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Half-Life 2 - Lost Coast Details

Posted by Zonk on from the too-much-flare!-i-can't-see! dept.

Eurogamer.com has some more details on the mini-expansion cum tech demo that is "The Lost Coast". The release will be specifically for high-end PCs, and is intended to show off the places that Valve can stretch the Source technology into. From the article: "If you jump out of a dark space into a light area you're going to be blinded. It's going to be really bright until your eyes adjust. It can be used the other way around, too. Hide from a monster in a dark area and it will take a couple of seconds to go from a silhouette to detail..."

8 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Concept Sketches by karn096 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Theres some concept sketches up on IGN heres the link http://media.pc.ign.com/media/492/492830/imgs_1.ht ml the concept sketches are in the center..the others I believe are just typical halflife2

  2. Re:So where are the screen shots? by br0ck · · Score: 5, Informative

    You forgot a step.

    Fly to the UK, walk into the bookstore, grab a copy of UK PC Gamer, look at the screenshots, put it back on the shelf, and walk out.

  3. Re:Flashbangs... by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 5, Informative

    Is this really any different than flashbang grenades we've seen in CS?

    Yes. Very different.

    I've posted links to it before, but here's a great demonstration of high-dynamic-range lighting, albeit taken to GPU-bullying extremes.

    Basically, lighting in current games has very little range. A seemingly 'dark' room may actually be only slightly dimmer than the bright summer day 'outside'; in the case of lightmaps, it goes from 0 (pitch black) to 255 (as bright as possible). If you've had any experience with photography, you'll know that real life has a much greater range - for example, this was several thousand times brighter than this.

    HDR can give back that variation, with lightmaps (or whatever) done with floating point, for a lighting range of 'well, lots'. Various post-processing effects are possible, such as 'bloom' and true motion-blur (specular highlights don't get turned into grey for each sub-frame) - basically, it's a much more realistic model of how light works.

    Because output to the monitor is still 0-255 per channel, it gives the player an 'eye' which automatically adjusts to the ambient brightness. So, if you immediately step from a bright, sunny day into a dark monastery (for example), your eyes will need time to adjust.

    Hmm. Someone needs to do a Thief-style game with HDR... ;-)

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  4. Re:So where are the screen shots? by FsG · · Score: 4, Informative

    Or you could just download the PC Gamer issue from BitTorrent.

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  5. Re:So where are the screen shots? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Where do you live that all the bookstand issues of PC Gamer aren't shrinkwrapped?

  6. Re:Wow... by OmgTEHMATRICKS · · Score: 1, Informative

    It's not simple gamma adjusting. It's HDR. Big difference. http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/index.html

  7. HDR's been done by Lucia_Inverse · · Score: 2, Informative

    you can see the night and day diffrence HDR makes by loading up farcry 1.31 and entering the HDR lighting command in the console with a geforce 6 series card. also you can google for screenshots

  8. Re:So where are the screen shots? by glob · · Score: 2, Informative

    HL2 mod that add HDR effect to single player:
    http://www.neotokyohq.com/

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