City 17 view from Citadel. What were they thinking?!?!?

It appears that I was the only person who just went "Ooooh, purdee"
 
kestrel7e7 said:
In comparison with the general high quality of Half-Life 2's design (read "Raising the Bar"), the City17 view from the Citadel is very disappointing.
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The view from the citadel is borderline identical to that shown in the citadel concepts in Raising the Bar. In fact, I think the exact same texture was used.

I'm really not getting you here. Very few people, I'm sure, expected to see the entire city laid out in detail from the top of the citadel because no game is that advanced graphically yet, especially when you're having the entire graphics-heavy combat and ending sequences going on.
And before the release, the citadel wasn't universally the expected site of the ending.

Top-down shots of the darker city-17 levels show exactly what I was talking about: the major light sources are small dots of orange fire and big blue combine lights. After Nova Prospekt, the first parts of the City 17 fight happen in the very early morning, and the end shows the sunrise (or sunset, depending on how long it takes you to beat the citadel).
http://www.hl-inside***/showpic/?/images/news/prima_sg_big.jpg

In fact, the focus of the elevator ride is much more on the sunrise than on the darkened city. It might not have met your expectations, but it seemed fairly evident that the point wasn't to remind you how awful the ground is, but to emphasize how peaceful it on top of the tower, which fits thematically with Breen's disconnect from the problems of the people.

Making it look consistent could have been done with relative ease using an appropriate satellite image of a European city and some simple Photoshop manipulation.
Click to expand...

newbitmapimageya2.png


I dunno, I'm just not buying it. If you're looking for large-scale desolation, the orange lights can easily (and probably do) represent fires resulting from the combat.

Citadel_view1.jpg


Many vast black patches could easily be areas of destruction from the combine walls.

Not even Jesus could look at this darkened photo with specks of light and say with certainty that a war wasn't going on. And, given current technology, this was pretty much the only way to represent such a view.

Imagination, really. Abstract orange dots on a black background shouldn't provoke such an adverse reaction, especially when the alternative you suggest isn't really possible.

It's like one of those guys who searches for bigfoot in a blurry photo and sees exactly what he expects, except all you're looking for sadness. :p
 
Citadel_skybox_comparison.jpg


Citadel_expected_view.jpg


hl2-raising the bar 180.JPG


Citadel_view1_grid.jpg



European_city_reference.jpg


"Early visions of the Combine wall had it devouring the City over the course of the game, an ominous metal monster that constantly reconfigured itself as it advanced." Viktor Antonov & Eric Kirchmer ("Raising the Bar")

"Everything about the Citadel is invasive - it's digging into the ground beneath City 17 while its articulated walls rake outward, demolishing everything in their path." David Speyrer ("Raising the Bar")

"Additionally, City 17 itself is being devoured, as Combine walls spread outward from the Citadel, consuming the city's buildings. It is unknown whether the Combine are purely using this method to destroy the city, or whether they're actually gathering raw materials from the city's structures. Because of all of the above factors, even if Combine rule ends, extensive rebuilding, cleanup and xeno-extermination would have to take place to make the planet habitable again." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_(Half-Life_2)
 
Well I had no idea City 17 was our capital city:eek: .
I'll have to go see the crater left from the citadel meltdown:p
 
Remus said:
Well I had no idea City 17 was our capital city:eek: .
I'll have to go see the crater left from the citadel meltdown:p
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New York is not capital of US :D Wash...

What I hate in the damn thing is that it feels so unrealistic, I would have expected something like traintracks to see, here in Finland the trainstation of Helsinki can be seen clearly in Google Earth, it is much like the C17 trainstation but a little bit bigger scale etc.

And there is even car lights in roads in that thing.
 
Stene said:
New York is not capital of US :D Wash...
Click to expand...

No, I was referring to kestrel's idea that it would've been better to use a satellite photo of Bucharest, which is my country's capital city.
 
Oh Samon shut up, can't you just let people have an opinion that is different from yours and let it go, or are you just too insecure?
 
Oh shit, I disagreed with you - how terrible. Please, your pissing and moaning about something so ridiculously trivial its almost laughable. Sure, a view from a much greater altitude might have made more sense but for christ’s sake you make it sound as though it is such a colossal issue.

Skim back a few pages and you'll see I agree with the idea that it does look a little silly, but in the long run I don't think I could give a shit. So please, if your going to be a twat take it elsewhere, because I'm simply not interested. Clearly the only person here with the problem is you, as highlighted in pretty much every post for the last few weeks. If you want to reply to this, take it to pm - any further reply in this thread will be deleted.

-I like how you removed the 'stfu' from your post.
 
edit: Not at all, I just composed a pm as a thread reply and accidentally posted it instead of copy&pasting, fyi.
 
Haha, now red arrows are being added to the jpegs in MS paint.

My bigfoot analogy gets sweeter by the minute. :p
 
Mechagodzilla said:
In fact, the focus of the elevator ride is much more on the sunrise than on the darkened city. It might not have met your expectations, but it seemed fairly evident that the point wasn't to remind you how awful the ground is, but to emphasize how peaceful it on top of the tower, which fits thematically with Breen's disconnect from the problems of the people.
Click to expand...

This makes a lot of sense to me.

The red arrows pointing everywhere really don't make his point clearer. I do think he is having trouble accepting the level's geometry.
 
I do think he is having trouble accepting the level's geometry.
Click to expand...

Well for one thing, the reason that the level seems so much "shorter" than the model of the tower is that placing the top of the citadel closer to the "floor" texture of the skybox is the only way to make the horizon extend into the distance with reasonable accuracy.

In other words, the skybox texture is intentionally using a completely different scale from the citadel model.

Lord knows how mortified Kest would be if the view looked like the one in his "expected view" second image; the edges of the map are visible from every possible angle, and the city is about twelve times smaller than it should be.
If that's what was expected, it's little wonder that disappointment occured.

The fact that the level is European does not mean that the streets can't follow a grid. Really.

Here's a map from Greece for example.

http://www.teletype.com/pages/gps/Euro_map/Euro_pic/Greece/greece_street.jpg

What the hell were Valve thinking when they designed Athens? Athens is even more of a grid than the city 17; I will e-mail gabe newell about this problem.

So let's get this straight:

-The fictional city doesn't look like your inaccurate model.
-The fictional city at night doesn't look specifically like Bucharest during the day.
-You cannot see small details in the dark from nearly two miles away.

Therefore the game is broken..?
 
Yes, exactly.


This board needs a special quarantine forum for really ****ing stupid threads.
 
sarcastinator said:
Yes, exactly.


This board needs a special quarantine forum for really ****ing stupid threads.
Click to expand...

Whoa, whoa easy there, without threads like this, serious problems wouldnt recieve attention, you know, only those minor problems like better graphics, and better NPC AI.

tschh...
 
But this isn't a bug or graphics problem, unless you count the texture resolution which isn't any lower than usual.

The issue at hand here is that Valve's final concept for how city 17 looks from the air did not match Kest's imagination and that made him sad.
Kest's personal taste, however, isn't a problem with the game.
 
If lots of people feel the same way, as suggested by this thread, it is.
 
pomegranate said:
If lots of people feel the same way, as suggested by this thread, it is.
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You mean Half-Life fan boys? I don't think 8 or 9 people constitute "a lot".

The people who complain about things like this I'm betting are the same who actually have trouble playing due to what they perceive as lack of realism.

"I shot a guys butt and his head popped off? Non-realistic! Game is defective and or lacking polish. I cannot concentrate."

"A city texture doesn't look exactly like an amalgamation of every scenario map in the game? Unrealistic! The mappers need to try harder. I am forcibly being sucked back into the real world."

Bull cock. It's pointless to get caught up in such trivial details.
 
Look, slight inconsistencies aren't a problem. You might as well complain about the fact that you reached the top of the Citadel after a riduculously short elevator ride.
 
pomegranate said:
I guess some people just don't have as such high standards.
Click to expand...

The first 3 times I played through HL2 was on my Pentium 3. I really didn't expect anything to look very good since I had all the settings on mid or lower.

If you are the kind of person who jumps to the latest technology and can't survive without having the highest end gadgets and graphics, sure your standards are going to be high while mine will be very low in comparison.

The fact is, it's not that my standards are low, I assure you they are much too high in some respects, but for me life-like and meticulously consistent graphics like textures are not as high on the priority list as say, control, story depth, character development, level diversity. I don't mind if things don't look quite right. It won't ruin my day, but things better damn well go left when I say go left, shoot when I say shoot, and fall if I shotty it to the face. :)
 
Look, I'll just answer the question the way it's been answered a lot, but I'll break it down so it's easyer to understand.

"What were they thinking?!" I do beleive they were thinking "Ohh... My god... Let's just use a sattellite picture of a city for the view, because the game's been delayed a bagillion times, so nobody will be looking that closely when they play the game unless they're trying to pick out all the bad stuff they can about it..." Beside that, the original game's coding was stolen, and sold illegaly (Which came to an abrupt end) which made the wait twice as long, and I think, made them look back at a lot of things they were doing at the time, and change them for the better. :)

Actually... I might have complicated it a bit... Ohh well. :|
 
Honestly it's not a huge deal, but I do specifically remember noticing that detail and thinking that it looked a bit shit. I don't think there's much to debate about. Valve made a minor oversight that they probably should have corrected, but didn't, and it's not that big of a deal.
 
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