Half Life thread - Discussions about Valve's FPS magnum opus(es) and any related content (spin offs, expansions and etc)

[Nameless One]

That reminds me, I remember back in the day the typical "test model" for 3D rendering was a certain teapot. I haven't seen that teapot in years and I haven't even heard anyone mention the Blender donut in some while.

Is 3D modelling losing its history and traditions?

Yes. The answer is obvious. Not only is the tech outdated, or seen as such by newcomers, the veterans who were around back then to play and pioneer with that tech are leaving and retiring or making mediocre slop (see Slitterhead and all of the veterans the director of the game had interviews with before release). It's gone. And it's getting worse. An industry crash is necessary for the game industry to even come back with feasible priorities like making a good game, making a fun game, trying new things, etc. It's so stagnant and bloated right now even with actual indies. The indie games that get popular are funded by corpo subsidiaries.

 

[thhrang]

It's going to be extremely funny when HL3, God-willing, runs better on actual toasters than this RTX 'Remaster' of a 20 year old Source 1 game runs on modern midrange PCs.

 

[Battlefield42]

Never got the point of RTX slop. Look at CS2, shit looks great and runs well on a GTX 750ti. If you are going to have static maps then might as well use baked lighting and baked shadow maps.

 

[Coolio55]

It's going to be extremely funny when HL3, God-willing, runs better on actual toasters than this RTX 'Remaster' of a 20 year old Source 1 game runs on modern midrange PCs.

I'm wondering whether I'll need to upgrade my ancient PC yet.
Might give CS2 a go but Counter Strike post-Source is imo pretty miserable.
Deathmatch or Arms Race or Danger Zone might be worth playing.

 

[Battlefield42]

I'm wondering whether I'll need to upgrade my ancient PC yet.
Might give CS2 a go but Counter Strike post-Source is imo pretty miserable.
Deathmatch or Arms Race or Danger Zone might be worth playing.

Danger Zone is kill.

 

[Nameless One]

Danger Zone is kill.

Valve has fallen. Billions must pirate.

 

[Creative Username]

That reminds me, I remember back in the day the typical "test model" for 3D rendering was a certain teapot. I haven't seen that teapot in years and I haven't even heard anyone mention the Blender donut in some while.

Is 3D modelling losing its history and traditions?

no they just use different models now like a bunny and a dragon and this weird armadillo thingy
the stanford bunny is a real classic tbh almost as good as the utah teapot

blender donut isn't a real test model it's the end result of a certain series of babby's first blender tutorials

 

[They were once men]

It's going to be extremely funny when HL3, God-willing, runs better on actual toasters than this RTX 'Remaster' of a 20 year old Source 1 game runs on modern midrange PCs.

It'll probably look better and run better than most games that have come out in the last five years.

 

[Creative Username]

It is a gimmick but its also a bad compromise. You get shit image quality and a mere fraction of the power ray tracing deserves. RAY TRACING IS A MERE ESTIMATION in gaming. It is a suggestion. I argue Planar reflections are superior in almost every way, they are expensive but worth the money. Planar reflections work best with water but can also be utilized with reflective floors as well if I recall correctly.

Why bother with ray tracing? We aren't there yet and this still looks better than a blurry and artifacting mess.

"planar reflections" (more often known as "render target reflections") are a very great way to make good-looking reflections
but ONLY when the reflections are perfectly sharp and the surface is perfectly flat (mildly non-flat surfaces can be faked by cheating a little bit and distorting the texture reads)
you can use them on any planar surface but if you make the surface rough it starts to turn into noisy/blurry bullshit, and most surfaces that aren't mirrors, water, or the most impeccably polished marble floors are quite rough

ray tracing is pretty much the same sort of thing: it works great until the surfaces are slightly rough and then you need 18 billion samples per frame
it can work on any surface though and nvidia decided the best place to use it would be on father grigori's head because they aren't too bright

raytracing is frequently seen as awful solely because it's often used in situations where it chokes and they should be using one of the other perfectly good gi techniques instead
it actually completely beats rasterization in a couple of areas, most importantly translucent objects

 

[The handsome tard]

Why bother with ray tracing? We aren't there yet and this still looks better than a blurry and artifacting mess.
Developers are so retarded they also forgot that they can just mirror rooms to save budget but also look pretty. No, have a fucking SMUDGE and an ugly cubemap instead on a mirror....
Developers have no excuse. They exceed game budgets from even back then yet sit on their asses and mindlessly obey. Never innovating, optimizing is optional.

The funny thing is, I remember how it was pointed out how in the Dead Rising "remake", there were no reflections in the mirrors, while the reflections were there in the original (and to make things more humiliating, they were there in the Wii version too even)

"planar reflections" (more often known as "render target reflections") are a very great way to make good-looking reflections
but ONLY when the reflections are perfectly sharp and the surface is perfectly flat (mildly non-flat surfaces can be faked by cheating a little bit and distorting the texture reads)
you can use them on any planar surface but if you make the surface rough it starts to turn into noisy/blurry bullshit, and most surfaces that aren't mirrors, water, or the most impeccably polished marble floors are quite rough

ray tracing is pretty much the same sort of thing: it works great until the surfaces are slightly rough and then you need 18 billion samples per frame
it can work on any surface though and nvidia decided the best place to use it would be on father grigori's head because they aren't too bright

raytracing is frequently seen as awful solely because it's often used in situations where it chokes and they should be using one of the other perfectly good gi techniques instead
it actually completely beats rasterization in a couple of areas, most importantly translucent objects

I can summarize it all with a simple "its a gimmick"

I tried to play Doom 2 RTX and that shit legit was annoying to play and I just returned to my "Vanilla +" setup with Smooth Doom weapons only and HD sound effects. Its simple but the core experience is maintained.

 

[Creative Username]

The funny thing is, I remember how it was pointed out how in the Dead Rising "remake", there were no reflections in the mirrors, while the reflections were there in the original (and to make things more humiliating, they were there in the Wii version too even)

"how the fuck do render targets work???" - retard thinking unreal engine will just do everything for them

I can summarize it all with a simple "its a gimmick"

i won't disparage it that hard, it will surely find some place in video game graphics
personally i want to see it used to replace the absolute dogshit that is screen-space reflections (graphics technique where you do ray tracing in the screen depth buffer (it's as horribly janky as it sounds)) and let you see render-target-quality reflections of yourself in any shiny object you can find
also would be nice to make hard shadows without crusty shadow map artifacts since you can do that in 1 sample (side note: i wonder why people aren't using shadow volumes? i happen to enjoy those super crisp shadows)
of course people right now are abusing it to make obnoxious semi-soft shadows and irradiance absolutely everywhere but eventually that will become the 2020 equivalent of people using shitty brown color grading and eye-raping bloom in 2010
color grading and bloom are still used in games today they're just somewhat less obnoxious now

 

[Soggy Floppa]

(side note: i wonder why people aren't using shadow volumes? i happen to enjoy those super crisp shadows)

Absurd amounts of overdraw, made worse by modern shading being a lot more computationally expensive per pixel

 

[BradeRunna]

I tried the Half Life 2 RTX demo. It runs like crap. RTX DLSS frame gen and UE5 are some of the worst things to have happened to gaming.

 

[Fig Kommandant]

RTX DLSS frame gen and UE5 are some of the worst things to have happened to gaming.

I do hope game designers go back to focus on game design instead of retarded game graphics.

 

[They were once men]

I tried the Half Life 2 RTX demo. It runs like crap. RTX DLSS frame gen and UE5 are some of the worst things to have happened to gaming.

Also TAA is fucking horrendous in older game you had many options of AA but now its all just TAA making the game look like a blury mess

 

[BradeRunna]

Also TAA is fucking horrendous in older game you had many options of AA but now its all just TAA making the game look like a blury mess

It's not bad in RDR2. I think UE5's TAA is just shit tier.

 

[Varretnon847]

I can summarize it all with a simple "its a gimmick"

I tried to play Doom 2 RTX and that shit legit was annoying to play and I just returned to my "Vanilla +" setup with Smooth Doom weapons only and HD sound effects. Its simple but the core experience is maintained.

I used to think Real-time Raytracing was neat, and I remember being interested to test it out when I got a graphics card that supported it a couple of years ago. But even though it looks neat at first, the performance issues were not. I would have to run games at a pretty low resolution just to get 50 frames at most. Raytracing also has this weird ghosting effect with its shadows that I noticed and looked quite obnoxious.

Overall, those issues I had, did not make it worth it, and the last time I tried using raytracing was Portal RTX, which felt underwhelming. For that reason, I don’t think I’m going to be trying out HL2 RTX.

 

[Creative Username]

Also TAA is fucking horrendous in older game you had many options of AA but now its all just TAA making the game look like a blury mess

It's not bad in RDR2. I think UE5's TAA is just shit tier.

taa is a double-edged sword, because if you do it right you have accurate, high-quality, and very cheap anti-aliasing
modern engines all use it because it looks great for cheap when done right, and is good at anti-aliasing speckly pbr fragment shaders; unlike msaa, which only does edges
the hard part is doing it right: the moment an object with the wrong shader moves over another object, the horrible ghosting artifacts will be very obvious
or if your taa is overly conservative, you end up with obvious jagged edges that also flicker a little bit

Raytracing also has this weird ghosting effect with its shadows that I noticed and looked quite obnoxious.

that's because ray tracing can't actually do soft shadows with the sample counts that even the beefiest gpus have, so they rely extremely heavily on temporal bullshit and magic neural networks
like any magic temporal bullshit that gets taken too far, it looks like absolute trash unless you stand in one place for 15 frames and take a screenshot to soy over

 

[Super Hans v2]

I used to think Real-time Raytracing was neat, and I remember being interested to test it out when I got a graphics card that supported it a couple of years ago. But even though it looks neat at first, the performance issues were not. I would have to run games at a pretty low resolution just to get 50 frames at most. Raytracing also has this weird ghosting effect with its shadows that I noticed and looked quite obnoxious.

Overall, those issues I had, did not make it worth it, and the last time I tried using raytracing was Portal RTX, which felt underwhelming. For that reason, I don’t think I’m going to be trying out HL2 RTX.

Just like everything else, how good the ray tracing is is heavily dependent on the game. On my 3080ti I can run CP2077 on the pre-4000 series ray tracing maxed out flawlessly, but Portal runs like shit.

 

[74164978231]

Also TAA

Vote for me for world leader and implementing TAA in any video game will result in a death sentence.

the hard part is doing it right: the moment an object with the wrong shader moves over another object, the horrible ghosting artifacts will be very obvious
or if your taa is overly conservative, you end up with obvious jagged edges that also flicker a little bit

Its awful because no matter what you end up with a every so slightly out of focus game.