Why new screenshots look so bad?

mrchimp said:
You are possibly the most infuriating person I have ever had the misfortune to meet on a forum, you are a hypocritical obstinate self important ignorant fool. Your signature is completely disrespectfull and is in my opinion a deliberate attempt to provoke people, which appears to be true for most of your posts as well.

You discredit people's perfectly respectable theorys and opinion's by calling them fanboys and subsquently bring a bitter taste to any debate you happen bring your word of God to. You blatantly have a bias towards FC yet you won't allow people to have a bias towards HL2 and often reffere to anyone who defends it as a fan boy, when they are in actuall fact they are just offering there genuine opinion, there's a certain level of bias and ignorance that is required of a fanboy and you are closer to it than most of the people you insult.

You are being far too obnoxious... oh and I'm still waiting to see your response to my post in the FC ps1.1 thread, if you can come up with evidense that fireing squad are a bunch of ass holes that don't know what there doing I'd love to see it. Personally I think you were just defending FC because thats what fan boys :p do (even when it doesn't need defending).

EDIT: HDR meaning high dynamic range is very significant, Fenrics going to go ape shit when he see's it being reffered to as a buzz word. Just take a look at the some of the art works useing HDRI on http://www.cgtalk.com/
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Me an ignorant? Perhaps. As for the rest, meh! Lobster was implying -as the fanboy he is- that the lately screenies were old and taken at low ress and what not. Thus making it sound like he had actually played the game. You're just flaming at me, out of frustrationg because the new media provably did not met your spectations.

And for the billionth time already, i am no fanboy of either game! As a matter of fact, the reason why i started PC gaming was because of HL1, not FarCry. Moreover, i still mantain that HL2 won't look as good as FarCry - not to be mistaken with game-play and so on, which by the way still remains to be played. You just need to be more realistic and stop acting like such of fanboy.

And yes, the people at firingsquad.com are a bunch of idiots - not assholes, i don't remember being that explicit. Their article is misleading, which i still mantain. They should have used a SP map for their useless investigation, instead of a MP one.
 
Marijn said:
i ... err. had a look at the leaked alpha and i can tell you that still images don't do the engine justice.
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yes so have i, and believe me just wait till the game is out. the textures will blow you away. the screenshots of the game are running on low detail with no AA and low tri-filter. i saw it run on a 9600XT and those screenshots are not even close to as good as it will look.
 
look at the pics at gamespy.com , at native resolution they are far nicer.
 
Wilco said:
look at the pics at gamespy.com , at native resolution they are far nicer.
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Not really, lol, they look about the same.. harder to notice the extra detail, which is disappointing in a sense
 
I just got back from the mag store, where I read the new PCGamer in which many of these "bad" screenshots are found. They are, as suspected, shunk down very tiny. But I also noticed that virtually every in game screenshot in the mag looks just as bad, including Far Cry: the same dull textures, jaggies, seemingly unbumpmapped surfaces, and so on. Yeah, that's right, even Far Cry looks awful. So I'm thinking: maybe PCGamer has some sort of rules about how high quality the shots can be: they all have to be on average hardware? Because the same argument that says "but why wouldn't Valve show their best shots" goes for Far Cry: why wouldn't THEY show their best shots?
 
Funny how there are so many experts on the net and no one can agree on anything.
 
I haven't read the whole thread but here is my theory.

I am guessing that they have the good comp(s), getting ready for Half-Life 2. If you are going to be running a demo on a game that is not released, you gotta make sure it runs perfect on those machines so you get the best publicity. Thus, I think they took the good comps, with the latest build of Half-Life 2 and are testing them to make sure it runs the game good and such, or make sure that it doesn't crash if it opens the videos :p That would be horrible. They are probably just prepping them for E3.

They also, could have set some mid-range computers as press only, so that if something bad does happen, the magazine company won't get sued (like let's say the company brought in a floopy to copy those screens onto.. it's more protection).

IDK just some guesses from me.
 
Imho we are all geeting to greedy. If you compare those shots to U2k4 ( which has solid graphics) you'll notice that theres actually a huge amount of detail in all of them. Valve has obivously chosen to take them at lower detail which is slightly confusing, but once its running in motion with full graphics its going to be amazing.
 
mrchimp said:
You are possibly the most infuriating person I have ever had the misfortune to meet on a forum, you are a hypocritical obstinate self important ignorant fool. Your signature is completely disrespectfull and is in my opinion a deliberate attempt to provoke people, which appears to be true for most of your posts as well.

You discredit people's perfectly respectable theorys and opinion's by calling them fanboys and subsquently bring a bitter taste to any debate you happen bring your word of God to. You blatantly have a bias towards FC yet you won't allow people to have a bias towards HL2 and often reffere to anyone who defends it as a fan boy, when they are in actuall fact they are just offering there genuine opinion, there's a certain level of bias and ignorance that is required of a fanboy and you are closer to it than most of the people you insult.

You are being far too obnoxious... oh and I'm still waiting to see your response to my post in the FC ps1.1 thread, if you can come up with evidense that fireing squad are a bunch of ass holes that don't know what there doing I'd love to see it. Personally I think you were just defending FC because thats what fan boys :p do (even when it doesn't need defending).

EDIT: HDR meaning high dynamic range is very significant, Fenrics going to go ape shit when he see's it being reffered to as a buzz word. Just take a look at the some of the art works useing HDRI on http://www.cgtalk.com/
Click to expand...

Hail to the chimp :cheers:
 
Caminante said:
btw, Sparta you are such fanboy dude. ;)
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Looks who's talking :LOL:
Shut up about this fanboy talk, you're only making yourself look even more like a fool Caminante.
Back on topic now. I think the main reason people are upset about the screenies is that these shots look old and "unpolished" compared to other shots of the game
 
The best explanation I can think of is that Valve had a lot of older screenies lying around, so they gave them to the magazines, knowing that they'd be shrunk down and transfered from digital to print, where the graphics are blurred.
That way, Valve gets free publicity without even shooting new screens, saving the best for E3.
The only problem is that they were released over the net, where their older flaws are clearer.
These screens are likely from before sept 30, given their purported sub-beta nature.
 
the screens look better than any game out now, you damn people need to shut the **** up and stop complaining
 
better than almost any game out, and i think they do look better than far cry... i don't think everything needs a layer of shellac on it like ever surface has on it in FC. I think in terms of art direction, content, and what it implies for gameplay, YES-these shots look better than anything else out there. In terms of graphics technology, perhaps not THE best, but close.
 
torso boy said:
well ok, painkiller looks better.
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surprisingly, the Painkiller Engine kicked ass, loved the visuals.

as Spiff said, in terms of Art direction etc Valve have the best looking "idea" however their geometry (in recent pics) is severely lacking.

Im waiting for E3, please please please please Valve make all of us eat our words. please

I may come off as negative sometimes, but I will admit it.. Im a valve/Hl/Hl2 fanboy, have been since the day I played Hl five years ago.
and probably no matter what I think it looks like I will still go out and buy the special edition.

its just dissapointing, it seems a lot of the time they lead us on by letting us think what we want about Hl2... and keeping silent (very bad)
they would like us to think the engine can do ANYTHING... a lot of the time Valve answer with things like "well its a design decision, not technical limitation", so of course we all speculate and in our minds build HL2 up to be the beast that it should be.
but when we are let down people say "what did you expect?" ... well we didnt know WHAT to expect really so we just wanted what we were lead to believe it might be.

and Hl 1 was originally delayed a year, and came out looking as though it was revolutionized graphically.. so a LOT of us were thinking the same might be the case this time through... so it was like getting slapped in the face with the facts.
it leads a lot of us to thinking what were Valve doing all this time, and blah dee blah.

I wouldnt care so much if I didnt like Hl2 so much :p

anywhoo.. poop, just give us the f'n game already, f*** it if its ugly as HL1 or as pretty as Unreal 3 (that wasnt a comparison) we are all still gonna buy it :)
 
There's another thread that just popped up, that says that the site that first posted the pics didn't get them from Valve. They appear to be unofficial.
 
If anything spoiled us it wasn't FarCry but the HDR vid. The HDR vid makes FarCry look like a cartoon. The HDR vid was also rumoured to be the benchmark. Assuming that is true, why would they release a benchmark of something we wouldn't get to see in the game? It doesn't seem likely that they had to optimize the game until it looks that bad and they also said the game ran at 60fps at full on an ATI 9800 (which isn't even top of the line anymore). They said there would be over 1200 kinds of shaders in the game, they released a PDF about their normal mapping and radiosity, they said they added more dx9 effects after E3 last year. Maybe I'm optimistic but it seems reasonable to say that these screenshots do not represent what the game on high detail will look like.
This is actually how I felt about most of the released HL2 screenshots because, awesome as they were, none was flawless. It always seems like Valve are putting art polish last on their list of priorities (except for the HDR vid.
 
TALK ABOUT HEADHUNTERS!

I think the game looks incredible! I dont know why we are even discussing the FSAA, its obvious it wasnt being used. The game looks like it is in 1024, so if your me, your going to be playing it in 1280 with 4x FSAA. Game looks great.
 
Well, some of those screenshots aren't so bad once I look at them better. In fact, the train station one is downright awesome.
 
Styloid said:
If anything spoiled us it wasn't FarCry but the HDR vid. The HDR vid makes FarCry look like a cartoon. The HDR vid was also rumoured to be the benchmark. Assuming that is true, why would they release a benchmark of something we wouldn't get to see in the game? It doesn't seem likely that they had to optimize the game until it looks that bad and they also said the game ran at 60fps at full on an ATI 9800 (which isn't even top of the line anymore). They said there would be over 1200 kinds of shaders in the game, they released a PDF about their normal mapping and radiosity, they said they added more dx9 effects after E3 last year. Maybe I'm optimistic but it seems reasonable to say that these screenshots do not represent what the game on high detail will look like.
This is actually how I felt about most of the released HL2 screenshots because, awesome as they were, none was flawless. It always seems like Valve are putting art polish last on their list of priorities (except for the HDR vid.
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agreed. 10 character limit.
 
While those who know me know that I never though Half-Life 2's graphics were as impressive as most others... the new screens do not seem to do justice to the game. First of all, they are very low resolution screens, so that really give syou no idea of how detailed the textures are, also... it seems that only 1 of the pics had any specular/pixel shader effects turned on on the texturing.

Something's fishing. Half-Life 2 does look better than those screens might imply. I don't know why Valve released such second-rate shots.

Styloid said:
If anything spoiled us it wasn't FarCry but the HDR vid. The HDR vid makes FarCry look like a cartoon. The HDR vid was also rumoured to be the benchmark. Assuming that is true, why would they release a benchmark of something we wouldn't get to see in the game? It doesn't seem likely that they had to optimize the game until it looks that bad and they also said the game ran at 60fps at full on an ATI 9800 (which isn't even top of the line anymore). They said there would be over 1200 kinds of shaders in the game, they released a PDF about their normal mapping and radiosity, they said they added more dx9 effects after E3 last year. Maybe I'm optimistic but it seems reasonable to say that these screenshots do not represent what the game on high detail will look like.
This is actually how I felt about most of the released HL2 screenshots because, awesome as they were, none was flawless. It always seems like Valve are putting art polish last on their list of priorities (except for the HDR vid.
Click to expand...


Well, err... I do not agree that the HDR render made Far Cry look unimpressive, because i've always though and still do think that Far Cry is more impressive than Half-Life 2, graphically. This will be further amplified when Crytek releases their new patch for the game that will upgrade to pixel shaders 3.0 which was shown at the Geforce 6800 launch event (made the pixel shaders 2.0 look like 2d!).

I do agree that these new screens are not very good represenations of Half-Life 2's best graphics though.
 
Lifthz said:
This will be further amplified when Crytek releases their new patch for the game that will upgrade to pixel shaders 3.0 which was shown at the Geforce 6800 launch event (made the pixel shaders 2.0 look like 2d!).
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You are aware that there is very little difference between visual quality of PS2.0 and PS3.0, yeah? It just runs more efficiently than 2.0..

As for those comparasion shots, they were running PS1.1 (plus everything else in the shot was at absolute MINIMUM) vs PS3.0.. that comparasion was pure marketing BS
 
Yeah they had a thread in the Hardware forum about how Nvidia cheated the 3d Mark 2003 test, as well as that PS1.1/PS3.0 comparison.
Also i'd like to say that i think that everything that was done in Far Cry could be done in the Source engine. There's nothing we've seen or read that proves otherwise
 
This will be further amplified when Crytek releases their new patch for the game that will upgrade to pixel shaders 3.0 which was shown at the Geforce 6800 launch event (made the pixel shaders 2.0 look like 2d!).
Click to expand...

Source is also getting this upgrade. Really none of these graphics features are exlusive to any engine, they are just standard DirectX path stuff. HL2 and Far Cry pretty much have the exact same feature sets when you come down to it, except that HL2 has better and better integrated physics. Doom3 is the only one of the big shooters to feature a significantly different set of features and rendering focus.

Personally, whatever the graphics, I think the level of art design and the creativity of the designers puts HL2 way ahead of Far Cry regardless of texture quality or bump maps etc. Graphics isn't just about effects, it's also about _effect_. :)
 
Now i'll say this for Far Cry, some of the graphics are shaders in that game are totally AWESOME, but when i watch Bugbait or Tunnels and i notice those effects on differant surfaces, they just look so much more realistic then Far Cry.
 
Lifthz said:
While those who know me know that I never though Half-Life 2's graphics were as impressive as most others... the new screens do not seem to do justice to the game. First of all, they are very low resolution screens, so that really give syou no idea of how detailed the textures are, also... it seems that only 1 of the pics had any specular/pixel shader effects turned on on the texturing.

Something's fishing. Half-Life 2 does look better than those screens might imply. I don't know why Valve released such second-rate shots.




Well, err... I do not agree that the HDR render made Far Cry look unimpressive, because i've always though and still do think that Far Cry is more impressive than Half-Life 2, graphically. This will be further amplified when Crytek releases their new patch for the game that will upgrade to pixel shaders 3.0 which was shown at the Geforce 6800 launch event (made the pixel shaders 2.0 look like 2d!).

I do agree that these new screens are not very good represenations of Half-Life 2's best graphics though.
Click to expand...


the screenshots shown at the 6800 launch event were comparing pixel shader 1.1 to pixel shader 3.0, pixel shader 3.0 looks the same as pixel shader 2.0, which is why they didn't show screenshots comparing 2.0 to 3.0 because they'd look the same.

[edit]

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjA5
 
Apos said:
Personally, whatever the graphics, I think the level of art design and the creativity of the designers puts HL2 way ahead of Far Cry regardless of texture quality or bump maps etc. Graphics isn't just about effects, it's also about _effect_. :)
Click to expand...

Yeah, I agree. The graphics are totally secondary to gameplay and creative designs.
I'd play HL2 if the graphics hadn't changed since the first one.

I'm just baffled because we know that those screens aren't high quality compared to what has already been shown.
It's just the mystery behind this oddness that bugs me, along with the fact that I was expecting stuff of equal quality as before.
 
Okay, Munro has been e-mailed by valve with confirmation. Those screens were almost definitely unofficial.

The question now is why they were shown off by so many respectable institutions.

The magazine that first released them (the german one, wasn't it?) did so without anyone expecting it.
Could they have been to blame?
Making Beta screens on a low-end PC, and combining them with the ones about to be released by the more reputable mags after the NDA wore off?

That would explain why some screens ( The combine shooting at the boat, the zombies and the helicopter) look fine, while some others aren't very good at all.
 
Halflife and Blizzard have proven time and time-again, graphics are not the be all and end all, far from it!. Anyway i cant believe that u are complaining about the screenies, they are incredible, the characters look amazing and the screens have a good 'feel' to them, (that zombie screen is my favourite btw).

We have also seen a HDR clip, which if u have the power(i dont), will boost the eye-candy levels considerably.

All i hope is that halflife 2 will satisfy my gaming needs for 3 years minimum( a big ask i know), like halflife has. I can honestly say i havent bought a game since i've had a copy of HL.
And frankly, with this in mind, i would hope that u would be fretting over the 'moddability' of source, and the quality of mods, created on source.

After all that has been a massive component of halflife's longevity and success. (i think!) :thumbs:

Long live Day of Defeat 2 :LOL:
 
MjM said:
We have also seen a HDR clip, which if u have the power(i dont), will boost the eye-candy levels considerably.
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Arg, i keep hearing about this HDR clip, and i've seen a couple of screens of 'dx9 shader' examples or something.. there's a cave, an ant lion.. etc

another thing i keep hearing about are the shader pdf's...

can someone pleaase show me a link to somewhere i can check these out?
 
Plug said:
Arg, i keep hearing about this HDR clip, and i've seen a couple of screens of 'dx9 shader' examples or something.. there's a cave, an ant lion.. etc

another thing i keep hearing about are the shader pdf's...

can someone pleaase show me a link to somewhere i can check these out?
Click to expand...

"HDR clip" here http://www.gamershell.com/download_3360.shtml

the pdf is on ati's site somewhere, i dont have the link handy though.
 
Hey, I remember that video :p it was sweet! gonna check it out again :p
 
Those screens were almost definitely unofficial.
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What does that mean? Who took them, from what build? How can you have 'unnofficial shots' unless they are grabbed by somone at Vivendi and leaked?

I think they are official shots, released too early.
 
Hey, what if these screenies are what it would look like on a LOW end comp! Going by that logic, it looks amazing. :D

I don't believe these are full quality, if the Source demo is any indication.
 
I'm still sure they aren't full quality... look at the floor in the pic with Breen and the Combine... something's up with the filtering there...
 
fact is... I think the majority of you are just being anal and they look fine :frog: actually they look quite nice to me! :p :cheese:
 
After staring at some of the shots I have found a large number of effects that in the full game would be animated, I can also see that some of the shots have been blown up way bigger than they should be, I can see, quite clearly the blending on the edges of objects (caused by AA) is completely the wrong scale, only on the Gamespy shots does it seem normal.

trust me when I say a scene in motion looks far better than when it's stationary especially when it contains shader, particle and lighting effects, all of which I am fairly confident I have found.

However I think this isn't HL2's top level in graphics, Valve have worked hard to implement HDR and there is only the slightest hints of it in one or two of the shots, nothing of what we have seen is comparable to the DX9 video which even when stationary is graphically superior to these shots. Valve will not have just dropped HDR and in these shots I doubt it is actually present.

Also I have a suspicion that the shader effects I can identify in the SS's arn't PS2.0 or they are atleast lower detail versions of the full shaders. Some of them remind me of fixed function effects i have seen.

But at the end of the day, if these are HL2's best graphics, the fact "everything is physically simulated" makes up for it and quite frankly I think the original HL still beats FC and PK despite the fact they are in a different generation.

BTW **** FC and it's over the top fancyass overglorified graphics, dodgy voice acting, point bollocks useless physics, annoying poxy A.I and it's gobshite gameplay. It's basically a big sloppy turd to fill the void untill something more solid comes along. If I remember correctly every ****ing magazine on the planet was praising MOHAA and basically saying it's the best game ever... now 50% of the gameing community hate it's ****ing guts. The fact is everyone who thinks FC is good is wrong.
 
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