Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast is out

[Ed Oscuro]

Be warned, it's very short (it's not over until the screen fades, though; no spoilers from me how to get to that point), as it's basically a "fifteen minute tech demo." I recommend turning on the commentary; this appears in the form of bubbles that turn around as you get close, and if you [USE] them one of the devs will speak. Good stuff overall, and some nifty effects are used to show Valve's HDR versus the old stuff.

For my part, I'm not sure HDR is THAT good overall. Whenever you walk up to a light and turn the flashlight on, it appears too bright at first, and then quickly adjusts. Doesn't matter if you've just done it; you can repeat the process over and over. Sure, the game benefits from it, but it's not as striking a difference as you might think (of course, the Source material, ahem, was already quite good). Colors do bleed into each other pretty nicely, but it's hard to say if every player will like this new effect. For my part, it seems DOOM III's lighting system is still king.

[cityside75]

Loading now, but it's already told me that my AthlonXP 2800+ is below spec

It's just barely under, so hopefully it'll be alright.

[Ed Oscuro]

Loading now, but it's already told me that my AthlonXP 2800+ is below spec

It's just barely under, so hopefully it'll be alright.

My advice: check out the Advanced settings for your video card. Mine ran fine with their default settings (it should, it's a 7800 GTX, the highest overclocked-by-the-factory model at release, by XFX!), but I turned down the Aniostropic Filtering (from 8x to 4x) and turned down anti-aliasing, just to be safe.

[cityside75]

Well it ended up working fine. My card is way below a 7800 GTX - I'm running an AIW 9600 Pro, so my settings are already quite a bit lower.

Still, the HDR stuff was cool, and the "director's commentary" was much more interesting than I thought it would be. They should implement that feature in future games, I'd definitely enjoy running through HL2 again with similar commentary.

[Joker T]

I heard the requirments are ridiculous, yet I also heard that if you can run Half-Life 2 really good you won't have a problem.

My Specs:

Desktop:

Pentium D 3.2ghz
1gb ram
Ati X850 256 mb

Laptop:
Pentium M 2.0ghz
512mb ram
ati mobility radeon X300 128mb

guess I will be playing it on my desktop

[Joker T]

Quite a decent level in my opinion. Amazing looking. I hope we get more levels like this hopefully longer.

[Ed Oscuro]

Well, since the topic is bumped, I might as well mention that I'm downloading cs_militia. This is very nice, since the notification it'd be out soon came only two weeks ago (or so). That's much better than the wait for Lost Coast was

Map supports HDR, let's see if it actually looks as great as the screenshots suggest.

[Joker T]

Well, since the topic is bumped, I might as well mention that I'm downloading cs_militia. This is very nice, since the notification it'd be out soon came only two weeks ago (or so). That's much better than the wait for Lost Coast was

Map supports HDR, let's see if it actually looks as great as the screenshots suggest.

I also tried out that map today. Very nice looking but I did notice my frame-rate wasn't as high as normal. Still good but a little lower than usual, I guess all that eye candy was putting some strain on my PC. Good map but nothing to keep me out of Dust

[GrandAmChandler]

I am gonna move this to modern gaming.

Making Moves.

-Chris

[Ed Oscuro]

No idea why I posted this in Classic originally, thanks for the move.

Anyhow, at this point I can't really imagine playing without HDR (these maps anyway). I originally didn't know how nice it'd be, and I still dislike the flashlight effect. Sometimes the blurring isn't that great. On the whole, though, it really helps bring a map alive. I hope Valve creates HDR versions of the other CS maps