about that bink

[jimbones]

... or they could be like Ant Lions and live in the sand (another pic).

yeah! I would call them .. arachnids!

no, wait...

 

[Takaitokuten]

For Gods sake it's a manhole cover! You guys are over analyzing details of the game.

 

[BoRn[nBk]]

Why dont you people go on living your own damn lifes? the bastards at valve are living theres and there job is too make GAMES i know all of you adore sitting back and playing a graphicly advanced video game and alot of you people probly wack off too that while your playing the game YOU SICK TWISTED BASTARDS! hahahahahhaha im stoned you think there will be pot smoking in Half Life 2 picture gordon stoned as hell with the G-man lol is the G-man the head guy of the gorrila unit? haha white guy leadin a bunch of black guys that think there some hard sh*t

 

[CyberPitz]

silly people... "its obviously the rupture leading to the rift in the space-time continium leading you all to the big boss at the end of the game!!!!!!!"

Quoted For Truth

 

[Ownzed]

Yes shadows are nice, but even if there is one shadow bug like in CS:S i get irritated by it.

 

[She]

Oh...
The antlions remind me of those jumping spiders in Unreal2..
When they jump... no?

"Exactly" the same..

Hmm.. another thing..
There are no Blood Decals created in the Coast bink..
Not even when a combine get "crushed" by the crane...

 

[ytinupmi]

Oh...
The antlions remind me of those jumping spiders in Unreal2..
When they jump... no?

"Exactly" the same..

Hmm.. another thing..
There are no Blood Decals created in the Coast bink..
Not even when a combine get "crushed" by the crane...

blood decals have been removed from the whole game, valve wants to get an E rating so the game sells better.

 

[ahardy668]

Can't this be fixed if the shadows are the same shade?

Seems like that would be an easy fix. I wonder why they are two shades anyway? If they were the same color "Problem Solved".

Does anyone have any ideas why they would be different shades??

 

[killahsin-[CE]]

not only is it wrong, it's very wrong, shaddows do NOT have hard edges ever that high up. hold out a cup in a room, you might see a shaded area on the ground, you don't see a solid shape.

shadows render wrong in every way possible except where it shows up.

that is pretty bad.

btw, when i say "that high up", i'm speaking of right before the screenshot shown. the shadows look the same when the giant crate thingy is really really high up.

No offense but obviously you don't understand how any game renders shadows than. In the current world there is no such technique to do what it is you are talking about. Perhaps in the future, when there are shadow rendering engines built specifically onto graphics cards, maybe. At the same time alot of other engines will be put onto graphics cards. You will most likely see physics specific architecture, as well as shadows....and so forth. But with the current technology and the current ways shadows are rendered, including 'carmacks reverse' what you speak of is not possible.

 

[ViolenceJack]

did any one bitch about the err flashing effects apearing through stuff in the early vids. Like bullets hitting stuff and producing sparks but you could see through cars. why not bring that back up, although it was stated in a CS:S changelog that was fixed wasnt it. oh well.

The explination for this is. City 17 and the surrounding area have this big light which is used as a artificial sun. The old black mesa scientists produced this new way of producing light which was close to the effectiveness of the sun but its abit buggy, as particles pass through objects which makes it so shadows do not show like your usual sun and you get this phenomenon where you can see the shadows for each individual object.

There happy now.

oh yeah i forgot to mention. Jesus christ, stuff magically floats in this game. You saw some one use some silly gun thing this barrel thing was just floating infront of him in midair. i mean wtf, bug or what.

 

[shad3r]

Seems like that would be an easy fix. I wonder why they are two shades anyway? If they were the same color "Problem Solved".

Does anyone have any ideas why they would be different shades??

the shadows _are_ the same shade, but it's a transparent shade that is blended on top of what is already drawn there, making everything a little darker when a shadow is on it.

when you blend one shadow on top of another shadow, it gets double darkened. that is the problem.

there are ways to fix it but they involve extra rendering passes - maybe valve found it wasn't worth the performance loss to fix a problem you don't see much. i can think of two ways to fix it that i pointed out earlier, but i haven't tried implementing them so i don't know what the performance hit would be.

btw killahsin, Carmack's reverse doesn't have anything to do with soft shadow edges and there are ways to make soft shadows with current tech, but realistic ones are slow. Half Life 2's shadows have soft edges in the DX9 mode.

 

[inkined]

it looks more like a oil spill or stain duh

 

[ahardy668]

the shadows _are_ the same shade, but it's a transparent shade that is blended on top of what is already drawn there, making everything a little darker when a shadow is on it.

when you blend one shadow on top of another shadow, it gets double darkened. that is the problem.

I went back and watched the video and you're exactly right, that's what is happening. I'm not sure how they could fix that but hopefully they can/did.

 

[She]

You can clearly see that the "container" that gordon lifts with the crane is containing crates of some sort..
Just in the beginning when the container lifts from the ground, you can see crateshadows that fade away under the container..

 

[Xstacy]

What if it's a Oil Spill??? Maybe the combine didn't realize what was in a tank?

 

[Yombi]

um if this is still talking about the shadow of the magnet....all it is is that the shadows are being rendered in the wrong order....its been rendered like container shadow then magnet shadow on top instead of the magnet shadow THEN the container shadow ontop. thats what i think anyway

 

[brokenjago]

I'm going to have to be brutely honest.

If the worst thing I can say about the game is that the shadows are not realistic to the point of perfection then by joad; this is one of the best games made.

^_^_^ What he said

 

[killahsin-[CE]]

btw killahsin, Carmack's reverse doesn't have anything to do with soft shadow edges and there are ways to make soft shadows with current tech, but realistic ones are slow. Half Life 2's shadows have soft edges in the DX9 mode.

My comment wasnt in regards to soft shadow edges but about the way shadows themselves are rendered verse the vertices and polygons they represent. In regards to his post about how perfect angular growing bluring shadows can be done and whatnot. I.E distance vs intensity vs hieght. My comment had nothing to do with soft shadows, heh. What he was refering to was not what is repsentative of realistic shadows now, but rather in the future.

 

[MaDMaXX]

I hate these threads, but just a bit of info for you all, the engine used for this bink is 9 months old, lots of things have been cleaned up and tweaked since then, the face in the trainstation bink for the guy whom tells you not to drink the water is now fully animated and with a better texture, it looks sweet.

 

[PvtRyan]

I hate these threads, but just a bit of info for you all, the engine used for this bink is 9 months old, lots of things have been cleaned up and tweaked since then, the face in the trainstation bink for the guy whom tells you not to drink the water is now fully animated and with a better texture, it looks sweet.

Not that I wish to question you, but how do you know that?

 

[Feath]

I hate these threads, but just a bit of info for you all, the engine used for this bink is 9 months old, lots of things have been cleaned up and tweaked since then, the face in the trainstation bink for the guy whom tells you not to drink the water is now fully animated and with a better texture, it looks sweet.

He always was fully animated, just you couldn't see his mouth move on the lower quality video.

 

[MaDMaXX]

blood decals have been removed from the whole game, valve wants to get an E rating so the game sells better.

No they haven't

 

[MaDMaXX]

He always was fully animated, just you couldn't see his mouth move on the lower quality video.

Uh uh, his upper face isn't animated, his head is totally static, the mouth always moved, but it now looks very realistic, new texture, more animation, same for all NPC's


I know this because i pt'd the latest build as of last thursday night (9th sept)

 

[Feath]

Hmm, are you saying he looks better in the BINK than in the shakycam, or are you saying that the game (as it is now) looks better than the BINK (and shakycam)?

EDIT: Hmm, you were. Completely misunderstood your post, sorry.

 

[Demonmerc]

um if this is still talking about the shadow of the magnet....all it is is that the shadows are being rendered in the wrong order....its been rendered like container shadow then magnet shadow on top instead of the magnet shadow THEN the container shadow ontop. thats what i think anyway

Its not the order that matters, its the fact that all the shadow is doing is darkening the area it projects onto. Unfortunately the shadows are drawn on the ground instead of any object holding them. So the crate projects a shadow, and the barrel in the crate projects a shadow as well. When darkening the ground, the crate can't see the barrel and vice versa. The engine isn't smart enough to know that it is darkening an area that is already darkened.

 

[poseyjmac]

Its not the order that matters, its the fact that all the shadow is doing is darkening the area it projects onto. Unfortunately the shadows are drawn on the ground instead of any object holding them. So the crate projects a shadow, and the barrel in the crate projects a shadow as well. When darkening the ground, the crate can't see the barrel and vice versa. The engine isn't smart enough to know that it is darkening an area that is already darkened.

well ill do a service for valve by giving them this line of code to add to the engine

if place = shadowed
do not shadow it again!
else shadow it!

your welcome valve

 

[Feath]

well ill do a service for valve by giving them this line of code to add to the engine

if place = shadowed
do not shadow it again!
else shadow it!

your welcome valve

Well done, now when one shadow slightly overlaps then one (or both) shadows will completely disappear.

It's not that simple.

 

[poseyjmac]

if sense of humor = 0
goto feath

 

[Feath]

if sense of humor = 0
goto feath

That was for the benefit of people who may agree with you.

 

[Mechagodzilla]

If the slightly buggy shadows are too distracting to me, I'll just turn them off and wait for the inevitable patch over steam. Valve will be continually upgrading the game as hardware progresses, so It's only a matter of time before they put really good shadows in, if they haven't already.

I never missed the shadows in HL1, so I won't mind them being removed.

One thing though: is it really so impossible that Valve fixed the problem? After all, the shadows of the NPCs limbs don't overlap onto the shadow of the torso, or anything like that. The roof of the cargo container doesn't overlap through the floor of the container.

Would it really be too tough to make the same apply to the shadows of two seperate models?

 

[poseyjmac]

That was for the benefit of people who may agree with you.

all they really have to do is instead of 'darkening', just make it assign a static semi-transparent value to all shadows. its crude, but its prettier than layered shadows.

 

[shad3r]

all they really have to do is instead of 'darkening', just make it assign a static semi-transparent value to all shadows. its crude, but its prettier than layered shadows.

they _are_ assigning a static semi-transparent value for each shadow. it takes what is already in the framebuffer and blends it with a transparent black colour. do that twice on the same pixel and you get a double-darkened pixel. only way to avoid that is non-transparent solid black shadows.

before you were talking about only ever blending the shadow colour in _once_ per pixel. to do that you can draw each shadow once into a non-visible buffer (stencil buffer or alpha channel or something else) and use that to work out what bits of the scene are shadowed. then you do another pass to darken all those shadowed bits by the same amount.

or you check the stencil buffer before you shadow a pixel - if the stencil buffer is clear, shadow the pixel, then mark the stencil buffer so it doesn't get shadowed again. repeat.

both those methods are a lot more work than the engine is doing at the moment just blending shadows on top of each other. the newer cards are faster at stencil buffer stuff, but they are optimised for Doom3 style stencil shadow volumes - dunno if it helps Valve any with their shadows. it may not have been worth the performance drop to fix it - we will find out when we see the final game.

or perhaps MadMaXX can tell us if he's seen the latest build?

 

[poseyjmac]

they are assigning a static semi-transparent value for each shadow. it takes what is already in the framebuffer and blends it with a transparent black colour. do that twice on the same pixel and you get a double-darkened pixel.

you are talking about only ever blending the shadow colour in _once_ per pixel. to do that you need to draw each shadow once into a non-visible buffer (stencil buffer or alpha channel or something else) and use that to work out what bits of the scene are shadowed. then you do another pass to darken all those shadowed bits by the same amount.

that is a lot more work than the engine is doing at the moment just blending shadows on top of each other. it may not have been worth the performance drop to do it that way- we will find out when we see the final game.

or perhaps MadMaXX can tell us if he's seen the latest build?

yea, no doubt there would be a performance drop, but newer video cards can handle it. itd just be nice if shadow detail was scalable.

 

[shad3r]

oops you quoted me before i edited. i thought of something else.
heheh

 

[MaDMaXX]

Hmm, i can say this, the shadows are part of the game, i saw nothing that distracted me in the slightest, so i wouldn't bother about that.

As to how they'd fix them, i don't know, i cba going into it, there is a very high chance they're already fixed, unfortunately i didn't play the scene we're talking about so can't say for certain, i noticed nothing out of the ordenary during play though.

 

[NeLi]

I never noticed the overlapping shadow until threads were created about it here on HL2.net...

 

[flo_Orian]

I think im going to play without shadows. Better none than these stupid ones : E

 

[johnnypoopoopant]

i dont think its taht bad not every game is perfect so it really dont bother me sorta