Half Life 2 Path Tracing Mod Highly Praised for Adding Extra Visual Flair

erek

erek

[H]F Junkie
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Here it is

"Zdrowowicz was enthused about his progress, but has to deal with special effects: "Figured out a way to apply normal maps and tweak the materials after capturing relevant textures in game! Some areas look good, some of them kinda dodgy, but I focus my full attention on remaking all materials with this amazing (even though not officially released yet) tool!"

Last month he managed to get water lighting effects working: "For now a bit of fun with refraction!""

Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/307277/...-highly-praised-for-adding-extra-visual-flair

 
I love this new trend - the best thing is, we don't have to pay for a half-baked remake of a game and since it's just a mod not a paid product, the Publishing company can't send a cease/desist to stop the development of a mod. Everybody wins (and the mod developer is a hero - btw, this is nice little piece of "flair" to put in your portfolio
 
socK said:
Holy shit absolutely

Unreal is so absurdly burned into my brain I can still feel and smell the basement the computer was in at the time when I think about it
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When I think of unreal… the first thing that comes to mind is watching early episodes of Star gate sg1 while playing unreal during commercials. I can vividly remember the crappy crt, desk made of plywood,file cabinets, and a sheet and how hard the folding chair was on my ass lol. The sinus pain of my grandmother chain smoking inside.

Strange how the mind links certain things things together.
 
Can't wait for this to be released. I'll love to do a play through with path tracing.
 
mullet said:
Looks good!! I wish Valve would take a break from counting money all day and make TF3 or HL3.
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Given they have let go almost all their writing and development staff I doubt we will see either any time soon.
 
Blakestr said:
I love this new trend - the best thing is, we don't have to pay for a half-baked remake of a game and since it's just a mod not a paid product, the Publishing company can't send a cease/desist to stop the development of a mod. Everybody wins (and the mod developer is a hero - btw, this is nice little piece of "flair" to put in your portfolio
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Well they can, just most companies aren't likely to do so.
 
aldamon said:
Then they'd just need to exhume Aureal and we'd be all set!
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i never had the chance to try an Aureal card back in the day, just SB live cards and their EAX. which i have to say was pretty amazing to turn on playing HL1 in its prime.

i did read somewhere that aureal was better for headphones.....?
 
What would people be willing to pay for a real copy of HL3?

100?
200?
800?
 
THRESHIN said:
i never had the chance to try an Aureal card back in the day, just SB live cards and their EAX. which i have to say was pretty amazing to turn on playing HL1 in its prime.

i did read somewhere that aureal was better for headphones.....?
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IIRC EAX just added better reverb than what was generally used at the time while A3D actually used some kind of audio path tracing (basically ray tracing but for audio). I played Thief:TDP and Thief:TMA with an A3D card and later with a SB EAX card and remember A3D being amazing (much better than EAX) but it's been almost 30 years so it's hard to actually recall the intricacies.
 
Bankie said:
IIRC EAX just added better reverb than what was generally used at the time while A3D actually used some kind of audio path tracing (basically ray tracing but for audio). I played Thief:TDP and Thief:TMA with an A3D card and later with a SB EAX card and remember A3D being amazing (much better than EAX) but it's been almost 30 years so it's hard to actually recall the intricacies.
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Remember A3D 3.0?

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=31502
 
Bankie said:
IIRC EAX just added better reverb than what was generally used at the time while A3D actually used some kind of audio path tracing (basically ray tracing but for audio). I played Thief:TDP and Thief:TMA with an A3D card and later with a SB EAX card and remember A3D being amazing (much better than EAX) but it's been almost 30 years so it's hard to actually recall the intricacies.
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Yeah, the biggest issue I had with A3D was the performance overhead at a time when we didn't have much CPU power to spare. I think your comparison to ray tracing today is appropriate. Same pitfalls. Much longer runway this time to figure things out.

Here's a blast from the past:

http://www.dansdata.com/tbeach.htm

"Performance
OK, that's why you should use A3D. Why shouldn't you?

Well, because it sucks up a significant amount of CPU time, that's why.

A3D 2.0's fancy "wavetracing" - the audio equivalent of graphics "raytracing" - tracks where sounds are going in quite detailed ways, allowing realistic wall reflections and occlusions and so on. The price of this, though, is a big CPU load.

A3D 2.0 also includes "A2D", which is A3D emulation for sound cards that don't have a Vortex chipset. Using A2D can elevate the CPU load from large to enormous, but not necessarily; it can use DirectSound 3D hardware, if it's present, and not elevate the CPU load at all, unless it's asked to do things the hardware can't handle, like reflections.

A couple of quick Quake 3 Arena benchmarks tell the story. Q3A supports A3D 2.0, but not EAX or A3D 1.0, and its A3D support is less than perfect. You have to turn on A3D in the setup menu every time you run Q3A, and it still seems prone to crashing now and then, with the current v2040 drivers. But it works, within the definition of the term"
 
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