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Half Life 2 - Lost Coast HDR Explained
An Anonymous Reader writes: "Valve has released some amazing new screenshots of Half Life 2: Lost Coast, showing off the new-found technical wizardry called High-Dynamic Range rendering. It is the same advanced lighting that makes Unreal 3.0 look so good, except it will be available very soon for Half Life 2. Bit-tech has written a guide to all the new stuff like Blooming and HDR Cube Maps which explains everything you can expect to see when Lost Coast comes out."
Obligatory 1st Post! Personally I can't wait. HDR is a really fun thing to play around with and the current crop of games with it (if only a limited implementation) are gorgeous... and yes I'm a graphics freak.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Uh, it's not just HDR that makes UE3 look so good.
With Halflife2, the graphics were not the problem. Is the gameplay being so downright boring and repetitive.
Granted, the gameplay in HL2 seemed repetitive - but isn't that what FPS' are? Don't get me wrong, almost all I play are FPS'... BUT I was expecting these kind of graphics with HL2 out of the box. Doom3 also for that matter.
:Shadows of Chernobyl or :vaporware, whatever they are calling it now. Now this game has been described as having a 24-hour persistent environtment with realtime sun, rain, etc... Much of what HDR provides seems to be exactly what the developers of STALKER have been selling. Could this be the reason it's taken forever to hit the shelves? Will it ever?
:(
Either way, I play them because I can shut my brain off and see the pretty things blow up and splatter!
These new pics look A LOT like early shots and descriptions of STALKER:Oblivion Lost or
And I guess my 9800 pro sux0rs now.
How will this make the game better? How will this help advance HL2's story?
How will it help this other, more pressing graphics problem that plagues today's games, namely repetitive textures and models?
we dont have flying cars yet, but at least we can make 'white' in video games REAL FUCKIN' WHITE
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
the graphics may look better, but does the game physics allow you to explore/utilise the environment to the same degree ?
A month or so ago, someone took some HL2 models and rendered them with HDL. Then he put those renderings into his back-yard.
You can see them here
Your Sig Here ($10)
I know very little about graphics programming. Can someone please give me a boiled down explanation of how they are making a computer monitor brighter than normal with HDR? Or is this not a hardware hack at all?
The article is very light on details.
Pity. The first episode of Half-Life rocked big time.
I stand corrected. The error had two sources: First, a friend of mine who told me so, and second, a misreading of the bold from the review at Ars Technica:
If Steam is having a bad day and you can't download a necessary update, you may not be able to play the game that's already installed in your computer.
My bold, my bad. Thanks for the correction.
As the article states, the "blooming" effect is not HDR, it simply is blurring a white image and compositing it atop the original.
.000035 to 32768 (ie a contrast ration of over 1 billion), plus a gradual underflow area, +/-zero, +/-infinity, a full range of negative numbers, and several NaN values, all in the same 16-bit area that many images use for fixed-point.
HDR really means that floating point numbers are used instead of fixed-point integers. You can easily achieve human brightness resolution with a 16-bit number, appropriately used. The EXR standard mentioned in the article is the same as IEEE 32-bit floating point, except the exponent is reduced to 5 bits, plus 1 sign bit, and a 10 bit mantissa (plus hidden 1). This allows a range of
The EXR 16-bit format is now a standard and Nvidia is putting it into hardware on their boards. It is likely that all texture maps will be in this form in the near future.
Currently the final display buffer is 8 bits, and the floating point image is converted by multiplying by a constant and truncating. The first huge improvement will be to use a lookup texture to add the gamma curve of the 8-bit displays, so that the floating point data is really brightness information, this will hugely improve the realism of these exposure and lighting setups. Currently you must use a shader program for this, but I expect it will be put in hardware soon.
More in the future are actual HDR displays. These have a contrast ratio of perhaps 80000:1, so the EXR data will still be truncated, but it well exceeds the human eye's contrast ratio (ignoring the ability of the pupil to dialate). The best technology appears to be to put a color LCD display atop a monochrome LED display.
Wasn't the point of HL1 supposed to revolve around the player outsmarting and outthinking enemies when faced with overwhelming odds? In HL1 the most powerful guns were either obtained late or lacked a good source of ammo to be used often. (By the time you got the Gauss Cannon or Gluon Gun, you pretty much fought everything and weapons such as the Rocket Launcher and Crossbow had rare amounts of ammo throughout the entire game.)
In HL2, its possible to go through entire segments using only the SMG because its so plentiful between the easy Combine kills and unlimited ammo crates. The Gravity Gun is obtained less than halfway through the game. The Magnum, Crossbow and unlimited Grenade crates begin appearing too early and are overpowered even on Hard mode. The whole 2 spare clips for most weapons didn't help either since people just turned to the overpowered Gravity Gun as a result.
I don't know whether or not I like this feature. At first, I couldn't even work out what it actually did. I mean, a white pixel on your monitor is a white pixel, and that's as bright as it's ever going to get. Equally, a black pixel is as dark as it's ever going to get. All the screenshots I found (including the ones in this very story) don't demonstrate HDR *at all*. They demonstrate bloom, and differences of brightness.
Then I worked it out. You can't *see* HDR, because the "D" stands for "Dynamic", and that means it's an effect that is only noticable in motion, not in still shots. Apparently, this feature emulates exposure in phatography, so windows will all be bright white when you're standing in a room, and hallways will be pitch black if there's a bright source of light somewhere in your view (like the end of a tunnel).
Sure, this makes it look realistic... but I don't know if I really want my games to do this or not. I *like* being able to see the inside of the room I'm in, AND the outside environment through the window. I won't *want* my windows to fill with solid white just to simulate the exposure conditions that would be present in a real photo. I like to be able to see the detail on the wall of a tunnel, even if the sun is glaring through from the tunnel's opening. In short, I just don't think this will add anything to the game at all. It might look pretty (though it's mainly the bloom that adds to the visual experience, and I have no problem with that), but it's just going to get in the way.
Those "Lost Coast" pictures have me somewhat concerned. They basically seem as though someone has simply raised the contrast so anything reasonably bright becomes white. Any time the sun shines through a window, the lightmap inside the building becomes a solid shade of white, hiding all the details from the texture it's cast on. This just seems annoying.
Am I missing anything? Why is everyone so excited about this feature?
Whenever I see references to HDR, it always seems to be a DirectX thing.
Now, since HDR is really just floating point chicanery ( I'm not criticizing it ) is there any intent for support in OpenGL? I do a fair bit of GL programming, and, sadly am on OS X where GL is, like, a whole *year* behind linux and windows... but it would be nice to know that the underlying mechanisms ( I suppose texture formats, pixel ops in shaders, etc ) could be exposed in GL. So that I could use them in 2031, when Apple exposes the ARB_xyz etensions.
Anybody know?
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Have they fixed the stuttering bug yet?
How will this make the game better? How will this help advance HL2's story?
It makes the game better by adding more realistic lighting, increasing the sense of immersion. The new level content MAY make the story better.
How will it help this other, more pressing graphics problem that plagues today's games, namely repetitive textures and models?
This problem is a designer one; the more time one has to put into a level/model, the better/less repetitive it becomes. However, by adding the realistic lighting, levels can become less repetitive by simply adding varied lights, which is infinitely easier to do as opposed to creating and applying new textures or complex world geometry. Models end up looking more 3-dimensional and realistic with the lighting as well.
"For the average enthusiast, there are only three things to remember about HDR:
1. Bright things can be really bright
2. Dark things can be really dark
3. And the details can be seen in both"
Yes... and it's good if you like to tweak the image. * I don't get how this will help with 3d-rendering.
I simply abhor the Doom 3 style of making the player stumble around in the dark trying to find a door. Its *NOT* fun. And it seems that nearly every game now has at least one section like this (horrible haunted house mission in Vampire: Bloodlines being my most recent).
Sure you can get a few cheap scares. But if I can't even see the switch I am meant to be activating then I am going to get frustrated. And the most scary game I ever played, was farly well lit (System Shock 2).
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion