shadows and water reflections

[camamassa21]

hey there....
ever since i bought half life 2 it wont seem to let me use high detailed shadows or have anything other than detailed reflections. I go to the menu and change them and click apply and nothing happens. I admit i have lower system specs but i can play doom 3 with shadows and it works fine. any ideas? thanks

Cameron

 

[Bobcat]

What kind of hardware do you have? It might be that it simply isn't capable of doing what you want it to.

 

[WhiteZero]

HL2 dosent have Dynamic Shadows, it has dynamic lighting.

Your not going to get Doom3 type Shadows with HL2.

 

[EC]

To have water reflections, you need a DirectX 9 videocard. I believe the same thing applies for the high-quality shadows.
The reason you have shadows on Doom 3 is it is a different engine. Doom 3 uses OpenGL, while HL2 uses Direct3D.

 

[The Dark Elf]

hey there....
ever since i bought half life 2 it wont seem to let me use high detailed shadows or have anything other than detailed reflections. I go to the menu and change them and click apply and nothing happens. I admit i have lower system specs but i can play doom 3 with shadows and it works fine. any ideas? thanks

Cameron

D3 and HL2 use entirely different methods. HL2 is DX based, which means if your hardware isn't at a particular level of DirectX, you wont get those effects no matter how hard you try (without re-writing the code)

D3 uses OpenGL and while you still need to be using a version of OGL above a certain number, it'll look the same on all machines, simply run faster or slower depending on the cpu.

 

[socK]

One thing about DooM3, the fire effect (wavy heat haze) did not show up unless you had a DX9 card. Why is that?

 

[WhiteZero]

One thing about DooM3, the fire effect (wavy heat haze) did not show up unless you had a DX9 card. Why is that?

Because it's a DX9 effect?
:rolling:

 

[Ames]

OpenGL 2.0 effect....?

edit: no not 1.4, why did I think that. Most DX9 cards support OpenGL 2.0.

 

[The Dark Elf]

One thing about DooM3, the fire effect (wavy heat haze) did not show up unless you had a DX9 card. Why is that?

As Shens says, or possibly it didn't show up if the machine wouldn't have been able to handle it.. Though I'm pretty sure I saw all the effects when I tried D3 on my older machine, ran terribly with everything on, but im pretty sure it all appeared.

 

[Foebane]

Hl2 doesn't have dynamic ANYTHING, FFS!! It's not Doom 3, you know. A far superior engine.

 

[Ames]

Hl2 doesn't have dynamic ANYTHING, FFS!! It's not Doom 3, you know. A far superior engine.

Saying that would get you flamed even by Doom 3 fanboys.

 

[The Dark Elf]

Hl2 doesn't have dynamic ANYTHING, FFS!! It's not Doom 3, you know. A far superior engine.

You need to quote who your talking to cause otherwise your not making much sense, we're not discussing if it has dynamic light and shadow, the original guy asked if there was a way to get better shadows in HL2 and used D3 running fine as an example, that was quickly cleared up that neither use the same method of lighting/shadow. Then someone else asked about the heat haze effect in D3.

Nobody is saying HL2 has dynamic shadows.

For sake of argument, HL2 does have dynamic light, not dynamic shadows.

 

[ghostrider4450]

Hl2 doesn't have dynamic ANYTHING, FFS!! It's not Doom 3, you know. A far superior engine.

Far superior in terms of what? Shitty graphics that can only render things 50 ft away with shadows.....Yea ok dont see too many mods for that SUPERIOR engine.

 

[Cole]

Hl2 doesn't have dynamic ANYTHING, FFS!! It's not Doom 3, you know. A far superior engine.

Far Superior?
In physics? Ha.
Source I believe can render dynamic light and dynamic shadows, just HL2 does not use them for performance reasons. I think anyway.

The Doom 3 engine is not anywhere near far superior. Maybe when it comes to shadows, but...thats about it.

 

[Physicles]

Doom 3 uses stenciled shadows, for which you only need a stencil buffer (anything DirectX 7 and higher does this, although fill rate is a huge issue). Half-Life 2 uses depth textured shadows, which require some more advanced GPU operations (anything DirectX 8 or higher, which includes GeForce3) and one more texture unit, which basically means you need four to do anything useful with the shadows. Their implementation could even require DirectX8.1, not sure.

What hardware do you have, exactly?

Btw, at the risk of getting flamed, Doom 3 shadows look better by nature -- unless you happen to like soft shadows with more jaggies (look *closely* at HL2's shadows, and you'll see what I mean). The resolution of stenciled shadows is that of your screen, whereas depth textured shadows require that the object be rendered first to a finite-resolution texture, and then mapped onto some surface. I haven't mentioned performance or flexibility; they each have their strengths there as well.

I guess the ultimate question is which method supports soft shadows more easily, since we'll be seeing those pretty soon. I don't know... anyone out there?

 

[Zeus]

Far Superior?
The Doom 3 engine is not anywhere near far superior. Maybe when it comes to shadows, but...thats about it.

Also it is superior in lighting, but it doesn't even have water let alone water effects like HL2's

 

[hungryduck]

The fact is that DOOM 3 was made for a different kind of game....the engine tailors to the dark corridor romp that it is. HL2 is presented in much more grand environments, so the Source engine cater's to that by making the large environment as a whole look good, not just the interior of buildings and sewers. Both engines are good, and have their strengths, but I will admit, Source does win out in terms of flexibility and physics.

 

[CREMATOR666]

DOOM3 was too "plastic" IMO

 

[Ultimape]

sentciled shadows aren't that great... too much processing required for even one light, and I think it is rather unrealistic everything is metalic but nothign really reflects. It does make a pretty picture, but untill we start seeing cards that actually simulate the photons or light rays being reflected around and use radiosity and that type of thing, we cant really say we've seen anything yet... by the way, HL2's most basic game world shadows are pre renedered, so in essense it does that "relected light rays & radiosity" effect, if only on the world itself. This information is stored on the map to LIGHT objects quite accurately, and can be set to quite a realistic level. Why do something realtime when it isn't really needed yet?

 

[socK]

http://www.artificialstudios.com/ :O

Now that's a sexy game engine. HDR is so pretty.

 

[CREMATOR666]

Network Error (tcp_error)

A communication error occurred: "Connection refused"
The Web Server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time.

For assistance, contact your network support team.

:|

 

[Muhahahaha]

I would look closely, but check out my video card... dang.

Edit: Oh, just me being dumb again. I was talking about shadow, which was talked about much earlier in this thread.

 

[Llama]

Can the Source engine SUPPORT HDR Lighting AND Shadow?