SoW1 vs. HL2 - Graphic quality

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    The SoW textures look nice for HL1, but it still looks like someone bukakked difference clouds blotches all over them. What the hell are the greyish blotches meant to be? It's a pretty stupid comparison. Most of the time I see HL2 textures they're very sharp and detailed because of the increased texture size. The overall effect is more important than two screenshots that aren't close to even (texture scale, lighting, position when taking the screenshot etc).

    1. The so called "bukakked difference clouds" over them is the diffuse texture which is almost transparant at this distance. It looks crappy yes and it is probably the effect that I dislike the most about detail textures.

    2. HL2 textures are not very sharp and detail because of their increased texture size, it's because of their scale and their bump maps.

    3. Yes, the overall impression is the most important. I only compared texture detail here. I doubt anyone is in doubt of what the result of comparing the overall visuals for HL2 and a HL1 mod would be:D

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    Look at the textures Zacker. U can see even from a mile away that the SOW textures arent looking very spiffy, but HL2's are.

    Slackkiller did not use detail textures in SoW_Village, maybe thats why? And yes of course textures scaled at ~1 without any shaders looks worse than textures scaled ~0.25 with bump maps. You dont really have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out...

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    Yea, rd's right, why the fuck am i arguing about this? No one stares at floors and says "DETAIL TEXTRES RUL HL2" anyways.

    Trying to avoid the point that you said down right wrong things? Around here it is custody to apologize when you have done so - if you havent been banned already.

    We are going nowhere in this thread. Thread closing requested.

    Detail tex + normal maps are less fun but in other situations they are absolutely required, altho obviously not for the hl community

    If I review or play a map that uses custom tex without detail tex applied in Unreal Im going to complain about it and look at it as a sign the author didnt spend a lot of time and polishing effort on the map

    HL2 tex are medium res btw, 512 isnt that big and certainly not "detailed" or "sharp"

    Detail textures are the 180mph of sports cars. You can even have some old Lada go that fast but you can't drive that fast anywhere, so it's just added to grow your imaginary penis, just like detail texture, they are there but anything it adds is the size of your @-penis nothing more.

    why even have the argument that adding an extra rendering pass to each surface makes it look better???

    Yes, congrats. If you add detail textures to your blurry (keyword) crap it will make it look less blurry, and render the surface and extra time.

    There's many many many other things you can with those extra passes... like...

    spec map

    normal map

    displacement map

    decals

    projectors

    animated goatse

    The textures are not blurry, 1024 res textures

    None of the things you said can make a surface look like that besides higher res textures but for that youd need a 8192 texture and thats impossible

    Unreal engine 3 and gears of wars in particullary support it heavily, theres a reason for that

    Afaik it even uses normal mapped detail textures, so a second smaller scaled normal map just for detail texturing

    Quote from Hourences

    Unreal engine 3 and gears of wars in particullary support it heavily, theres a reason for thatAfaik it even uses normal mapped detail textures, so a second smaller scaled normal map just for detail texturing

    Yeah but unless you haven't noticed, Unreal Engine 3 is the holy grail of shitload of extra work hours of nifty details 90% of the consumers are not ever going to see or give a flying fuck about, they even have two different shadow maps per light source and light detail textures, normal map this and normal map that.

    Yeah I can see that there are uses for detail textures but it is not actually something that adds really anything to the game, no, nothing, it adds completely 0% of any kind of immersion or anything and besides the textures look even more unrealistic with detail textures.

    The amount of work developers do already, and one would think that engines take off the workload but it's the opposite, and now you would like to add one more step between me and game. If they come up with a shader that does the same thing without adding any more work, then I'd agree the usability and would actually support it, but right now? Nah, fuck it.

    You are underestimating your own eyes, eyes are super fast. Close your eyes and open them for just 0.1 second before closing them again. In that 0.1 second youve already saw your entire room and can describe it pretty much blindly already.

    Details matter. You do see them no matter how fast they zip by or how small they seem to be. They make or break your world, the believe you can have in your created world. Details create immersion and immersion is important when designing environments. You do not design cubes to play in with weapons. You design a living and breathing environment with a war going on.

    Looking at blurry textures does not help me believe in the virtual world.

    If details would not matter we would still be playing 30 poly cube maps right now.

    Useless ? Look at my example pics. Huge difference ?

    Renderpasses ? A detail texture has an -extremely- limited influence on the cpu/gpu. 1998 games already had them actually. They ran just fine on 300 mhz pcs..

    Lot of work ? Those 2 setups in my example pics took me the whole 10 to 15 seconds to set up and about 8 mouseclicks. What did you say ?

    Memory usage ? An entire level only uses about 5-10 detail textures, resulting in about 1 MB memory usage in the current gen. Hmm ?

    Technically, detail textures are easy. With my little OpenGL knowledge I can say it's just a layer that uses different texture coordinates. That's all. So all that makes it a detail texture is it's different scale. And those screenshot show that it can make a great difference.

    However, for the initial statement that HL2 should've used detail textures, I still think it wouldn't have added significantly to the overall impression. From Nova Prospekt, I remember the grim feeling of a half-destroyed prison. From City17, I remember the train-station with it's shiny floors and light rays coming through the windows. Those things made more impression on me than the texture detail pixel-per-unit wise. I agree it would've looked better, but I don't think it would've been that important.

    Also, I think individual details matter more than repeating details like detail textures. From your second screenshot, I remember the several bushes better than that one of those area's was more detailed texture-wise.

    I think Valve's time was spent well. And I agree there will always be things that could've been added, that could've been done better. But at a certain point, you just decide it's good the way it is. For me, HL2 was good. Without detail textures.

    For my own levels, I would consider using detail textures since I have the time for it, and by that time also the knowledge, hopefully.

    Half-Life: Source (the cheap little source remake of Half-Life ONE that made me spend 20 Bucks more for the Collector's Edition) is full of detail textures.

    No amount of blurry or sharp textures are not going to create the illusion of a living world, I'm a book reader, the world with lively characters and good background story creates this illusion to me. Just like my undying love for Sam 'n Max: Hit the Road and Day of the Tentacle, those two games create their world with speaking presonalities and interesting storylines and do hell of a lot better job at creating a good gaming experience than any kind of detail texture you can add to a game, like I just said, detail texture adds zero game value.

    And speaking of realism, do you know why they created shader based DYNAMIC effects and are moving away from texture based STATIC effects? Oh, geez, I just answered my own question.

    Just like internet, static content = bad, dynamic user created content and communities = good.

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    Lot of work ? Those 2 setups in my example pics took me the whole 10 to 15 seconds to set up and about 8 mouseclicks. What did you say ?

    Yes, you did that with maps and textures already there, but now apply your 10 to 15 seconds TO APPLY THE TEXTURE TO THE MAP and now do textures, models, gameplay etc. etc. by your self and add the stupid amount of additional detail textures on the top of the pile vs. engine supported lighting effects out of the box. Again, is this piece of detail texture so neccessary that developers should do the extra work for just to give some graphics oriented players the immersion they need just because they can't use their imagination?

    Yes

    And you basically just said I cant use my imagination

    I wonder how I can create things then.

    Setting it up for an entire map, eg all surfaces and shader configs, would take less than half an hour at max, using custom detail textures.

    Youre telling me that you just spend 4 damn months of your life making an absolutely awesome map but that another 30 minutes is too much. If you already spend that much you can easily spend some more to be sure your 4 months of hard work really payed off and you really managed to make a great and super polished product of the highest possible standards

    And they already spend so much more time to give "graphic orientated players" (wtf that may be) their thing. Thats why we have 3 million poly worlds right now, so to speak.

    Wake up

    Example of a shader based dynamic effect ? Normal map ?

    Want another things thats considered "modern" ?

    Customability and giving the user the choice what he wants is expected these days. If you do not want to see detailtex then turn them off in the menu, if you do want to see them turn it on. Both sides happy. Give people the choice.

    Did you look at the pictures now ?

    Can you tell me if you see a difference in visual quality ?

    Detail tex add just as much value as any other graphical feature. You wanna go say none of those adds any game value ?

    If you do youll end up in a gameplay vs visual discussion and you prolly know where that will take you

    Dont deny visual stuff. The more you can have of such features the better. It wont hurt if you do, it can only end up possitive

    When I make 3d models from start to finish, concepts, modelling, tweaking, UW mapping, rigging, texturing and that is what I do today, soon you can add cooking normal maps and making shaders for the textures, making bones to react correctly to physics and whatnot.

    I'm horrified by the things you and about half a million more effect junkies want me to add to my model, I remember quake 2 days when I basically did something that kinda looked like a dude with some sort of log that shoots rockets, and people were like "dude, that is the most awesome model ever!" and I was happy, and they were happy.

    You spend 4 months on a map and you have a deadline of 6 months to do 5 maps with all the static meshes and textures, believe me, the 30 minutes of extra work can break you especially when you have quality to keep, the effect junkies demand movie quality graphics and usually so does your boss.

    Now like I have been saying, there is nothing wrong with static detail textures, but what I am saying, they are not actually that great to begin with, first of all, they create extra work, second they really don't add that much compared to lighting, normal maps, HDRI, specular, bump and all kinds of road and whatnot maps, IF they be added I suggest that you look at the end of the project if you have time and need to use detail textures and then do them, not put them on a pile with things way more important than that, it doesn't save anything (not that it could destroy anything either).

    If there are detail textres in a game, I don't mind, it's all good, but I did actually enjoy HL2 despite the "burry" textures and lack of detail textures and the addition of detail textures won't propably increase the enjoyment rate any further for me nor hundreds of other players. Now compared to the new HDRI thing they did, I might actually revisit some maps in HL2 if I'm really desperate of somekind of gaming experience and HL2 is the only game around.

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