Microscopic maps, low framerates looking at absolutely nothing where a similarly detailed area in any other engine (like unreal)…
Those two are enough to warrant a bit of TLC. That’s only the output stuff. There’s a whole bunch of shit while actually USING it that could be a lot easier.
Like I said. Source needs deferred rendering. Anything to cut back on compiling or eradicate it completely. Testing takes too damn long 
So, let me see if i’m getting that right:
You play a game that doesn’t look nearly as good as most other games, it has a seven years old engine, and you actually think the game is not so good looking because Valve didn’t feel like it?
Man, the game doesn’t look as good as Crysis 2 (example) because Source Engine doesn’t allow it to. It is time to either create a new engine or have a MAJOR update on the Source Engine. Which one doesn’t really matter to me, as long as Episode 3 gets some actual beauty.
This especially is true. Compiling is a pain and ends up making good maps even harder to make. Its so much easier to just leave minor problems in than recompile five more times to fix them.
One more time … Source is not outdated … Valve is just lazy to not use 100% out of their engine and using pc version as a port of console version …
Just lazy …
Really source can make a lot better graphics than you think, well nothing like Crysis 1 but still good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYiVkHEzThk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb1yrhgRVMQ
And one more time look at cinematic mod, imagine with latest version how good it can look.
Hahano. You think Valve was lazy with Portal 2 you’re an idiot. Plain and simple. It is really the limit of the engine. Its capable of making limited areas look up to current-gen standards, but it is incapable of bringing the scale of other engines, and will still take a year and a half to compile the damn things.
Source has great Graphics… i really prefer them over some things i’ve seen with Unreal Engine 3… (for example, bits/peices of lighting from Source is really much better, in my opinion, Also Source has Dynamic Water Reflection in 2004, i still have yet to find a decent or easy to use water material in UE3 {which totally makes HL2 Gorgeous in many parts)
Where Source Fails is Tools…
UE3 Provided an editor that has EVERYTHING in it… (Which i could care less if i had to move back and forth… but it provided easy access), Lighting showed a preview of what to expect when rendering, and can really show you what your materials will look like, and all of that…
CryEngine 3 is the best though, Everything is real-time! Moving lights are real-time, and no lightmap\radiosity computations), the game, the physics can be done real time as well
while i went a bit offtopic… i’ll answer the post with a simple Possibly…
Source engine graphics are Possibly dated… but theres been massive improvements year to year… from HL2 -> Orange box ->l4d series->p2…
we can and will see better from source… will they be the “BEST”… maybe… if its not the best… they will make it work… I loved the graphics quality of the source…
UE3 lighting (mainly indoors) can be very saturated… where as in many source engine games you’ve seen nice smooth Realistic lighting…
also for some people who don’t know why i went off on a mini light rant here, lighting makes the game, it makes the effects like bump\specular
Source\ CE3 have more realistic lighting i think, and its very easy to get a decent quality from both…
Seriously? Neither of those at all show any power on the part of the source engine. The first one is SOME impressive lighting and then just a bunch of badass coding and art style. The second is decent lighting and then that’s it. If you want to stun someone with the source engine you should link Dear Esther. But that still doesn’t mean the Source engine isn’t outdated; the maker of DE has spent so much time squeezing graphics out of source for DE it wouldn’t be at all practical for a full scale game even with Valve behind it.
It’s more of an issue with game asset budgets. Even though the maps, models, textures and so on are very well designed, the budgets are often too low (maybe to optimize performance on consoles?). The low resolution textures (diffuse in particular) and the lack of specular maps and normal (+detail) maps is disappointing. Take for example the Unreal Engine 3 in which you can take one specific normal detail map and tile the UV’s multiple times on a model. This gives the model a great amount of extra detail with minimal performance loss. Using these tiled normal maps also allows you to save memory on the diffuse because the lack of quality due to low resolution becomes a lot less noticeable when a normal map is used with specular highlight. The use of specular maps in conjunction with baked normal maps is also very important in order to get that fake 3D effect everyone loves.
The Source engine is lacking in terms of material manipulation and stands absolutely no chance against the hugely complex materials you can create in engines like the Unreal Engine 3 (example). In UE3 you can easily create complex materials without ever writing a single line of code or having to move files around (and there’s no manual compiling, all changes are instantly applied).
One major advantage of lower game asset budgets is of course that games will run a lot smoother. Even on my relatively old PC I managed to get silky smooth frame rates at the highest settings using a 1920x1200 resolution with AA and AF fully enabled.
I had some problems with mouse lag and things like that, I turned the graphics and dynamic shadows to medium and my game ran smooth 
“The shadowmapping code is written from scratch and not based on Valves technique in any way. In my current build two shadowmaps at 3072² and 1024² are drawn to allow a shadow with a range of 10k units (the video just shows the former one though), all factors are variable and can be changed to the users liking.”
Yeah cool link showing what source cant do you posted there…
They have a nice little engine right now that’s at an advanced stage in terms of expertise and tools that is being used to create almost unanimously critically acclaimed videogames of a high quality and large marketplace (due to conservative system reqs) which generates multiple millions of dollars in profits.
Or, they could throw it all in the bin and spend a few years writing a whole new engine, API and tools that will give them a marginal improvement in visuals, while having to reinvest in this engine for years to come to get their staff up to speed, start development of any new games from scratch, alienate their low-mid spec customer base and not to mention the lucrative console market.
If you ask me, Valve don’t need to do shit.
What if the Source Engine branched off since the Orange Box? Engineers worked on a Source Engine Version that had been seen in L4D1/2, Alien Swarm and Portal 2, whilst a seperate team have been locked away working on secretive large-scale engine updates. Once they are ready, the updates to lighting and shadow and the blob mechanics, seen in the other games are then incorporated (through sources modulability) to the Next-Gen version of the Source Engine. Gabe Newell did criticise the difficulty the Hammer Editor invokes, and it sounds like it is currently in the middle of a overhaul
How do you like those lemons, huh!
I do have a question about this. Do you still have to apply nodraw textures to any face that doesn’t get seen by the player, or is that face automatically culled?
Just because Valve didn’t make part of the code doesn’t mean it’s not Source… we’re talking about the capabilities of the engine here, not what Valve chooses to put in it.
Lolwut? HL2 ran on DirectX 7, 8, 8.1 and 9. That is, it ran on every video card released in the five years before it launched, going right back to the original GeForce and the original Radeon.
Those with lesser capabilities missed out on some of the eye candy (lighting and water effects were the most noticeable to me) but the game still ran for them, and at decent framerates. HL2 is an outstanding example of a game that both looked great and scaled well.
what happend with the phisics in portal 2? There are a lot of stuff welded in the ground and unmoveable, tables, chairs…etc
Aperture’s regulations states that every physical object should be glued to the ground in case the gravity disappears.
Dear Esther looks very very good and it run on 4 years old version of source …
I really think that still can be achieved a lot more from Source … maybe thats why next half life is taking so long … pushing source to its very limits.
Like I said Portal 2 is Valve’s laziness, xbox have shadows of some object while ps3 and pc version is missing those shadows, and PC version is just port of console versions just with better resolution,aa,af and like these but same textures like on consoles.
Too bad Portal 2 is not PC only with later ports to consoles.
Really dont underestimate Source yet.
Just ask Raminator how good Black Mesa looks D:
You’re an idiot. If it takes two or three times as much work to make the source engine look like the competition then it’s outdated. Also, from what I understand, with npcs and particle effects and such required in a normal game, you couldn’t get anywhere near DE’s graphics. It’s not laziness. Valve just realizes that squeezing more graphics out of source’s current build is an absolute waste of time. It’s either huge update to source, new engine, or deal with sub par graphics. I kind of hope they go with huge update for Ep3.
Portal 2 isn’t a console port. Took about ten seconds and a google search to find that. And please, do show me these “missing shadows”.
As for blackmesa, as with all source things, it’s beauty is in the skill of the makers not the quality of the engine. Blackmesa’s graphics are getting steadily obsolete.
Have you ever noticed how Black Mesa doesn’t look incredible? Compared to HL yeah, its incredibly better, but compared to most games? Nope.
I don’t give a crap about the Source engine’s graphical capability. It’s not how REAL video games look for me, it’s how UNIQUE. (here I was thinking that video games were for people who wanted to ESCAPE reality). To me, Portal 2 is a very stylistic and unique-looking game, and I’m happy. That’s all.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
