half life 2 hmmmmm

[borntosoul]

what do you all think of this (taken from an interview at sharkys)?

"SE - Obviously from 1999 to 2003, there have been a lot of technological increases in the level of graphical quality. New Direct X releases, newer video cards, things like that. How did the Half-Life 2 engine evolve from when it first began in 1999 to now in order to keep itself from becoming graphically, and even technologically, outdated?"


"Ken - Actually, technology-wise it hasn't [evolved much]. Right from the beginning, one of our major goals was scalability. We wanted to make sure that our engine would scale to hardware that wasn't going to ship for several years. We knew it was going to be a three to four year development process. So when we started we said "Okay, let's project what graphics hardware will look like in three to four years." Get a rough idea of the polygon counts. Talk to NVIDIA. Talk to ATI. Get an idea as to what direction they are going. And how fast they were going. We offer all of our content at extremely high resolution. All of our base textures are 2 [kilobytes] by 2 [kilobytes]. All of our polygon counts are very, very high. We won't actually ship that, primarily because there's currently no hardware that can possibly [run] it. . However, once hardware releases that can run it, then we might release that higher rez content. So we actually author for hardware that doesn't exist. And then our game will scale from a [Direct X 9 system] all the way down to [Direct X 6]. Of course, it certainly won't look like this on a DX6, but the game will still play and it will still be fun."

have they been showing hl2 at higher graphic detail than what will be released?
here is the link
http://www.sharkyextreme.com/features/idtrInterviews/article.php/2221941
edit just put in bold

[jAkUp]

it was running on a raddy 9800. he said no current hardware can run it..

[borntosoul]

then why did he say this?
However, once hardware releases that can run it, then we might release that higher rez content.

[jAkUp]

they may have been showing low quality textures in the movie. because if no hardware could run it... how could they show it???

[CaptNKILL]

"All of our base textures are 2 [kilobytes] by 2 [kilobytes]."

Kilobytes? WTF is he talking about? He must mean 2 thousand pixels by 2 thousand pixels. Thats a big texture :)

[Uttar]

Actually, no, 2 kilobytes by 2 kilobytes make sense.
If they're using texture compression, thus 1 byte per pixel, then it's 2k * 2k
If they're using pure 32-bit textures, then it's 4 bytes, thus 512x512.


Uttar

[SurfMonkey]

I think the demos we've seen are how the final product will look. I think he's just saying that the HL engine is capable of supporting some features at a quality level that current cards couldn't run if they were utilised.

[StealthHawk]

Developers usually create their content with much more detail than what is actually used in the game. Scaled down versions are used in games. Back when Doom3 was first introduced, there were pictures of super high poly monsters which were the source models for the lower poly ones that will be used in the game.

[saturnotaku]

Originally posted by SurfMonkey
I think the demos we've seen are how the final product will look. I think he's just saying that the HL engine is capable of supporting some features at a quality level that current cards couldn't run if they were utilised.

I agree with this. The Source engine is supposed to be capable of scaling to any game developed on it on hardware as low as a PIII 600 and a GeForce2 MX. Once hardware is released that can handle additional features in the engine, then we'll start seeing what it (Source) is really capable of. :)

[Sazar]

Originally posted by jAkUp
they may have been showing low quality textures in the movie. because if no hardware could run it... how could they show it???

you sir... are a genius...

but yes... the hl2 engine was designed with scalability in mind... it will run on old systems and it will run on future systems keeping its look sharp...

I assume this means that the hl2 engine is going to be adopted in more games and what not... the scalability is appealing and the physics engine is quite a treat :)

[stncttr908]

I think he was talking about at the time they were developing the game (a few years ago) they knew there would be no hardware capable of running it at the time.

[digitalwanderer]

I just haven't been this excited about a game coming out since either Vice City or the original Half-life! (I was one of them weirdos who was all hyped about half-life during it's overly long development cycle...one of the very few games worth the wait!!! :D )

I think it's gonna be sweet, I love the idea that they made it scalable thru such a wide range of hardware and are going to be able to upgrade the engine when hardware that supports more comes out!

[RAY16]

I know Half-Life 2 is going to be great. The only thing i'm worried about is eye-candy. I hope i can run the game at medium details on my GeForce 3 and get a playable frame rate (I consider anything 25FPS or above playable).

[GlowStick]

Thx for the find on the HL2 Interview,

and i do agree with the textures.

They probly started with super high res textures, but they are so high res that no card can use them yet, and even if there was a way for these cards to use em, it would be a pritty pointless slidshow.

[Nutty]

What kind of idiot refers to texture dimensions as kilobytes? Given they're in brackets I assume the editor added them. I would not expect anyone to say this, so I'm assuming he means 2048x2048 pixel textures. Theres nowt spesh about 512x512.

[GlowStick]

sweet, i like big textures, you never can go wrong!

[Smokey]

My gf3 64mb doesnt like big textures :( lets hope I can get a new card in the next 6 mnths ;)

I think the texture thing is like UT2003, isnt there a higher high res texture pack that they still havent released?

[StealthHawk]

I've been waiting for realistic textures for a long time, go 2048X2048 :p IMO textures can make or break a game graphically.

[GlowStick]

OH yeah, igh res textures are what its all about,

espically the ones with bump mapping applied to em!

[MrNasty]

BUMP MAP EVERYTHING ! :mad:

[GlowStick]

Originally posted by MrNasty
BUMP MAP EVERYTHING ! :mad:

muahhahhahhahahahhahhaha
muhahahahahhahahah
muhahh
muah

[Nv40]

Originally posted by StealthHawk
I've been waiting for realistic textures for a long time, go 2048X2048 :p IMO textures can make or break a game graphically.

well acording to some people you need no less than IEEE-32 precision for that kind of ultra high resolution textures .. :)

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by Nv40
well acording to some people you need no less than IEEE-32 precision for that kind of ultra high resolution textures .. :)

Hey, I'd be happy with every texture in every game looking like the textures S3 demoed to show the world how good their S3TC compression could make games look when high resolution textures were used. That was before even hardware T&L!

[Nv40]

Originally posted by StealthHawk
Hey, I'd be happy with every texture in every game looking like the textures S3 demoed to show the world how good their S3TC compression could make games look when high resolution textures were used. That was before even hardware T&L!

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/reviews3tcfxt1/


textures of 2048x2048 resolutions are nearly 4x times!! the quality of 512x512 S3tc offered by that time. and nearly 2xtimes the quality of UnrealT2003 textures which i read somewhere that are 1024x1024.

a bit.. off topic.. im still curious about what happened with the HIgher quality textures of UnrealT2k3 ,that required 256megs cards.. :confused:

[StealthHawk]

I don't think most games use 512X512 textures very often...if they use them at all.