Lost Coast - come to daddy :)

Anyone know if Valve plans to implement HDR in the HL2: Aftermath expansion (whenever the hell that comes out) as well?

 

Perhaps? It'd be a bit silly for them to showcase their latest implementation and then not utilize it...

 

I dont know, they have said there's area's of HL2 where they simply wouldnt want to use HDR lighting, this may also be the case for Aftermath, I think I read that HDR wouldnt be being used in Aftermath.

 

Anyone besides me encounters crashes playing Lost Coast ? I never had any problem with HL2, but Lost Coast often results in my PC locking up... Playing with Full HDR and 4xFSAA, on a P4 3.2GHz, with an X800XL...

 

Yup, I've only played it twice and it's crashed twice.

First time was a few seconds after I had quite it and steam. Second time was in the midst of playing. BSOD both times.

 

do you have to have hl2 installed to play this? or just steam?

 

Plays well on my rig at 1280x720 2xAA / 8xAF with everything else at full tilt. I did notice a bit of "lag" on the first time the game plays any previously un-played sound effects. I'm guessing a bit of extra ram might help.

P4 3.0C at 3.7ghz
1GB DDR at 494mhz (247FSB 1:1)
x800Vivo AGP unlocked and overclocked to 540/560

 

I had it running for about a minute at 1024x768xMax/16XAF/8xS-FSAA on my 6800GT and it looked absolutely fantastic. Really good.

It also ran at no higher than 15fps. So much for that!

 

I feel real stupid asking this but we can have HDR + AA in Lost Coast on *all* SM3 boards?

 

yes, it doesn't use FP blending

 

I believe you can have it on all SM2.0 boards, too.

 

Yes, you can.

 

So there's no separate path for FP blending on SM3 boards that support it, just the one path that avoids FP blending?

 

Give CrySoft a year and they come out with a free expansion that contains a whole LEVEL...

Give Valve a year and they come out with... a church?

Pretty, but not that pretty. I think it took more effort to write those marketing blurbs about Lost Coast in all the Steam "Update News" things we've had to read for the past year or so...

 

... wasn't the r520 release delay to blame for the Lost Coast waiting period?

 

Does that really make any sense (R520 delay) seeing as how I can enable all HDR features on my X800 Pro and everything appears to look "fine"?

Or am I missing something, despite the Video Options menu telling me that my HDR is set to "Full"?

 

I'm not sure it was valve that decided waiting for the r520 was a must; the decision to postpone seems to be more ati influenced.

 

i find that believable from a purely political standpoint, but given valves history of delays and some pretty glaring bugs in lost coast... i'm not sure if i believe it.

after reading your post i thought "wow, i get better than that at similar settings*". i've got an x700pro, so i was pretty surprised. so i fired up fraps and then lost coast. i played it on release day and thought it was pretty smooth at 1024*768 all settings max 6xfsaa 8xaf. and i thought it was smoother than 15fps, but alas 15fps was what i got near the water. when i started climbing the hillside it was 25-30, then the game crashed on me with a repeating sound. i thought my machine went down, wich wouldn't surprise me siince i haven't rebooted or shut down in 2 or three weeks and i've been doing some pretty stupid stuff (i updated driver for my sata controller and ide controllers, plus a few windows updates. windows asked for i reboot and i said "later". that was well over a week ago. plus i've been installing and uninstalling game demos trying to keep with whats new) but nope, a quick visit to task managed and i'm back to the deaktop.

i'm not sure what the moral of this story is, other than i should realy restart my computer.

*didn't notice at the time that you were running the game at 8xS, which explains alot

 

Well, a few things..

I eyeballed the 15fps, it was 8xFSAA, and I didn't even reach the old man. I just happened to have a profile difficulty, where it was seeing my Quake 2 settings as my Half-Life 2 settings. I quickly fixed it before I proceeded to beat Lost Coast in almost no time at all. I seriously just stayed on the "beach" level.. look at some of the debris..

I wish it was just a little longer. As it stands, it's not even as long.. or barely.. as a normal HL2 segment. (between auto-saves)

 

How much more storage do the textures in Lost Coast take up? Is it realistic to offer a complete game the size of HL2 using their HD texture format over Steam? It annoys me how long it takes to download Steam content and updates as it is...