G4TV To Preview Half-Life 2 Expansion

Voodoo Extreme has word that new technology for the Steam engine, as well as a HL2 expansion entitled 'The Lost Coast', will be shown off on G4TV's Attack of the Show (formerly The ScreenSavers). From the article: "On Wednesday's show, Valve's Doug Lombardi will give an exclusive demonstration of the previously unseen 'The Lost Coast,' an upcoming expansion that utilizes a brand-new technology that Valve is implementing into the Source engine. Called 'high-dynamic range lighting,' this new technology enables a leap in lighting realism from even the current high benchmark set by Half-Life 2 and the existing Source engine."

Comments

Re:Old News

[Ford Prefect]

First announced in early February, yes, but I think this'll be the first we see of it beyond some rough concept sketches.

I'm intrigued as to what the Source engine will be able to do when given room to breathe - Half-Life 2's maps were highly optimised, with just about every unnecessary surface made invisible or clipped-off to make the physics simpler. The seemingly huge, far-reaching environments usually weren't, but instead were clever simulations thereof. Okay, so it did mean it could run pretty well on my old PC, but I've got a new one now... ;-)

High dy-whaty?

[The-Bus]

nVidia Guru David Kirk Answers Your Questions

Paul Debevec Executive Producer, Graphics Research Research Assistant Professor, USC, who has a LOT of information on the subject.

And the intro to the presentation for SIGGRAPH2004:

Current display devices can display a limited range of contrast and colors, which is one of the main reasons that most image acquisition, processing, and display techniques use no more than eight bits per color channel. This course outlines recent advances in high-dynamic-range imaging, from capture to display, that remove this restriction, thereby enabling images to represent the color gamut and dynamic range of the original scene rather than the limited subspace imposed by current monitor technology. This hands-on course teaches how high-dynamic-range images can be captured, the file formats available to store them, and the algorithms required to prepare them for display on low-dynamic-range display devices. The trade-offs at each stage, from capture to display, are assessed, allowing attendees to make informed choices about data-capture techniques, file formats, and tone-reproduction operators. The course also covers recent advances in image-based lighting, in which HDR images can be used to illuminate CG objects and realistically integrate them into real-world scenes. Through practical examples taken from photography and the film industry, it shows the vast improvements in image fidelity afforded by high-dynamic-range imaging. [more]

Re:... this will be great!

[Ford Prefect]

With that said, HL2 was awesome and almost worth the wait, and i'll end up buying the expansion. *sigh*

Well, I'm definitely not going to buy this particular expansion...

'Cause it'll be a free download!

High Benchmark

[fozzmeister]

Yeh HL2 is superb, but there is nothing new about it really, the Lighting is not even dynamic except shadows of objects. All the standard lighting is there because it uses the same sortof radiant technology that was in Quake1-Q3 (although at higher detail levels). Yeh sure it looks great, probably mostly because of High Polygon count and High Res textures, and some nifty effects (reflection et al).

If you want to see the "Benchmark" Technology, look at Doom3, Sure its got low polygon count, and low (in comparison) texture quality, But the whole world is lighted at run-time.

In summary, HL2 looks great, and probably as good as Doom3, but its doing nothing new or revolutionary. The future has to be engines like Doom3 even though the computers of today are maybe not quite upto the point of realising that potential.

Re:High Benchmark

[chris_oat]

I have to disagree. The lighting is by no means standard and is far more advanced than Quake1-Q3 lighting. Valve uses a directional radiosity basis for storing light on static scene surfaceses which makes it work very nicely with normal maps (standard light maps don't have this property). Valve also stores volumetric lighting using what they call an "ambient cube" basis, this is a lot like the irradiance volume which is used for accelerating offline rendering and has no equivalent in any Quake or Doom. You can read all about the interesting lighting techniques they're using in Gary McTaggart's 2004 GDC presentation. This volume is static in the sense that it's precomputed but it's used for dynamic lighting in the sense that characters/objects can move through the volume and are lit dynamically. Doom3 on the other hand is using fairly vanilla real-time lighting techniques... per-pixel Phong lighting, while it works and looks just fine, has been used for interactive graphics for a few years now. Doom3's stencil shadow volumes were all the rage for a while but aren't so popular these days because they tend to have fairly nasty performance characteristics (and there really is no such thing as a hard shadow in the real world... light sources aren't infinitely small). Anyway, both games look great, I'm certainly not trying to slam anyone here... I just wanted to point out that your statement:

...but its doing nothing new or revolutionary. The future has to be engines like Doom3 even though the computers of today are maybe not quite upto the point of realising that potential.

isn't true at all. HL2 *is* doing stuff that's new and revolutionary and in my opinion this is the direction many game developers will be going.

Re:High Benchmark

[Ford Prefect]

Yup. Half-Life 2's lighting system is startlingly advanced in places, but a lot of its more interesting effects are a bit ... Subtle.

I'm admittedly not too keen on the (rather crude) dynamic shadows from model entities - if the shadows took account of nearby bright lights then things wouldn't be so bad - but I really like a lot of the other aspects, such as those directional lightmaps and lighting on models which is gloriously subtle and realistic.

I'm intrigued as to what Valve will do with HDR. I got Far Cry running with HDR the other day, and it looked genuinely horrible. Over-saturated colours, too much bloom in the wrong places and none of the right ones, and everything looking terribly unrealistic. With a bit of luck, Valve might do something a bit more understated and photographically realistic - they've managed it with shaders and normal-mapping, which people seem to assume aren't in Half-Life 2 because they're used so well...

Nerdgasm

[uglysad]

Playing my PSP and I saw this article. I just suffered a nerdgasm

Does anyone watch/care about G4TV?

[HycoWhit]

The Screen Savers used to be great. Tried to watch the G4TV version but in the end I saved myself $350 buck a year and canceled the digital tier of cable. TechTV was the only thing worthwhile and G4 ruined it. Watching G4TV made me feel like an idiot for being a gamer. Who is the idiot now? Me for reading/posting under a G4TV thread or the /. editor that decided this story was worth the front page. Who cares about G4TV? And who cares about HL2 hype? I lived through too many years of HL2 hype--I'm cool with waiting for the product to hit the shelves and learning about the new stuff then...

Re:Does anyone watch/care about G4TV?

[chromaphobic]

Personally, I don't care about G4 but I do care about HL2 hype as it's one of my favorite games of all time. :-) Next Wednesday will be the first time in months I've watched anything on G4, let alone The Screen Savers... err.. Attack Of The Show.

Attack Of The Show? Excuse me while I go in the corner and laugh out loud for several minutes. That has to be the WORST name for a show EVER. So it should fit in real well on G4.

Valve Should Do Other Things With Their time

[jmole]

I know Valve probably has different divisions that work on different aspects of their games, but if they have enough resources to come out with new improvements to the source engine and a new expansion can't they shift some of those resources to the areas that need more attention?

They are working on expansions when HLDM and CS: Source are practically incomplete. Its been 5+ months (counting beta) that CS: Source still has only two available player models. I just think there are more important things that need to be added(especially VAC2)/fixed with the games already out rather then start on something new. There is a good portion of the servers out there now, which are being exploited with the falling skulls and purple boxes. I could care less about lighting when I can't even play in a server without it crashing due to exploits.

Priorities!

[Dubpal]

Lighting effects and a new level's all well and good, but surely the folks at Valve could be putting their energies to better use?

I for one certainly could have waited another month or two for this release if it had meant they could put more manpower into delivering Day of Defeat: Source or Team Fortress 2 (Valve's very own Duke Nukem Forever) to the people earlier.

With the constant delays their fanbase endured during the development of HL2, releasing something more gamers actually want would have been a tremendous sign of good faith.