Making the Source Engine Beautiful again [3kliksphilip]
84 replies, posted
[QUOTE=JoeSkylynx;53054701]As for mapping, well... Valve needs to seriously update the Hammer tools, and make them not a pile of a shit at the moment.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, Id tech engine was never exactly a stellar tool for mapping. I'm surprised it's still the standard for valve as it hasn't been the standard in the industry for a very long time.
[QUOTE=AtomicSans;53056005]I'm thinking of whatever the really nice AA in Doom 2016 was. If that wasn't TAA then I must be wrong. But I do like the TAA in Siege.
I actually like a blurry AA because I can't wear my glasses and have headphones on simultaneously or they dig into my face. So I play games with my glasses off and everything is a tiny bit blurry anyway. And a blurry AA seems to reduce screen door effect on my 1080p display, somehow.[/QUOTE]
I don't like the blurry AA as it can produce round shapes on objects and nerf texture detail. Some solutions are also prone to ghosting.
[QUOTE=Pingu1;53056510]Titanfall 2 is on source1 and looks good for today standards. Yes its a modified version of source but it is still runned by source engine.[/QUOTE]
They pretty much completely redid the renderer. A lot of the back end and model formats are relatively the same.
[QUOTE=EcksDee;53056511]I think we can all just forget Source2 now that S&box is on its way.[/QUOTE]
aw hell yeah
[QUOTE=JoeSkylynx;53054701]Honestly, Source 1 is at it's limits, and has been for awhile. Source 2 is just... Eh....
It doesn't really provide anything new, and I highly doubt Valve is gonna make a new stunning splash into the gaming world again. As for mapping, well... Valve needs to seriously update the Hammer tools, and make them not a pile of a shit at the moment.[/QUOTE]
[quote=Leintharien]
It's got a great set of mapping tools as well. They do away with BSP volumes so now everything is made of meshes. So far the strongest feature Source 2's Hammer editor has is the ability to modify meshes in-editor and save them as completely new meshes. This helps massively in map iteration, and is a feature I've barely ever seen natively supported in modern engines, with the exception of Lumberyard.
[/quote]
Yep, there's a ton of improvements in Source 2, and from a pure mapping standpoint it looks a whole lot more efficient than, for instance, UE4. BSP brushes are completely gone in favour of meshes, but said meshes are just as easy, actually easier to manipulate than brushes are in Source 1, same goes for the process of applying textures.
[video=youtube;VB5ypL7JQg8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB5ypL7JQg8[/video]
GLHF doing something like that in Unity or UE4 without using external 3D programs.
Not to say that UE4/Unity are bad engines or anything, but I'm still pretty surprised that they haven't integrated similar tools as well, UE4's current options for blocking out levels are hot garbage in comparison, and I'd even argue that an implementation such as Source 2's can be used for more than simply blocking out
Source 2 is a really disappointing use of Vulkan, that API offers so much potential if one really digs into it's features and capabilities. But Valve still seems stuck in 2009 with it. Afaik, the most I've heard of them exploiting is it's ease of async resource transfer?
[editline]edited[/editline]
i made this comment shortly after waking up this morning and on mobile but to clarify the kind of stuff they could be exploiting:
- built-in occlusion queries, either retrieving area of something on screen or returning a simple yes/no for occlusion
- Vulkan [I]requires[/I] compute support so that opens up more opportunities for using compute shaders to speed things up (e.g env map generation maybe?)
- nice indirect drawing support, [U]stupid[/U] powerful stuff with some nvidia extensions for device generated commands
- vulkans setup for multipass rendering makes it possible for the driver to optimize the hell out of it: not sure how Source 2 does its thing, but Forward/Forward+/Deferred are all really easy to implement and extremely performant ([URL="https://github.com/WindyDarian/Vulkan-Forward-Plus-Renderer"]example forward+[/URL])
I wonder if Source 2's vpk file compression is better than Source 1.
[QUOTE=Nidhogg;53056330]Clips are broken for me.[/QUOTE]
I've got it from here, if somebody wants to look in:
[url]https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/56jeco/procedural_glass_shattering_from_source_2/[/url]
[QUOTE=TheBorealis;53056957]I wonder if Source 2's vpk file compression is better than Source 1.[/QUOTE]
Are GCFs or VPKs compressed at all in any valve version of source?. I thought those were just uncompressed archives.
[QUOTE=Laserbeams;53054736]The Dell product placement in this video is way too obnoxious[/QUOTE]
With Youtube being a prick and all there isn't much other options now isn't there?
[QUOTE=Pingu1;53056510]Titanfall 2 is on source1 and looks good for today standards. Yes its a modified version of source but it is still runned by source engine.[/QUOTE]
I hate this argument so much.
[QUOTE=weyu6572;53057048]With Youtube being a prick and all there isn't much other options now isn't there?[/QUOTE]
There's no option other than making a 9 minute long Dell ad disguised as a video about mapping and the Source engine? Please
[QUOTE=EcksDee;53056511]I think we can all just forget Source2 now that S&box is on its way.[/QUOTE]
That's a funny way to spell [url=https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1572105][b]Pragma[/b], resident Facepuncher Silverlan's completely-from-scratch 100%-compatible-with-Source-assets custom engine.[/url]
[media]https://youtu.be/G1JvibPFnyE[/media]
[media]https://youtu.be/-pTDM63YADA[/media]
[media]https://youtu.be/UbVCBS-poyM[/media]
No shade intended for S&box, but being the massive Source fanboy I am (particularly just a fan of how Source renders things, not to mention having a large arrangement of tools I've written explicitly for optimizing my Source workflow), I have [b]far[/b] more interest in Pragma than I do S&box, for no other reason than the fact it means I won't have to change how I work at all to be able to utilize all of the advantages Pragma provides.
:pudge:
[QUOTE=Gmod4ever;53057063]-deserved post on Pragma-[/QUOTE]
Also let it be known that [I]this[/I] is one of the best usages of Vulkan I've seen, Silverlan really knows his shit. Realtime shader editing and recompiliation (a rather tricky thing with Vulkan!), compute shaders for things like water waves (wip, afaik), [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhldKD2sP1c"]forward+ rendering supporting hundreds of lights at once[/URL], performant memory allocation, and fairly stable cross-platform support.
Also, speaking about dust 2 being dull, I guess it should be pretty obvious that the map is created for a competitive shooter in which one of the most important things is to be able to easily tell apart your enemy's silhouette from a complex background behind them, thus minimizing the randomness of encounters, so having all those shiny ass textures all around would be just uncomfortable for players and counterproductive for the balance.
[QUOTE=Gmod4ever;53057063]That's a funny way to spell [url=https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1572105][b]Pragma[/b], resident Facepuncher Silverlan's completely-from-scratch 100%-compatible-with-Source-assets custom engine.[/url]
``PRAGMA VIDS``
No shade intended for S&box, but being the massive Source fanboy I am (particularly just a fan of how Source renders things, not to mention having a large arrangement of tools I've written explicitly for optimizing my Source workflow), I have [b]far[/b] more interest in Pragma than I do S&box, for no other reason than the fact it means I won't have to change how I work at all to be able to utilize all of the advantages Pragma provides.
:pudge:[/QUOTE]
Yeah, Pragma is one of my most anticipated gaming developments ever. If it ever gets to the point of being feature-comparable to GMod, this will be GMod 2.0 to me, not S&box. Sorry Layla.
I think S&box looks really really promising, as does Pragma. Personally though from what I've seen of S&, I feel like as someone with absolutely 0 game engine knowledge but a lot of "other" 3D app knowledge, I could easily pick up S&box and use it to build detailed levels in just a couple of hours. All the options to import meshes and 3d files as well as all the mapping and real time modeling tools look really intuitive and easy to pick up.
Tbh I still think the graphics in source 1 look good. They're obviously dated but they still look great. Or maybe my eyes are bad who knows
[QUOTE=fruxodaily;53057513]Tbh I still think the graphics in source 1 look good. They're obviously dated but they still look great. Or maybe my eyes are bad who knows[/QUOTE]
To be fair, there were times where I thought the visuals in Unreal Tournament looked great even though the graphics are even more dated than a lot of Source engine games.
[editline]16th January 2018[/editline]
Methinks it might have more to do with its artistic style than its graphical fidelity, but even shit like those particle simulation textures (e.g. most of the fire textures) and rippling water textures look impressive to me.
art direction >>>>>>>>> actual horsepower. That's why even though games like, for example Bully, Okami, Metal Gear Solid 2, etc. are quite old, they still hold up today
[QUOTE=LZTYBRN;53057638]art direction >>>>>>>>> actual horsepower. That's why even though games like, for example [B]Bully[/B], Okami, Metal Gear Solid 2, etc. are quite old, they still hold up today[/QUOTE]
It's also why the remaster sucked. Different team so different art direction. And because they original devs knew how to push the engine to its limits and work around them, the new team didn't and so the remaster was a buggy mess.
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