapping on every wall, rock, floor and whatever piece of level geometry you can find in HL2. However, the lighting itself is completely static, so the effect looks like a pre-lit texture most of the time - and we've seen very good examples of that in many games so far. Valve is mainly using the diffuse bump mapping on level geo to hide texture tiling and repetition; but this also makes the level's lighting to react when you turn off flames in Ravenholm, for example.

The other part of bump mapping is the "specular" part, but I'd rather not use this term as there really is no specular in the game; they are using lots of small reflection maps (probably spherical), which are generated in the editor from the actual level. Tile floors, metal pipes and even headcrabs are good examples for normal mapped reflection (ok, so they also call it specularity in the ATI docs, but they're wrong to do so on shiny surfaces. I hope the other developers pay attention to this, as speculars in CG are just a cheap fake for true reflections... and it seems to be possible to get them working well in a game enviroment.

As far as I've seen most characters also have normal mapping but it's even more subtle due to the high amount of ambient lighting (using a low res cube map). Vortigaunts and ant lions are easy to spot, but even combine soldiers have normal mapping - too bad that the only place I've seen it was in the Citadel's dark corners. They also should have made the human skin a bit more shiny... But they'll probably need better lighting/shading models to make proper use of it.

All in all, HL2 had nice (but not brand spanking new) technology, and very good art direction.

 

The thing that I find most annoying in hl2 graphics, is that the light shine through geometry.

It's easily to tell which door opens and which are for decoration.

Not to mention makes the scene looks "odd".

 

[hint]it's meant to be that way[/hint]

 

Ok, you might have a point give that HL2 is for mostly part a linear game.
But it doesn't change the fact that it look some how wrong.

 

http://makeashorterlink.com/?I12121F0A

Does it really look that good against modern games? UT2004 has all the ut maps and still has detail textures. Timesplitters 2 also has some very nice detail textures, as does serious sam.

Use 2x with temporal AA instead, you'll get a faster framerate and basically equal image quality as long as the game stays over 60 fps.

Ut2004(probably ut2003 too) has some ice palace level that looks rather close to halo's snow level.(and also runs very crappy compared to most ut2004 levels)

Would it be better or worse to run halflife 2 on a geforce 4 mx instead? It would probably run better(I think 4 mx's fixed function t&l is faster than the t&l on geforce 3) but would look much worse.

BTW, does the patch to give geforce 4 ti and up cards better water also work on geforce 3?
I thought geforce 3 fully supported dx8...

 

Probably, but i have to force it through Ati control panel, not in game settings: is there any contraindication to do this? I remember something like this... :? However, i'll try it!

Have you got any screens? In my opinion, the way the ice is scratched by bullets is impossible to do without heavy usage of pixel shaders (that UT 2003/2004 doesnt'use in full potential, if not at all).

Me too: see this...

 

I didn't think that HL2 graphics were too hot, then I saw this and it was all over.

[/img]

 

Use radlinker for the AA.

UT2004 just has shiny, no breaking of the ice.

Maybe halflife 2 requires some things that weren't added until dx8.1?

 

Radlinker or not, i cannot leave AA to "Application preference" to get temporal AA: i don't know if this interferes with in game AA settings (i think i must disable AA in game, to not "double" the amount of AA... )...
Cay you link any shots af UT's shiny ice?
Half Life 2 has different rendering paths for DX 8 and DX 8.1 (GeForce 4 uses DX 8 path: DX 8.1 path is "reserved" for Radeon 8500 and GeForce FX -PS 1.4-): maybe GeForce 3 is not fully DX 8 compatable...

 

I'm not sure if it's the NVIDIA people that think it looks like crap (possibly justifiably), but to me it looks pretty damn good on my 9700 Pro:

full size image (1280x960)