Havok can handle dynamic water just the same as PhysX.
I’d also like to see more streamlined ragdolls physics, so the game doesn’t crash every damn time you blow up 12+ enemies at a time.
That’s because physics are currently handled by the CPU, if they add GPU accelerated physics that problem should go away.
Wether, DX 11 and better AI. They have something on mind, something big. 
Don’t you mean weather :brow:
I disagree. Parallax mapping is great when it’s done right. Unfortunately, not many games have done it right. Aliens vs. Predator (PC version only) being one of the few examples I can call off the top of my head. Crysis, maybe, but it was glitchy as hell in cryengine 2.
env_precipitation :hmph:
This plus env_wind. Which they should fix.
the problem with parallax mapping is that the kinds of parallax mapping that add significantly to graphics quality breaks other features, like AA. The kind that works with AA has a significant performance cost associated with it and doesn’t add much. I read a really great article about it (by a Valve programmer, IIRC, although I might be making that up), but I can’t find it now. I think it was a SIGGRAPH paper. Things might have improved lately, but last I heard, it wasn’t worth it.
I think higher-res textures and better lighting would do wonders. Look at cinematic mod, graphically it looks very impressive but there’s still that weird bloom lighting.
Yeah, but I hope they don’t look like the FakeFactory ones, those are shite :pffft:
I imagine Portal 2’s paint feature will be somewhat included.
The Paint feature looks awesome, but from reading the mag, it looks so much more complex now. Still, that’s awesome as well. Seeing as Portal 1 was only a test game.
3:05
Imagine if the scene where Alyx hugged Eli didn’t need to be entirely pre-rigged.
Imagine if you could have a dynamically “baked on” skybox (Like CryTech) with some parralax, and most importantly writes to the Z-buffer, so an object in the distance can go between trees and hills without having to “re-draw” said trees and hills.
Not mentioned: I think Valve took the right approach of not doing pure dynamic direct illumination (a la Doom 3), and instead went for heavily pre-computed lighting so that a whole lot of indirect illumination is possible without consuming a lot of resources. But imagine being able to have stencils, blending, or even animation of said lightmaps.
Ironically, there was an engine with the latter capability right around Half-Life 1’s development time: Unreal Engine 1. I think I found a gaming magazine issue from around 1997 that describes how they did this. I think it involves rendering thee lightmap without all the animated lights, then rendering all of them individually, adding all the resulting lightmaps together and then animating the individual animating lights as chosen - If the level designer wished to make flickering lights, the lightmap containing the animated light will be multiplied with a flickering pattern. If he wants to create an imperssion of a firey waver, then chaotic patterns will be procedurally generated, and the same will be done with them. The whole resulting lightmap is finally multiplied onto all the lightmapped surfaces.
You’re thinking just like John Carmack thought around late 1989/early 1990 - That was his trick that he used to make Apogee’s Commander Keen sidescroller engine for DOS. In console games, the whole scene would update all the time, a thing which in the 80’s, PCs just couldn’t do. Well, though Carmack, why the hell do you need to update the WHOLE scene at the same time? Why not just update the parts that actually MOVE? If the sky is all the time the exact same static sheet of blue, why not keep it the same in the scene buffer? And as he programmed his new engine to use this feature, it had allowed to run a sidescroller on DOS. Maybe your move will inspire Gabe to port the Source engine over to iOS and Android using your trick, and it’ll still have very good graphics while having great performance.
Actually, both Goldsource and Source have the ability to toggle lightmaps as well. Just not have the lights move dynamically. (Or look good when they’re toggleable)
While we’ve got this bumped, from early screenshots it looks like CS:GO is going to finally give the Source engine full Dynamic shadow mapping (removing the limits on such that were in Portal 2), so we can probably cross dynamic lighting off the list.
What lighting system does the Source engine use? (if any)
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vrad.exe