Valve released an extened version of their Episode 2 teaser today. It just teh episode 2 teaser you see at teh end of episode 1 with a couple more scenes. The first scene you see is worth teh download alone. It shows the cinematic physics valve is implementing into the source engine. It looks amazing. It shows a bridge collasping with all the metal twisting, and bending. Looks great. It also shows a really cool looking strider/hunter battle scene in the forest.

DL link: http://www.filecloud.com/file/3622/Half-Life+2+Episode+2+Extended+Trailer/

Alien slave FOR THE WIN

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Breaking the laws of mapping since 2003 and doing a damn fine job at it

A bit short for a 100 MB download but the physics bit is interesting. That pieces of concrete you see when the bridge collapses look rather strange. Like they aren't textured correctly... which makes me excited: are they calculated real-time? I mean the engine splitting the road in little pieces? Would be a nice feature. I always liked the geo-mod of Red Faction.

PS: No more squad combat... please.

FileCloud. Worst download site ever. Who else would put a text like "I don't want an account, I'm a sadist" on a button... :razz:

Anyway, Ep2 is only looking better and better. I enjoyed Ep1 quite a lot, and this one looks like even better action and some fresh new environment and enemies to play with. Cool stuff. :smile:

EDIT: I don't think it's real-time generated, rather real-time picking enough gib models to fit the volume of the broken object, like sort of happened in HL. As for the bending metal, isn't that just some stiff ragdoll stuff? Maybe they enhanced it a bit for that, and it certainly looks cool, but I don't think it's radically new tech. Doesn't matter as long as it's well used of course. :smile:

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

The bending metal could be just vertex keyframed animation... It looked
very intresting though. :smile: Time will tell what will come of it.

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''Everyone wades in s**t until they're competent enough to walk on it. Jesus style.''
Dystopia - Empires

FileCloud. Worst download site ever. Who else would put a text like "I don't want an account, I'm a sadist" on a button...

I find file cloud generally has teh least amount of wait for the free non-registered file sites.

FileCloud. Worst download site ever. Who else would put a text like "I don't want an account, I'm a sadist" on a button...

I find file cloud generally has teh least amount of wait for the free non-registered file sites.

Filefront.

I just use Steam to download the trailers I can. Try to open the HL2:EP2 Trailer and it will update.

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o

Oh, their waiting time was nothing to complain about, I just found that button text a bit overdone. :wink:

Perhaps it's me, but the trailers I play with Steam look choking. Same goes when I played this trailer with Winamp, at some point the screen stopped updating but the sound continued... Windows Media Player seems to handle it all-right though. Codec problem, or...?

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

I'm guessing its the way Winamp and Steam Media Player handle huge .wmvs. I had all sorts of problems watching the trailer at the end of ep2, but I was able to watch it fine by extracting it from the gcf and watching that with WMP. They play fine with Steams media player, which seems to implement components of WMP.

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

Anyone noticed you can't take screenshots of videos? I wanted to show you some proof for my real-time rubble theory but it doesn't let me

Turn off hardware acceleration for video playback.

20 seconds later
... I couldn't figure out how to get any settings for "Steam media player" but you can use GCFscape to get the WMV from the GCF... then turn off hardware acceleration for your media player of choice.

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o

Turn off hardware acceleration for video playback.

20 seconds later
... I couldn't figure out how to get any settings for "Steam media player" but you can use GCFscape to get the WMV from the GCF... then turn off hardware acceleration for your media player of choice.

Wow, didn't expect this to be fixable so easy, thx.

The collapsing bridge was impressive but it could very well be a cheap trick done with a prop bridge and some physboxes.

I really wish they introduced animated backgrounds to compliment the
sweetness of the source engine. Seeing that large column of smoke and
thinking that RTCW had animated backgrounds, I'm not sure how they'll
get away without such a thing :heee: .

The collapsing bridge was impressive but it could very well be a cheap trick done with a prop bridge and some physboxes.

Isn't level-design not all about finding cheap tricks? Because, let's face it, in the end all we're doing is showing the player a bunch of colored pixels. If that isn't faking, then I don't know what is... :wink:

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

Ha! Now look at that: Would a modeler build rubble like this? The texture of the white stripe goes right through the block. Looks automatically generated. Or they got some pretty lazy modelers now ^^

That's just some really strong paint.

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Boo f**king Hoo

asphalt ussually soaks up paint like a sponge, just like what you see in that picture.

Question: Does it matter?

The goal of that scene was to show you that the bridge was collasping. I think it's did it's job quite well.

Why are you being picky about a model you see for maybe 3 seconds?

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Dark_Kilauea
DVS Administration
http://www.dvstudio-production.com/

If you thought I'm picky you clearly misunderstood. Play some Red Faction multiplayer and you'll see what I mean with real-time deformable terrain. It allows you to literally shoot holes in walls wherever you want. It's an amazing technology and the debris here look like it's generated by the engine which would be cool and suggests a similar piece of technology.

It's just speculation, though.

I always thought the next step in interactivity would be deformable terrain. That was before I knew about Portal. :wink:

That line could be the result of fast modelling, yeah... (deadlines, y'know). Plus, it's debris, not worth a lot of time compared to other models, I'd say.

But, who knows. Perhaps it is generated. And perhaps it's generated at real-time, too. :wink:

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

I hope its real-time generated, but honestly I doubt it. It's probably another animated prop like the smokestacks from HL2 SP.

Yea, it's unrealistic to hope for it. I guess the announcement of "cinematic physics" (like it includes some new physics technology) made me think of what they might have changed. If it was generated we'd probably heared a little more about it... :/

I'm thinking it something like, you can manipulate the vertices of the model and put it into a scripted sequnce or something. And the debris is engine generated.

But how do they determine the way the debris looks in terms of texture and size? Is that why that piece of road was so oddly textured?

valve dev wiki

"Dynamic crumbling of brush geometry - before, lines of seperation had to be specified by the mapper"

HA!

me=king :biggrin:

In other words, they used the cut tool
on a platform and assigned the pieces to a func_physbox. Melikes the
catchy name though. :evilgrin:

I thought reaper's quote meant that the mapper didn't have to assign pieces to a func_physbox... but instead the destruction happens automatically, dynamically?

dynamically?

Think so...

Doubt it, although i'd really love that.

Right, but with this "dynamic crumbling of brush geometry" (it seems) the mapper doesn't have to define any edges.

At least it's saving the mapper some time by the sound of it. Too bad the exact nature isn't known yet, but hey, it looks cool. :smile:

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

What's made me happy is this line:

With color correction and film grain[6] already released, Valve intend to add their other cinematic effects such as motion blur and depth of field to Source when hardware is able to render it to their satisfaction.

It means my mod can be done. Thanks Valve!

Well, Garrys mod has already shown its just a (probably trivial) matter of coding to enable motion blur and DoF. This announcement just means Valve is going to switch it on for etiher ep2 or ep3, and everything they release afterwards.

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

The key phrase there is "when hardware is able to render it to their satisfaction". Valve has already said that they have implementations that bring even the most powerful cards today to their absolute knees. Either we'll have to wait quite a while for technology to advance, or Valve to make a less GPU-intensive method of calculating+rendering these things. Probably both (the waiting and the optimizing).

Garry's Mod DoF is a really fake method by just basically the same technique used for fog (a lot of planes, each with the same very low opacity, going into the distance from the player's POV, resulting in fog that looks like it gets denser the farther it is) except instead of rendering a solid color at low opacity it renders a "blurred" plane and as these go on it causes things to appear more blurred just like fog appears to get more dense. It's quite ugly and unprofessional, and it doesn't affect the viewmodel. "True" DoF is much trickier.

I doubt E2 will have any kind of DoF or Motion Blur (maybe slight motion blur, it should be a bit easier for current cards to handle).

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-- midkay

I think they're going to release portal as a sort of Tech demo (like The Lost Coast was), with motion blur and DoF.

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:: Forceflow.be :: Nuclear Dawn developer

Doesn't seem likely to me, but maybe Valve will surprise us with a less powerhungry implementation of Mblur and/or DoF. We can always hope... :smile:

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-- midkay