Weekend Discussion

Shacknews has a few recent features online you should checkout:

Hands-on with Duke Nukem Forever should blow your top off, Call of Duty: Black Ops multiplayer looks to shake things up a bit, Metroid: Other M is flawed but has some great moments, and Shack looks at Halo: Reach from multiple angles with previews of single-player and the 'Forge World.'

Xav de Matos was previously a games journalist creating content at Shacknews.

From The Chatty
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    September 4, 2010 8:01 AM

    Holy shit the best looking Portal 2 screens yet

    http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/09/04/aw-cuddles-portal-2-co-op-screenshots/

    One is tempted to say that Source is in fact not a horribly dated engine that needs to be on its fucking way!

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      September 4, 2010 8:02 AM

      It's being made by Pixar?

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      September 4, 2010 8:03 AM

      Wait a sec, you play a robot in Portal 2?

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      September 4, 2010 8:04 AM

      Whoa. - Keanu Reeves

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      September 4, 2010 8:04 AM

      It's seriously looks like renders. Very impressive.

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      September 4, 2010 8:05 AM

      I'd be curious to know if those were doctored at all.

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      September 4, 2010 8:06 AM

      Are those renders? Like in-engine but not gameplay speed renders?

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      September 4, 2010 8:06 AM

      Not in-game shots, though. Those are taken from the trailer, which Valve has again made to look much prettier than the game itself.

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        September 4, 2010 8:07 AM

        Are they actually taken from the trailer because I don't remember those specific shots in the trailer.

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        September 4, 2010 8:08 AM

        I would LOVE the game to look like that. Really digging the visuals.

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          September 4, 2010 8:22 AM

          Forcing supersampling via driver options (use nhancer for Nvidia and Catalyst for ATI) basically gets you this look. A lot of current games (especially UE3) look this good or even better once all the horrid rendering artifacts (aliasing) have been removed.

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            September 4, 2010 8:33 AM

            I'm not talking about antialiasing. I'm talking about lighting, shading and so on.

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              September 4, 2010 8:36 AM

              The recent UE3 (Mirror's Edge, Mass Effect 2) games have lighting like this. However the texture resolution is lower. Once you add supersampling you end up with a similar look though.

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        September 4, 2010 8:08 AM

        Remember the early portal trailer showing ridiculous amounts of insane motion blur and a shitload of idiots telling me it's in engine, then the game finally comes out and while it does support kind of cool motion blur it's nothing like the motion blur in the trailer? That was awesome.

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      September 4, 2010 8:13 AM

      10 minute long video of co-op play!
      http://www.gametrailers.com/video/pax-10-portal-2/704062

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        September 4, 2010 8:18 AM

        I love the design of the robots.

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        September 4, 2010 8:21 AM

        So awesome. And even though its horribly blurry I'm gonna say that the lighting in that video looks extremely sophisticated, so much so that perhaps the shots I posted are plausible and not bullshots after all! :)

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          September 4, 2010 9:42 AM

          And that even looks to be the 360 version.... it probably will live up to those shots on PC.

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        September 4, 2010 8:25 AM

        wow bring on February!

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        September 4, 2010 8:40 AM

        Duke who? This is the game of 2011! Diablo 3 will be the game of 2012 :(

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        September 4, 2010 8:41 AM

        The ping tool design is great.

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        September 4, 2010 8:48 AM

        coop is twice the length of portal 1 sp! wow

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        September 4, 2010 9:48 AM

        [deleted]

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        September 4, 2010 10:25 AM

        awesome, can't come soon enough

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      September 4, 2010 8:19 AM

      All I know is that the shot of the two robots hugging in terror/fright has tons more character than most other human characters from other AAA titles.

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      September 4, 2010 8:20 AM

      I'd say it is. :) Excellent lighting combined with specially prepared supersampling (not available inside the game without forcing it through the driver options) though. If you allow your eyes to leave the characters though, you can see the sparse amount of detail.

      Mirror's Edge has nice lighting like this, but the rest of the game is up to date too. :)

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        September 4, 2010 8:25 AM

        They're very smart artists. It's not any kind of new tech at all, depth map shadowing has been around for so long already, but you can see they're using it in very specific light situations, where they know it will have a dramatic effect, and allowing cheaper methods to take care of the rest.

        And like so much of what Valve does, it's one of those things when you see it you just go "duhh" because there are so many situations where depth map shadows actually dither really badly and shouldn't be used (lots of good examples of this in mass effect 1 and 2), but devs still feel it's some kind of all in thing, if you have dynamic lighting here and there you must have it everywhere. Valve disagrees!

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          September 4, 2010 8:30 AM

          They are very art smart, however I feel like the L4D series allows itself to look ugly (without supersampling especially, more so even on the 360) just often enough that it draws attention to their aging engine.

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            September 4, 2010 8:37 AM

            Yeah, L4D really pushes the limits in ways Portal doesn't. Loooots of characters on screen, big complex environments where you really see very far and then characters to interact with those environments, plus an art style that doesn't really support large flat surfaces and big foggy voids the way Portal does. so what you end up with are lots of boxy buildings and very flat lighting.

            Meanwhile here in Portal 2 you have at most two guys with what is often just a bunch of non-colliding decorative geometry, with some animated prop models here and there, maybe. A lot more manageable, so they can crank up the texture res and the shaders.

            Really wonder what Ep3 is going to end up looking like.

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      September 4, 2010 8:30 AM

      God this looks amazing. As do the PAX videos. I can't wait to play this.

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      September 4, 2010 8:31 AM

      This game is gonna fucking rock my box so hard.

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      September 4, 2010 8:38 AM

      [deleted]

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        September 4, 2010 9:09 AM

        I wish super-sampling didn't kill my video card. In the cutscene engine the fps drops to like 15 or so.

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        September 4, 2010 9:18 AM

        Nice

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        September 4, 2010 9:41 AM

        They are using a light of lightmaps obviously. There are some tricks you can pull in UE3 to get a ton of lightmaps in no that much memory, but it takes more shader processing and if you are are already pushing that to the limit you're kind of stuck. It's all about compromises.

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          September 4, 2010 9:48 AM

          [deleted]

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            September 4, 2010 9:58 AM

            Not sure what you are saying? All lighting in games is basically a suite of tricks. It's all about finding the cheapest way to create the best effect. And lightmaps are usually generated by some variation of ray tracing.

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        September 4, 2010 11:01 AM

        I don't remember being able to get antialiasing to work in that game...

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          September 4, 2010 2:17 PM

          Works with the current ATI drivers.

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      September 4, 2010 9:18 AM

      Those robots are of questionable sexuality, especially considering the evidence seen in the last video here:

      http://kotaku.com/5629908/four-mildly-head+hurting-portal-2-co+op-levels

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        September 4, 2010 9:32 AM

        Keep in mind: the original idea of co-op was to have Chell and another woman (named Mel, IIRC) running around, with GLaDOS aiming her comments to undercut them ("you're fat" things).

        Valve changed it given that its a lot more fun to watch robots die over and over than humans, but it sounds like the concept of GLaDOs towards them remains the same.

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      September 4, 2010 9:57 AM

      Are they finally going away from the shadows from only the global lighting? That always distracted me in the HL games, especially more now. Sure, the flashlight casts a shadow, but none of the other lights do.

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        September 4, 2010 9:59 AM

        It's expensive to have multiple dynamic light sources and raises your min spec.

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          September 4, 2010 10:03 AM

          Pretty much every other engine does this now, though
          I think most of them pick the nearest source to use for shadowcasting, rather than all the nearby lights, which should reduce the expense, right?

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            September 4, 2010 10:07 AM

            Yeah, there are methods to cull out lights that aren't close, but it's still very pricey to have all dynamic lights. That's why so many engines show outdoor scenes that use one sun. Looks fantastic and it's cheap. Indoor levels with potentially dozens of lights are rough. There will be a point where that changes, but it hasn't yet.

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        September 4, 2010 10:11 AM

        [deleted]

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