Half-Life 2 - Lost Coast Details

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..."

Comments

Concept Sketches

[karn096]

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

Re:So where are the screen shots?

[br0ck]

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.

Re:Flashbangs...

[Ford Prefect]

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... ;-)

Re:So where are the screen shots?

[FsG]

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