Half Life 2's 'Lost Coast' released...

[grazzhoppa]

A lot of fanfare over Valve's HDR tech demo, dubbed the Lost Coast, was made for a long time. Well it was released, it was short, it was pretty to gaze at. But it's still just a tech demo - playable but still a short demo.

If you own Half Life 2, you can download it through Steam. A good collection of screenshots is over at IGN. Although a video would do it more justice, as the lighting is dynamic.


The demo comes with audio comments from Valve staff who worked on getting HDR for the Source engine and the Lost Coast together. Interestingly, it was said that Valve would do similar demos if the 'community' responded well to the Loast Coast. Judging from the media coverage they got with with it, I suspect we'll be seeing more tech demo/playable levels regardless what gamers think of it.

Valve was reported saying all future Source games developed by them will incorporate HDR. Everyone will be looking foward to seeing what they can do with this flashy eye candy, but hopefully the extra time needed to create assets for HDR won't take away from other areas of the game: time is money remember.

The announced expansion pack for Half Life 2, called Aftermath, will be the first full featured single player game Valve releases with HDR available. The multiplayer only Day of Defeat: Source already incorporates HDR into it's maps - but the maps weren't designed with HDR in mind as they are remakes of older maps.

Valve didn't rule out giving an HDR makeover to Half Life 2 singleplayer maps, but I suppose that is at the near bottom of the company's priority list. Plus Valve said the download would be around 3 gigabytes for an entire HL2 HDR makeover.

Expect to see the official maps for Counter-Strike: Source remade for HDR in the future (but we're still waiting for those extra player models, ho hum).

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Grottenolm]

DOD:S Maps are remakes?

The DOD:S Maps are remakes and thus were not designed with HDR in mind? Although the map names and general theme is similar in DOD and DOD:S, the Source maps have been completely re-built. At the first glance nothing almost is common, with the possible exception of dod_avalanche.

So I think since these maps are almost completely new, they do have HDR designed "into them", not just appliedafterwards.

 

[grazzhoppa]

The DOD:S Maps are remakes and thus were not designed with HDR in mind? Although the map names and general theme is similar in DOD and DOD:S, the Source maps have been completely re-built. At the first glance nothing almost is common, with the possible exception of dod_avalanche.

So I think since these maps are almost completely new, they do have HDR designed "into them", not just appliedafterwards.

Thanks for clearing that up. I only played the original DOD for 5 minutes before shutting it off. But I saw some of the old Flash map, and what I saw looked similiar to the new Flash, so I just assumed.

Some of the HDR textures in the new maps just look poorly laid out though. There are lot of areas where the HDR texture looks sculpted around shadowed areas of the lightmap, and in those shadowed areas there is absolutely no blooming.

Take your flashlight, with HDR enabled, and shine it around somes walls. A good example is one of the orange walls of a house, in Avalanche, ahead of the Wermacht spawn. The blooming texture will abruptly stop, looking like it got cut off by the lightmap on the left side. It looked like Lost Coast had less of this.

 

[Grottenolm]

Yep, I agree that not everything with HDR looks very well in DOD:S. The only point that I wanted to clear up was with the remakes, the rest of your article stands undisputed

 

[Velocity]

The new hdr looks quite good, but i was dissapointed about how short the accual level was, especialy with how much hype went into the game building it up.