Dynamic lighting?

[Mountain Man]

Something annoying I found about the HL2 lighning is the static of lights all around. No such thing as shooting lights out, no pushing them around. I very enjoyed that in Far Cry and it adds pretty much to the game's reality level. Granted, the light maps in HL2 are quite good from a photorealistic view, but it's static and lifeless.

On the other hand, Half-Life 2's average environment is considerably more detailed and interactive than anything in Far Cry. Valve's incredible physics engine didn't come for free in terms of CPU cycles, which explains why Half-Life 2 uses "cheap" lighting and shadows.

 

[Tupper]

"Dynamic lighting" has been in games for a long, long time. Of course HL2 has dynamic lighting, though there are instances where it isn't used to full effect. What it doesn't have is fully dynamic shadowing, which Doom 3 specialises in (everything is shadowed in real-time).

Doom 3 is technically proficient, but Half-Life 2 still manages to be more aesthetically pleasing to most people, due to better art direction and design. Of course this is subjective, but I think on the whole most people would say that HL2 is the more beautiful game.

This post ends it all, everyone needs to read this.

 

[Pesmerga]

Lighting and graphics in general is certainly not Source's strong point. It will most likely only be liscensed for RPG games.

So untrue. Radiosity is Half-Life2's strongest point, besides maybe physics (which is better than anything else, but not as important as lighting).

Dynamic lighting takes alot of system resources, and Valve used it sparingly during development to keep their engine well-playable on lower end machines while keeping high end machines busy.

 

[FireCrack]

My major qualm with halflife 2 was inconsistency in the fraphics, sure the lighting and radiosity therein were awesome but the frire looked like absolute ass, go to that mineshaft level then when still on the beams explode a barel to set a headcrab alight, you see "sheets" becasuee the fire is aligned along the vertical axis.

It would be nice to se a mod re-implement all these "lost features" however..

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

I think i'm the only one who isin't nit-picky about this, I Just find it hard to care.

 

[Cypher19]

Non-power-of-2 won't be that great an issue with the new cards and the relevant GL extension. But is that really what he said? It's been a while since I watched that and I can't remember much, but I thought he said that even with a shadow map as large as 2048x2048 a global source (eg sun) didn't make very nice shadows on a large map, that the jaggies were bound to get you eventually, so that was why he was working on that mip-mapping-like approach (based on distance, not screen visibility) to his mapping textures?

Well, he decided to have two seperate systems for directional (sun) and omnidirectional lights. For the directionals, primarily for use outside, he is going to do a cropped-mip-map like system, where near the camera the shadow map is a really high resolution so that it's not only smooth, but can pick up little details like grass. The omni lights use the system I described above.

Does it still satisfy the unified light system he wants in his specs? Of course. Doom3 still had seperate directional and omni lights, it's just that for those two the difference in code was REALLY small (slightly different shadow volume and lighting calcs).

Ooc, I haven't really experimented with this too much, perhaps you have: Do you know what the performance drop is with non-power-of-2 textures with the things that you mentioned like a new GL extension?

 

[PvtRyan]

I wasn't too sure about that. I'm sort of going off the early screenshots from maps where the light-map resolution was low and blocky, and the muzzle flashes were correspondingly blocky too. I'm also pretty sure they're a bit blocky in CSS, along with some trickery in the smoke. But if there's a written Valve comment saying the muzzle flashes are per-pixel now, I'd accept it.

EDIT: http://www.halflife2.net/media/displayimage.php?album=2&pos=13
This was the screenshot I was thinking of.

Dynamic lighting does seem to correspond to lightmap resolution. When you put a dynamic light in your map, it only starts to look nice when you put the lightmap resolution on 4 units/luxel. So I guess dynamic lights light up the lightmap, and entities per vertex.
Although I believe that the smoke from smokegrenades was lit per pixel.

 

[Foebane]

Enough of this! Look, it's simple:

Source is ideal for the requirements of Half-Life 2, and
Doom 3 Engine is ideal for the requirements of Doom 3...

OK? True, both engines were designed with both game's requirements in mind, but... well, there you go.

Now, enough of this comparison and one-upmanship crap.

 

[jondy]

Damn f'kin straight. I'm sick of people comparing the two. Apples and oranges. Get over it.

 

[DreadLord]

Right.. light comes off when you shoot your weapon..

http://img144.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img144&image=decbble00128az.jpg
http://img144.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img144&image=d1town0100003if.jpg

 

[Ultimape]

I don't like the harshness of doom3's lighting, if they had sometype of radiosity, it would be so much better. It was cool how they made the shadows accurate and all, but being PITCH BLACK outside those areas was insanely unrealistic IMO. HL2 might not have realisic shadows, but the net effect is an illusion of realistic lighting, those shadow glitches/positions really arent that obvious unless you go around looking for them, and those prerendered lightamaps were wonderful. 100% of the time, the doom3's lighting and shadowing model was always infront of you.

Radiosity is the property of a material to reflect light back from a lightsource and illuminate other stuff on its own. Its like what happens when you put a red apple up to a white wall, the wall with show redish and the apple will be whitesih.

 

[Syphoon!!]

Ooc, I haven't really experimented with this too much, perhaps you have: Do you know what the performance drop is with non-power-of-2 textures with the things that you mentioned like a new GL extension?

You'd have to talk to someone who's got the money to buy one of the new cards :x

 

[bongmachinery666]

so has anyone found a way to implement just some simple lighting for the weapons and fire?? so the surrounding areas are illuminated too... CSS does it so why the f*** isnt it in HL2?? and to all the retarded imbecile fanboys who cry at any criticism of HL2, f*** idiots... i think some people have been ignoring the age rating on the game LOL
but anyway, is there a mod or something out there to implement some simple dynamic lighting on weapons and fire??? it looks really damn unrealistic without it, i dont think it would be too taxing on the hardware, just a simple effect like in CSS would make a big difference i think the fire would look real pretty with some simple lighting like that... but without, god damn it looks unrealistic... i wanna play through the game again but im not going to until i find some sort of mod to implement some lighting in those instances i mentioned

 

[itsmygame]

Couldnt dissagree more.
Heres some ss's i picked randomly with some lighting effects
Water ..2 sided
inside 1
inside2

and the flashlight effects are just amazing.

Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding. We have a winner. :O