Half Life 2 - Lost Coast

If anyone has used Steam recently, you may have noticed that Lost Coast has been released. If you don't have a clue what it is, it's a new chapter in HL2, which includes HDR technology for great graphical looks.

Pretty small D/L too.  I kicked the D/L off last night.  ~350MB or so?  Not too bad.

I'll try it out tonight.

It's very pretty, if you don't go in expecting an hour long game then its good

Anyway I think another intresting thing of note is how much bandwhidth steam uses.

http://steampowered.com/status/status.html

Over 10Gbps

It is a fun level.  The HDR stuff is great... but I have to note that some times, there is too much shiny stuff.  Whatever happened to matte black finishes on guns?

Yeah it does get into the shiny realm sometimes But Hey, what are techdemos for?

If you wan't to see how they are using HDR in their games, check out day of defeat source.

That has a much subtler HDR effect and it's really nice.

muh.... It is a slight improvement over HL2, I can't see what all the fuss is about .... The level its self isn't fun, and the scenery isn't that great. Was it really worth while for Valve to completely re-write the entire rendering engine to add dynamic lighting? Maybe my graphics card just sucks (Geforce 6600) and isn't going to show me what they want me to see...

By the way, Half Life 2 is still the most advanced game out today, so even a slight improvement on the best still makes it the most advanced.

Did you listen to the commentary, Manip?  It shows you some of the technology better.  I for one noticed the effect of going from light to dark as a real human iris would almost immediately.  The scene with the stained glass windows in the church was great... the light streaming through was a good effect.

Yeah I listened to the commentary and saw the light get less bright after I exited the tunnel... And? ... Big deal... The sand doesn't look more real, the old man doesn't look more real and the game isn't any more fun because of it.

This new feature strikes me as some tick on a game developers tick sheet rather than something consumers are meant to enjoy. Until the texture quality is a lot higher none of it looks photo realistic yet, so why pretend that the textures are fine and spend ages tweaking how the light falls onto the ugly textures?

Manip wrote:

Yeah I listened to the commentary and saw the light get less bright after I exited the tunnel... And? ... Big deal... The sand doesn't look more real, the old man doesn't look more real and the game isn't any more fun because of it.

This new feature strikes me as some tick on a game developers tick sheet rather than something consumers are meant to enjoy. Until the texture quality is a lot higher none of it looks photo realistic yet, so why pretend that the textures are fine and spend ages tweaking how the light falls onto the ugly textures?

W3bbo wrote:

Manip wrote:Yeah I listened to the commentary and saw the light get less bright after I exited the tunnel... And? ... Big deal... The sand doesn't look more real, the old man doesn't look more real and the game isn't any more fun because of it. This new feature strikes me as some tick on a game developers tick sheet rather than something consumers are meant to enjoy. Until the texture quality is a lot higher none of it looks photo realistic yet, so why pretend that the textures are fine and spend ages tweaking how the light falls onto the ugly textures?

I actually dislike HDR, especially for multi-player games, it makes it hard to see your opponents. (So camping sharpshooters with the AWP nail me when I'm armed with the P-90 directly under the sun's glare)

Spitfire15 wrote:

Since when did HDR make its way to CSS? The only MP game I saw which uses this is Day of Defeat Source.

I keep getting a "Modules could not be loaded" error ever since they upgraded the GUI. Guess I will have to re download. I have been looking forward to Lost Coast.

W3bbo wrote:

Manip wrote:Yeah I listened to the commentary and saw the light get less bright after I exited the tunnel... And? ... Big deal... The sand doesn't look more real, the old man doesn't look more real and the game isn't any more fun because of it. This new feature strikes me as some tick on a game developers tick sheet rather than something consumers are meant to enjoy. Until the texture quality is a lot higher none of it looks photo realistic yet, so why pretend that the textures are fine and spend ages tweaking how the light falls onto the ugly textures?

I actually dislike HDR, especially for multi-player games, it makes it hard to see your opponents. (So camping sharpshooters with the AWP nail me when I'm armed with the P-90 directly under the sun's glare)

The level was ok, but I had hoped it would be a bit longer and a lot more fun than it was - on a gameplay level it hardly deserved have Half Life in its name.

The graphics were pretty nice and I will play it again with comentary on soon to see if there's anything cool I missed the first time through.  I also thought some things were a bit too shiny, especially the supply boxes.

I have a 6800GT and even with the details a bit lower than I had HL2 set at to play it comfortably, the frame rate was low, but still acceptable.  I don't think the effects are really worth it just yet, but maybe in a year or so when I get my next computer it will be.

HDR is the new lens flare and incredibly overused.