Yo Man! hAlf life 2 graphicaly not that great

[enoonmai]

I give up. I don't want to talk about useless old engines any more. In my opinion,

Best outdoor environment=CryEngine
Best indoor environment=Doom 3
Best overall merger of outdoor and indoor environments=Source

And thats going visually, I am gonna pore over mod developers' posts any longer, and frankly, I prefer the KISS policy, and I committed serious adultery stepping away from it.

In the end, all I care about (like everyone else) is being able to play the games. In the end, we have to admit that no amount of fancy eyecandy is a substitute for good gameplay. Which is why a game like Crimsonland or even Codename Gordon with hardly any graphical goodness is so addictive. (Mmmmm, Crimsonland!)

I do hope RoE will turn out with a wee bit better gameplay than Doom 3. While I love that game and its storytelling aspect and being scared half to death, somewhere along the line, I got a wee bit bored of doing the same old thing. (Give me my breakable environment objects, id Software) Part of the fun I have with games is using the environment, even if it means smashing and pushing around boxes and cardboard cartons needlessly (to think of all the joy I received breaking open a box and having screwdrivers, CDs, weird electronic thingies etc. pop out of them in the first Half-Life ) Apart from the explosive barrels, Doom 3 had no object interaction. I cant wait for RoE to change that with the Grabber.

Having said that, I will go and bomb Valve's Seattle office if they dont confirm HL3 soon. I mean, come on, its obvious they're working on it. They better not DARE say "That's all folks, move along, nothing to see here." after the miserably cliffhanging ending that was HL2. I am so sick and tired of all the rampant speculations on Alyx, Gordon, GMan and everything else. Hmm, maybe we should have our own HL3 speculation thread.

@icecoolz: Like I said, maybe we can catch each other sometime soon. I just have to be suddenly infected with the Ebola virus or fake my death and then bunk work, and we can all meet up and have fun.

 

[borg]

Man it was interesting to read the indoor /outdoor discussion on Doom 3 engine. I just want to know - what difference does it make to the engine whether indoor or outdoor?. These things are in our minds only. For the machine & the software, this is just a number crunching job nothing else.

 

[enoonmai]

@allwyndlima: Here it is:

*www.thinkdigit.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15768

Hope this helps.

 

[Charley]

I would like to start by saying that Half-Life was my first introduction into online gaming--and it got me hooked. I switched to Unreal tournament. The reason for the switch was because a friend of mine told me that half-life was on the way out and Unreal Tournament was the newest and best game out, and eventually nobody would be playing half-life(or any of the other HL games like counter strike and blue ops?). I really miss Half-Life, and find that HL had better maps and the weapons were better--I really miss laying those mines!

 

[speedyguy]

hi there....just wanna know if i can can run half-life 2 in my onboard grafix card...my sys is-

p4 1.8ghz,
intel 845gl chipset with 64 internal memory,
256mb ddr-ram,
40 gb hdd

if not is it worth upgrading to a ATi Radeon 9000 pro series...will it help wit latest games...even in normal settings is enuf...im asking this coz thats d cheapest option i got for my cnfg...
thanx
cheers

 

[Ethan_Hunt]

@speedyguy....yup u can play hl2 with ur onboard Gfx but the thing is it wont give ya a smooth enough gameplay and will deliver about 15Fps or more even at low settings....so well if u can try ad upgrade into a Ati radeon card if possible the 9600pro at 7k this will be more than required to play games at Fair resolutions.....whats ur budget just let us know and will take u through the rest

 

[tarey_g]

Could we plz cut out the "I love doom3 better cos I think it looks better" stuff. If you have a logical reason and can back up your views with facts as provided then plz provide them.

Hi icecoolz ,
i am telling here for the last time that i said that statement becoz we were comparing doom3 and halflife visually in this thread(not the gameplay and the other stuff which represents a game collectively). If u want to compare Doom3 to hl2 in terms of gameplay then doom3 dosen't stand a chance b4 hl2 coz hl2 was fun till the last level but doom3 became repetative(but i never got boared kept playing it praising the visual details).

 

[HellspawnLucifer]

Reply to enoonmai (loads more mumbo-jumbo)

I'd like to start off this post, by saying that this is just a reply to enoonmai to a few of his questions, and it may be out of context to some other posters on this forum. Please feel free to ignore this post if this information seems irrelevant to you.

enoonmai,

As for the shadowing and light interaction thingy ... there is one caveat in computer graphics ... the shading of a surface, and shadowing are two different things. Let me take the case of OpenGL, since we are talking about DOOM 3.

Although OpenGL supports lighting, it does not support shadowing. What I mean by this is that the developer wanting to shadow his/her character/model will have to write the associated code themselves, using methods like stencil shadows, shadow mapping, PRT, etc ... this, enoonmai is why a normal map only performs shading. Shadows are drawn on the framebuffer in (probably) a separate pass.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Assume that a shadow is falling on a corrugated surface in DOOM3. In the real world, a shadow like that would have the edges of itself corrugated as well, because its warping along the shape of that surface. In DOOM3, however it will be razor sharp and flat. See, although the bump mapping makes us believe that the flat surface is corrugated, thats only because of the lighting contribution changing across the surface (normal perturbation). Like I said in my previous post, there is no geometry modification in this technique.

Of course, when displacement mapping is used, this technique would produce the correct result. But I'm currently running off an R350 core (9800Pro), so I dont have hardware displacement maps as of now

Hope thats clear enough.

About multipass rendering, I meant multiple render passes on the same frame. Every object in DOOM 3 is associated with a shader. Applied to objects, this means that some objects render themselves in a single pass or in multiple passes based on the hardware specs available. For example, a shader that specifies it does not require a specular highlight would (on older hardware), utilize one less rendering pass. So for any card, which has a constant fillrate, the number of times the framebuffer is drawn to (also called overdraw) determines the final framerate. This, of course is notwithstanding the passes made onto renderable surfaces like the TV screens and the ammo indicators on the weapons.

The reason I asked you to look up that .plan on the pipelines, is because of that point that Carmack made about the continuous evolution of the pipelines. For example, did u know that the entire DOOM3 pipeline now only uses the ARB_vertex_program path? Initially, there were rendering paths written for multiple vendors for several of the same reasons you quoted, enoonmai. Carmack later decided this was detrimental as the whole point of having standards and the ARB_ extension was nullfied with that approach. So my point is: Although some cards service parts of the DOOM3 rendering engine at double/quadruple the speed, almost all of these optimizations are done on the driver, and most of DOOM3 uses standard rendering paths.

Nowadays, the line between a hardcore graphics geek and a gamer is getting mighty fuzzy. And information in any context, is all-important. I will now quote the Borg.

"Assimilate, assimilate".

--HellspawnLucifer

 

[Guest]

oh my god. mr 47 wht r u talkin abt. u probably played it without applying the fix for nvidia cards. the water is so cool. of course the graphics aren't as good as doom 3 but i agree with all the ppl here. the gameplay was the stress. if u don't know abt the nvidia fix take out the jan2005 issue of digit and read it . u will see that they have given the command line for running half life 2 on dx9 for nvidia cards.

 

[ctrl_alt_del]

Very good explaination HellSpawn. Simple and easy to follow. Would like to see more of you here.