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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..."

3 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Flashbangs... by Grygonos · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually yes it is...I can't remember specifics.. but I had the misfortune of watching Attack of the Show on what used to be TechTV. They previewed the technology and it was quite amazing. The light is just hotter (if you understand hot in terms of light) than light without that technology. Very interesting stuff, but hard to describe until you see it.The flashbang effect is a whiteout, that fades back in. this is totally different.

  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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