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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."
Amen to that! I can at least remember different areas and events in HL2. Doom 3 was the same level over and over and over and over again.
"I'm a graphics freak"
In all seriousness, I welcome your graphics freakynesh. It's a sight for sore eyes. Unfortunately, I already see the ubiquitous "The gameplay sucks, we don't need better graphics" posts starting to file in.
The truth is that this is all B.S.(goodbye karma). Improved graphics in game make it more visually appealing...not much else. But for some reason whenever a game makes a graphical improvement(or is just has good graphics for that matter) everyone screams bloody murder, complaining that the gameplay will suck. Then they proceed to obtaining enough +1 insightfuls to feed their family for a week.
Of course there are plenty of games out there with great graphics and terrible gameplay. But it's not BECAUSE they have good graphics. Imagine that people! I wonder how many gamers out there that complain about the gameplay have actually tried to develop their own fun and innovative game.
Anyways, the HDR looks sweet, and I'm buying the HL2 expansion as soon as it comes out.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
Most of the "limited implementations" of HDR are really just some cheesy bloom effects and whatnot. Not very pretty, imho, it just messes up the picture and makes it looks like your character has cataracts.
Half-Life 2, the Unreal 3.0 engine and the likes, on the other hand, use proper HDR. And it does indeed look gorgeous. This should be fun =)