Lolwut, he made a fool of you so your sarcastic reply just comes off as hilariously plausible.
Trench Coats, because one of the Terrorist groups are a bunch of Matrix truthers :fffuuu:
Finally you found out.
I still want a good matrix shooter. Damn, man
They have some compulsion to recreate the stories of the movies in the games, when being different but still being in the same universe would probably work much better.
And I had no idea that the cloth physics only applied to things like flags. I guess there goes my flappy Alyx shirt idea 
.
Methinks you forgot bout custom maps.
at the moment that would result in extremely stuttery games.
You would need to render 6 perspectives of the scene for every visible object that uses reflections.
Have fun playing a game with realistic reflections running at ~1fps.
^ yeah, and even then there’s a strong chance that the landmarks in reflections won’t end up at the correct spot. Halo 3 tried a method like this and abandoned it for performance and visual issues. It ended up only being used in cutscenes on MC’s visor. To this date it’s the only game I’m aware of that tried to do RTR that way. Then there’s the screen space RTR that’s been used in Crysis 2, but there’s too many god damn issues with that. Like, seriously.
You’re right, I did. Even then though, it’s not going to do any good for the character models themselves.
Mafia 2 had some pretty good reflections. Anyone know how they did them in there? They only ever rendered a single room and your character though.
That’s a render to texture technique, Source also supports it.
It works like a virtual camera, as in it takes whatever is in its “focus” and then shows it on any surface.
The screen that shows Dr. Breen at the start of HL2 uses that feature, as there’s literally a hidden room in that level with a virtual camera pointed at Dr. Breen doing his speech and is then shown on that screen.
Mafia 2 uses a more elaborate version of that technique for the mirrors.
I wonder if similar could be done in the current Source engine where the virtual camera is looking “through” the mirror and then rendering it on the mirror backwards. I know that your player character would look like Grayman, but…
There’s already a mirror material in Source. It only works on flat surfaces ofc. I’ve played on a Gmod map that had it before.
It was before one of the major engine updates though, I’m not sure if it still works.
I hate to say it, but Source doesn’t need more features nearly as much as Valve just needs to do less optimization. Ever since they gained the ability to see exactly what hardware their customers are running, they’ve been scared shitless of doing anything that will cause a framerate drop on all the users with ancient computers.
Valve needs to grow a pair and raise the bar a little bit. Not even that much, just a little. They’re so concerned with the lowest common denominator that they’re compromising the look of their games with low-poly, low-res environments and textures, and then compensating with good art design and character models – which only goes so far.
Granted, as long as they keep making fun games, I won’t complain too much. But there was something special about a game like HL2 that really felt excellent in every way – visuals included – that has been missing from every game they’ve made since.
What they really should do is have optional high-definition packs like the one they have for HL1 as free downloadable DLC on launch day.
When you go to install a game it should check your system specs & have a little notification pop-up asking if you want to download higher quality models &/or textures instead if it detects your system specs are high enough to run it without trouble. Even if it isn’t, it/they should still be downloadable though steam.
I don’t see why they couldn’t implement that like PC games always have: higher quality assets are always part of the install, if you can use them or not. If something like this ever does get put in to anything, it better ask before it starts downloading, so people don’t have to download more later.
It wouldn’t even have to ask, Steam could figure out the computer’s specs and then download the right package accordingly
Yeah, I don’t get it. I know a lot of people whine about games not being optimized when their Civil War-era laptops can’t run them totally maxed out, but it seems like too small a group to bother with.
It could be that Valve is overly worried about download size or something. Clearly the engine is capable of much more than they’re delivering, so the fact that there isn’t even an option to boost some of the ancient-looking things up a bit is totally bizarre.
I don’t have a very good computer, all I’ve been able to play anywhere near the maxed-out setting for the past few years have been valve games. Valve’s the ones doing the hardware surveys, so it could be a lot more common of a problem than you think.
Of course, a lot of people have ancient computers.
BUT, a new generation of consoles is coming and for PS4 version of Half-Life 3 to look 10x better than the PC version would be a virtual murder.
The PC version will always have the highest quality assets. It could be that the consoles could run the game better right at their release dates but they’re going to stay at whatever bar was set when the game was released for them, while PCs will keep improving and eventually get to the point where they can run the game at 100%. There is never going to be a point (with any game really) where the console version of the game will always look better than the PC version.