Doom 3 had to sacrifice in character polycount in order to compensate for the, at the time, heavy real-time lighting and shadowing system.
Sacrificing polycount is fine and all, you can’t really tell with their bump maps. It’s the shitty textures and heavy use of specular that annoys me.
Level design was much better in doom3 compared to emptiness in HL2…
-First time i played HL2 instead of using the car I decided to go on foot, man that was boring…
I don’t think you can compare the level design of the two games. They are supposed to fill diverse purposes.
I can understand if you thought it was boring, you weren’t supposed to be walking (I assume you mean Highway 17 and Sandtraps). The level design was adapted around the use of a vehicle.
Sure, I can agree with that some parts may be a bit empty but HL2 is 6 years old. Valve did a good job updating the engine through the episodes to keep the gameplay fresh and new. At least I think the Source engine still is a great engine in terms of graphics compared to what it requires. Besides, as I said in another thread, it has one of the most natural, life-giving animation and facial animation system.
^And that is your subjective personal opinion, which I don’t agree with. I don’t think DooM 3 looks shitty. Now I’m going to kick myself out of this thread, as this shit really has nothing to do with the Atomic PC BM Preview… 
Oh, I see, so you want us to extrapolate based on the pictures you posted… okay, in that case, real life is starting to look pretty outdated to me, although I can’t speak for the rest of you. [color=black]Also, we’re trolling?
The BM team can’t make the Source engine look better than that, they’re limited by what Valve does to the engine.
Besides, you were using old pictures from a mod that is still in development.
I think the topic of this thread has pretty much run its course regarding the actual article but I must say it seems to have graduated into more of a discussion of old/new pics vs. old/new versions of the engine.
As long as it stays in this realm, I am ok with keeping this open.
(Oh hai! I am not closing a thread! Someone pat me on the back!)
Pictures, they aren’t there to compare BM to other games, they’re there to compare Source engine to other…
Source wasn’t updated like other engines since there was no real need for games currently developed by Valve, they even chose simple level design for Portal on purpose…
Black Mesa is much different than Portal and might suffer as a result.
Yes there is HDR… but what isn’t there is getting more noticeable and in two more years you can cut the number of fans eager to play the game in half, just because of that…
If it was multiplayer game situation might be little different, singleplayer games are much more dependant on graphics than gameplay mechanics, you can use Crysis as example, everyone played it even if it had gameplay similar to Doom 20 years ago…
Pat pat
People want to play BM because they want a proper remake of HL1 in the Source engine. Good graphics may be important to the equation but they’re not the the only important selling point.
In fact, you’re missing the point if you think advanced graphics are what’s important here. Look at all of Valve’s single-player games. What are the most important aspects in all of them? The aspects Valve worked the most in all of them?
Gameplay mechanics and immersive storytelling.
Black Mesa, as a reinterpretation of Valve’s primordial game, is not only recreating HL1’s gameplay and plot but also improving and expanding on them. Good graphics come right after.
The BM team is creating this mod using the same mentality Valve uses in their games. Gameplay and immersion first of all, good graphics are just the cherry on top of the cake.
(No cake jokes please)
Yeah, Valve tends to focus on what’s important before graphics. Source may not have ultra-high polycounts, but the games are a far cry from the mediocre mainstream crap with high polycounts that floods the industry.
Shit, they have better animation than every other engine. Personally, I hold that higher than polycounts on the importance scale, even in graphics.
And Valve innovates in everything they do, even if it’s just improving on their previous innovations (Skeletal animation became Source’s animation, moving mouths became facial animation…)
Eh, Valve may have made advances in character animation at some point but right now Rockstar Games has the best animation system in the industry.
Hell, it took Valve quite a few years before they resorted to full motion capture animation for Left 4 Dead. Most of HL2’s animation was still handmade.
They chose simple level design for Portal because Portal was an experiment in gameplay - more of a tech demo than a full game, in their minds - and they didn’t want to sink thousands of man-hours into making it beautiful and detailed when they fully expected it to flop. Compare its graphics to Portal 2.
I was waiting for the moment you were dumb enough to turn this into an engine vs. engine argument. I see you were running out of options, no? Well, in your last ditch effort to save your pathetic credibility…
Alright. You wanted to use pictures? Poor choice.
Source
CryEngine
(Yes, that’s a stretched texture.)
I would post a video comparing facial animation, but Crytek doesn’t care about character believability. Source wins hands down in that.
The CryEngine pics ARE at highest settings, albeit no mods are installed to make it look prettier, but then again none of the Source pictures have mods installed (other than some being mods themselves!) so I thought it was ok.
Now, CryEngine is a bit more technically advanced. Crysis is a tech demo though, and they were showing off technology they had. It’s a game, but it’s not a game of substance nor beauty. Crysis has pretty environments, but they’re often not very believable. Granted Crysis alone doesn’t suffer from this, but with Source it’s like a painting. It tells a story, gives off a mood, exciting or scary or depressing. Source can do indoor environments better and I’ll argue on that if I have to. CryEngine can render more, and haz moar polies- but in the end, none of this makes the games. It’s ALL IN THE HANDS OF THE DEVELOPERS. THEY are the ones that make or break a game- not the engine itself. On a side note I’m willing to bet “angel” wouldn’t touch Cave Story or a RPG.
(Had too many pictures. This post lost a lot of it’s oomph. If you want to make it a picture war, “angel,” I’ll gladly supply pictures I was forced to leave out. Also, it counts smileys as images…)
Crysis water makes me thirsty.
And am I the only one who thought it was funny that he tried to prove BM has “bad graphics” by comparing some older screenshots with older games, games on the same level of graphics, and even games that haven’t been released yet?
Edit: Apparently not. I need to make of point of reading to the end of a thread before I reply to one in the middle.
Ah. Forgot about that. Crysis does have orgasmic water. I couldn’t include BM pictures because of the image limit. :rabies:
I chose to get rid of the BM ones because most of us are familiar with BM media. 
Source water is sex looking too, but it’s… Flat.
Whichever engine gets dynamic water first will win my firstborn.
Some of those are made by Mirror’s Edge level designer I think…
Point is Illuminate Labs products can be seen in almost every new game probably Portal too so they all look similar, but will Black Mesa make any use of that is uncertain…
At the end you can mod almost every engine to make it look pretty on screenshots and those HL2 mods you posted are bullshit and you know it…
To actually make full game look like that with those retarded Valve tools will take longer than Duke Nukem Forever…
Alright now I know you’re a troll 
. I had given you benefit of the doubt before…
Anyway it’s 11 PM here I’m going to bed night baby <3
It’s 9:50 here.
I should be in bed, but there’s an episode of Star Trek: TNG on, and I made the mistake of going to tvtropes.org.