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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.
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)
Pity. The first episode of Half-Life rocked big time.
It's a trick to make the monitor 'look' brighter. They use the pixel shaders on the graphics adapter(HW) and with some nifty algorithms and a floating point pipeline, appoximate the look of light saturation as it would appear on film. Like most nifty realtime graphics effects, HDR is a short cut, enabled by recent HW advances.
Tha being said, I wasn't too impressed by the Lost Coast pics. HDR needs a few more rendering passes for it to look real. It's cool that they are pushing the tech, but it'll be another few years until we see really good lighting implementations in games.
FUNK!
In a nutshell they aren't. Your computer monitor is not any brighter, its just the effects of contrast. You can see this yourself if you take a while square on your monitor (like from an empty browser window) and overlap it into the middle of one of the images. You will notice the white is the same intensity, its just the colors around that make the difference.
Want another example? Projectors throw an image on a white background, so how do you get black?!? The answer again is you dont, the black is nothing more than the unlit portions of the white screen. Everything else is bright enough that it creates a high lvl of contrast, so now your unlit white screen appears white.
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.
In the same way that I generally turn off lens flares (look pretty, but actually less realistic) this seems like it would actually *reduce* immersion. The fake camera effects are another thing reminding you that you're looking at a screen and not a real scene.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Am I missing anything? Why is everyone so excited about this feature?
Mostly because they don't understand what it means. But hey, at least it means we can restrict the bloom effect to only the really bright surfaces instead of making it look like you're looking through a dirty window/lens (I tend to wipe my glasses when I see bloom in real life).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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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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.
They're not just camera effects. The effects are more meant to mimic the way your eyes are affected by changes in light, caused by pupil dilation and glare.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
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