Valve's Way of HDR Rendering

Preview of Half-Life 2: Lost Coast

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 09/15/2005 | 02:49 PM ]

Game designers try to use all the means at their disposal, in order to persuade potential costumers to buy certain game titles. One way is to organize nig shows and gamer conventions. Another is to release an update to the title already available in the market.

<%BANNER[article_nw]%>

Last year, CryTek released a patch for the famous FarCry game, which enabled the High Dynamic Range feature. This move aroused almost as much interest to the FarCry game as when the game was released for the first time. Now it seems that Valve is hoping to achieve the same, by releasing a small update to the Half-Life 2 game.

In the coming weeks Valve is going to offer a new game-level for the Half Life 2 game, which will be available via Valve’s Steam software. This level is called Half Life 2: Lost Coast and it is supposed to bring new features to the game: one of them is HDR support. Bit-tech.net has managed to get a sneak peek at this upcoming title.

“To date, what has been touted as “HDR” in games such as Far Cry is pretty much just a single feature called Blooming: where the light from a bright source spills over the edge of an object, obscuring it from view. The exact featureset that makes up HDR varies within the game industry, so Valve have made a list of what they think is important for HDR. This featureset includes Blooming, HDR Skyboxes, HDR Cube maps, HDR light reflection and refractions and many more,” reports bit-tech.net.

• bit-tech.net: Half-Life 2: Lost Coast.