pretty much all generic looking bipedal soldier things...
i couldn't understand why they got rid of the bulltoad. that was a cool monster, and with some of the new ai, could have been really fun. 

man, HL2 should have been more like BGE in the mean of player freedom and game progression
just imagine.. 

btw any1 finds it funny that u operate objects via the powers of telecenesis or some other majik, or maybe u get smal grav gun just from the start 

well its a small price to pay, making custom hold anims for all the different sized objects would have been REAL fun Im sure ;) 

thought of that
could just make objects closer to the player view, to make it seem that the holding arms are offscreen
and it really behaves like small grav gun too, not like hands 

and it really behaves like small grav gun too, not like hands

Exactly. Gameplay before realism. 

It would have been neat to see some hl2 monsters back as sort of ambient wildlife. Not everything eats humans, surely. Might bullsquid not just roam around sewers and aquatic areas doing their general water face-sucking thing, and disregard Freeman after having grown tame around so many humans? Houndeyes, too. Wouldn't a herd of those grazing in a field look cute? Or a guy with a domesticated one as a pet. 

that someone wrote to valve asking if they had any inflateable hound-eye dolls. By inflateable dolls, I mean a sex doll.

Don't remember where I read it though - it was a long time ago.

I bet it was CZG 

I obviously would have asked for Barney dolls. (Or the real thing.) 

Steam just updated with news about a upcoming HDR showcase level called the Lost Highway. Additional game content is certainly welcome, but to my mind the interesting bit is this:

"it will be made available free of charge to Half-Life 2 customers that meet a specific set of high end hardware requirements."

And presumably won't, to those that don't.

Meh. 

I just spotted that myself. What actually is High Dynamic Range lighting anyway? I don't really under... fuck it, I'll go google it ;)

Ok, done that. HDR lighting seems to be what fitzquake's overbrights are to standard glquake. Standard gl looks lifeless (or shit, to most people) because of the low range of brightnesses in the lightmap. I assume fitzquake multiplies the brightness by two to get the overbright stuff and gives a much more satisfying appearance.

HDR lighting seems to be doing the same sort of thing, but I don't understand exactly what it is.

Someone intelligent please explain! 

Oh well.

Overbrights are a compromise. They allow you to push up the colour range of your scene at the expense of precision, which leads to teh fugly when things get very bright or very dark. What HDR does is increase the dynamic range - the ratio of brightest representable pixel to darkest - by adding more precision to colour calculations. That means you can light things very brightly or darkly in the same scene, and still get correct colours without the banding and blotchyness that normal precision rendering suffers from. 

was just increased colour precision.

Basically people started to realise that 24-bit colour isn't enough - not because you actually need more than 16.7 million colours but when you start to perform lots of funky operations on your old 8-bits per colour channel values the precision loss in the calculations of the final value is big enough to result in colour banding effects. 

not because you actually need more than 16.7 million colours but when you start to perform lots of funky operations on your old 8-bits per colour channel values the precision loss in the calculations of the final value is big enough to result in colour banding effects.

Brian Hook was saying this long ago, and none of the silly video card fanbois paid attention. 

Overbrightening is HDR (albeit not very high HDR :P). The extra precision just makes higher ranges practical by reducing banding. 

that's that then. Maj has spoken.

Brian Hook is cool by the way. I don't know why exactly. Maybe because the Q2 netcode was great! Hook is a cool name too, makes me imagine that he's a pirate, albeit one that is a hardcore programmer. 

What makes HDR different is that your calculations are all done in high precision (presumably floating point) until the last step. Normal, non-HDR rendering clamps all intermediate results to the low-precision range of the final result (i.e. 24-bit color.)

Things that make HDR cool:
- extreme gamma correction without banding
- very bright lights reflected in very dark mirrors will be the correct brightness, rather than way too dark.
- multi-pass shader effects without quality loss (including overbright lighting beyond 2x) 

fuck this hdri crap
how bout better monsters, Valve?
and HANDS!
racing games had hands on the wheel 5 years ago 

but racing games only need the hand to interact with the wheel, not any possible pickupable object in the game.

but agree with the better monsters comment. way too little variety, too many bipedals. 

See Trespasser. Then repent. 

Maj, excellent point, very well made!

Jesus that was horrid! 

FFS having some hands on a wheel in a game isn't rocket science. Valve really should have done this - how did that slip through QA?

Actually, maybe it was one of the things that was making testers barf and giving them fits and stuff when testing the vehicles... 

I totally agree, the lack of hands really ruined HL2. Had valve put hands on the wheel of the buggy, and when picking up physics objects, I would have given HL2 9.7 out of 10. As it stands, I'd give it about 7.3. Let's hope valve releases a hands patch in the near future.

Or maybe we'll have to wait until HL3 :( 

It's pretty easy to see why they didn't include hands:

On the buggy - you can look around about 90 degrees to either side of the front of the buggy, so if you added hands you'd also have to add arms, and probably shoulders, so at what point do you stop rendering things? The arms would also obscure the view quite a bit, which would be irritating given the lack of control you have over your viewpoint in an FPS compared to real life. Plus, even assuming you could work all of this, the extra polys/texture memory for a high resolution pair of arms would probably has been the first thing to get cut again when you start looking for optimisations.

Holding objects - Basically thiswould be really, really hard to do. If you think of how many different ways you use your hands to hold different objects, that should give you some idea of why. Even if you could program some very flexable code that would make the hands grasp things intelligently, adapt to different sizes of object correctly, and not look stupid 90% of the time, it would very likely be a very large hog on resources. Remember that the objects still interact with the world while you carry them, so when they start colliding with things you'd have to keep updating the hands, and that's when it'd get CPU intensive.

As an aside, I personally don't think valve originally intended you to be able to pick up objects with your hands, as the gravity gun was a neat way around the problem of hand grasping animations. But then seeing how well people responded to the interaction with physics in the game meant they decided to add the current method to allow for physics stuff in the early parts of the game. I could be (more) wrong about this bit, but it always seemed to me like a 'gameplay first' decision - as much gameplay as you can get out of stacking crates... 

Hands are missing for immersion's sake - your hands are on the keyboard and mouse (or if you're czg at a barney bit, on your schlong). Seeing someone else's hands on the steering wheel or crates you pick up and etc is a cue that you're controlling someone else, not being them.

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