What if... (about Lost Coast)

[Cyan Leader]

A lot of people are not happy with Lost Coast to be released only after DoD:S, but I think I came up with the reason why.

Although a lot of people won't be able to run it in a good performance, most will donwload it. Now put that with the DoD:S preloading.

I personaly think Valve's servers could suffer an overload, and because they don't want to risk it as they did with HL2's release, they are not releasing both very close. I think this because you can ready the reviews and it is pretty much done. And Valve's top priority is releasing DoD:S, not Lost Coast.

What do you think?

 

[dogboy73]

I think that at least makes sense even if it doesn't turn out to be the reason. Gabe said on that interview that was posted the other week that when HL2 was released the servers at their end couldn't hack it & that they had learnt from this. In other words Lost coast is unlikely to appear any time near the release of another major product.

 

[bigdeezy23]

Nah I don't think so, it's not like everyone will be getting DOD:S. We were all REQUIRED to download the rest of HL2 when it was released, but maybe 30 to 40% of HL2 owners will be getting DOD:S. So with that and Lost Coast, the load on servers should be much, much less, especially because Valve now knows how to handle their bandwith.

 

[Kadayi]

Lost coast is just an HDR showcase level, it's not going to be a full on expansion like Aftermath (ETA: Novemberish/Decemberish apparently) I wouldn't get too worked up about it.

 

[FuzzDad]

Kadayi's spot on. Less than 15 min of gameplay it is only intended to show off Valve technology. It's a single level in the game. The NPC's you'll interact with are 8000 polies...the textures are four times or more dense...all the models are extreme- poly. It's designed to push the edges of any gaming rig (much like D3 on ultra high qaulity) and show you how much the Source engine on crack can run.

 

[Solver]

There's not going to be a similar overload:

1. Not all HL2 owners will be getting DOD:S. Less than half of them will, probably.
2. A small fraction of HL2 owners will be getting the Lost Coast. Not everyone even knows it's going to be out, but the main thing is, I'm sure that less than 5% of people who have HL2 have computers that could handle Lost Coast, if it really needs as much power as Valve say.

 

[DrDevin]

There's not going to be a similar overload:

1. Not all HL2 owners will be getting DOD:S. Less than half of them will, probably.
2. A small fraction of HL2 owners will be getting the Lost Coast. Not everyone even knows it's going to be out, but the main thing is, I'm sure that less than 5% of people who have HL2 have computers that could handle Lost Coast, if it really needs as much power as Valve say.

1) So half of them is still *at least* a million people.

2) Everyone can play it if they turn HDR off and/or lower settings. Everyone wants 15-20 min of free gameplay so why not get it?

There you could end up with 3 million downloads near the same time, thats a huge number of people!

 

[Solver]

No, everyone can not play Lost Coast. Lost Coast, even without HDR, still had very high polygon counts, very detailed textures - things that a GeForce 5200 on a computer with 256 MB of RAM will NOT handle.

 

[Cyan Leader]

But still, people will have the least hope that it might work with tweaking and all. Most will download it.

 

[hi_ted]

The system used to demonstrate the game (Lost Coast) to us today was an Athlon 64 3800+ with 2GB of RAM and a GeForce 6800GT - high end for many people, but not stratospheric. If you needed further proof, the 1024x768 2xAA screenshots featured in this article were taken on a 1.6Ghz Centrino notebook with only 1GB of RAM and an aging 128MB FireGL graphics card. True, it ran at 10FPS at High Detail, but it was playable enough to appreciate the overall achievement.

"HDR has been added to the Source engine and the performance hit is managable: between 10-30% perhaps"

 

[RaBiD WeAzEL]

Yeah... The thing about the 10-30% hit is that that is only for HDR.

Poly count will take a much larger hit, I'd project...

Any... I think my computer will be able to handle it with about 15-35fps on high 1024x768, possible 1280x1024...

Anyway... I'm happily awaiting it anyway. I just wanna see how pretty it is...

 

[giant384]

Yeah... The thing about the 10-30% hit is that that is only for HDR.

Poly count will take a much larger hit, I'd project...

Any... I think my computer will be able to handle it with about 15-35fps on high 1024x768, possible 1280x1024...

Anyway... I'm happily awaiting it anyway. I just wanna see how pretty it is...

i wouldnt think that high mabye 1024x768 at the most

 

[hi_ted]

My 9600xt is running HL2 at 1024x720 with full AA and AF. I'm not worried. I'll drop it down to 800x600 with no AA if I have to.