Weekend Discussion
- Alice O'Connor: [Tea, and possibly crumpets, are involved.]
- Brian Leahy: [Trying not to spread the PAX nerd flu]
- Garnett Lee: [Confirming weekends, live]
- Jeff Mattas: I'll be playing some Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and taking some breaks to play Worms Reloaded and change my shorts.
- Xav de Matos: Bachelor Party tonight. When I get back on Sunday, I'll be spending time with PlayStation Move.
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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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Definitely not all of them are from the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI5KzqASlao
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10 minute long video of co-op play!
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/pax-10-portal-2/704062 -
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. :)-
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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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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Mass Effect 2 Lighting comparison discussion:
http://img375.imageshack.us/img375/8299/masseffect2201009041741.png
http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/4254/masseffect2201009041743.png
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/7238/masseffect2201009041744.png
http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/1904/masseffect2201009041747.png
http://img545.imageshack.us/img545/9945/masseffect2201009041749.png
As you can see there is some very fine level of lighting surface detail in the game, but most of it typically obscured by rendering artifacts (aliasing) in the shaders and geometry. With supersampling applied the details become visible. Unfortunately the lighting on the characters themselves tends to be a bit too dark.
Rest of shots:
http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/7484/masseffect2201009041740.png
http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/8299/masseffect2201009041741.png
http://img545.imageshack.us/img545/5513/masseffect2201009041745.png
http://img375.imageshack.us/img375/1904/masseffect2201009041747.png -
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-
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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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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