SIN2 to be released via Steam

Though the system is buggy I think its moving in the right direction. I'm glad to see developers trying something new with episodic releases. We discussed this in one of my classes last week. I'm a little sketchy on how its going to all turn out, but I'm willing to try episodic games out. I for one dont watch shows like 24 until they come out on DVD cause I'd rather get the whole adventure immediately rather than wait a week for the next, so I dunno if that train of thought will carry on to video games.

Source engine is already outdated...

on the other hand, valve is planning to make HL3 on source :roll:

Finally other firms than Valve are beginning to use Steam. I am wondering why this have not happened before.

Yeah, Steam is buggy and crappy in many ways, but is for sure a good idea. Distributing content over the net without having to involve the usual publishers and distributers is THE future imo.

I am pretty sure Valve is going to add some kind of p2p distribution to Steam someday. They could spare quite a bunch of money by having content distributed through p2p instead of the cs way. I guess that p2p was also the reason why they brought in Bram Cohen. Being without him now is probably the reason why it takes so long.

Yep, the Source engine is outdated. When working with it I often feel more limited than I did with the HL engine.

Quote from skdr

Source is outdated? Please tell me more about this if you have something to share because I'd like to know how it's outdated...

things I miss:

- dynamic shadows

- self shadowing

- better dynamic lights

- no compiling / wysiwyg editor

- model scaling in editor

- parallax mapping

- better workflow when importing textures or models

- easier AI scripting (like UE3)

.

.

.

you know, I love HL2 and also source - that's why I'm mapping for it. But this engine is definitely not capable for next-gen.

Cool stuff. Love the old Sin. Even though it has its share of flaws, then its still an awesome shooter when its patched up n working. When Half-Life n Sin were released (they were release around the same 2 month period), I had to decide on getting one of them, I went with Sin, only got hl like a half year after that ~

Anyway, steam, okay, uhmm yeah i like whatever

Quote from skdr

It was meant to be funny not agressive and attacking post. Sorry if it felt like it, I just had to post that image with that quote :>

Yeah sorry, I was probably a bit bitchy because of some other stuff with that pic. My apologies.

Quote

Even though it has its share of flaws, then its still an awesome shooter when its patched up n working.

Yep, did you also try the expansion? It really added most of what there was missing in the original Sin.

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Anyway, steam, okay, uhmm yeah i like whatever

Nice diplomatic sentence:)

Glad to know Sin 2 is still alive, and I'm glad it's using the Source engine too. I like its style.

Thing is however, that Sin 1s style was extremely cartoony, where as Source seems custom made for realistic looking stuff, or at least something close to it. But who knows, might be flexible enough to do stuff like this.

Now who the fuck wants to play something like Sin?

It sucked so much that my neighbors had to put their grandmother on one of those retirement homes.

But I'm intriqued by this distribution over Steam, the possibilities are endless, plus security and patching becomes more convinient. Now we just wait and watch EA steal it.

steam rox, never had a bug with its. Its bwiwiant.

As for source being outdated, so was hl1 a year or two after its release. Luckily its got some great gameplay/physics

What is this outdated bull crap? How do you define outdated exactly? Is it all graphics or more than that?

The way I define outdated is released AND atleast year or so old, since when engines come they do tend to be usually build for specific work, as in Source's case, they wanted a engine that rolls like a piece of greased fat, techniques worked on by Ageia for physics and many industry leaders on graphics have loads of tricks up their sleeve for the foreseeable future (this is mainly microsoft and their DirectX), so if you define outdated by ratio of how much engine uses of currently available techniques you are never going to see a cutting edge engine.

Unreal Engine 3 is even right now outdated compared to renderers like Brazil, they have much more advanced shader output and are constantly adding more advanced techniques, but Brazil is pretty crappy game engine, eh? I think Source is the best engine currently since it produces excellent visual quality and has some juice left for future in terms of graphics, like the textures used in HL2 were clearly very low res compared to what it can do, and that compared to solid framerates the engine is far from outdated, maybe some dev will come up with a game with better visuals than what valve did for HL2.

Stay level headed you guys.

SKDR, is there a source for this news article?

BTW, comparing a game engine to a non-realtime renderer like Brazil is not very fair.

Both engines have their ups and downs. UE3 has probably more ups than downs in comparison to source. But I'm sure Valve is aware of that and is gonna work on something to change it. Or not.

Quote from sensee

things I miss:

- dynamic shadows

- self shadowing

- better dynamic lights

- no compiling / wysiwyg editor

- model scaling in editor

- parallax mapping

- better workflow when importing textures or models

- easier AI scripting (like UE3)

you know, I love HL2 and also source - that's why I'm mapping for it. But this engine is definitely not capable for next-gen.

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I agree on all points. Pretty shitty for an editor to not have in-editor lighting preview.

Also Source has parallax mapping already...

IMO, engines are considered outdated when the developer stops working on them or supporting them. Features, such as HDR and parallax, are modular in such a way where they can be coded into nearly any existing engine's rendering pipeline, if the engine is fairly up-to-date with the latest DX9 standards.

Is Doom1's engine outdated? Certainly. Is Doom3, Source, or UE2 outdated? Nope. Some may look better than others, but that doesn't mean anyone of them can't be used to create great games.

And yes, comparing a realtime renderer to something like Brazil is retarted.

An engine doesn't have to remain stagnant - its perfectly possible (and common) for them to be changed heavily for other games. Check the Quake 3 engine, which went through loads of changes and was used in dozens of games to different effect. Or the Unreal or even Unreal 2 engine for that matter. Hell even the original HL engine (Goldsource as they now seem to be calling it?) began life as the Quake engine). Source is no different; Half-Life 2 is, by no means, the "best" it will ever necessarily be, and as skdr said, HDR is a clear example of that.

I also seem to recall somebody at Valve said they were interested in adding lighting previews into VHE in some interview, but I might be mistaken. I not quite sure how it would be handled given the way source does lighting, but I guess perhaps it would be done for only selected lights with a short (few second) generation period to calculate some example lightmaps.

Oh and Sin 2 - awesome. The first game was flawed but I loved the feel of the weapons and the hit reactions on the enemies. You always knew when you hit them and it gave a satisfying result. I bought it on release as the shop didn't have HL in yet, and while it hardly lived up to HL, it wasn't as bad as many make out. I'm pretty happy to see more being done over Steam as well, which so far I've had a pleasant experience with.

Quote from TomWithTheWeather

And yes, comparing a realtime renderer to something like Brazil is retarted.

Well then I'm glad that I didn't compare them, I was just making an example how technology has been heavily going forward even at this time we think of being the age of new technology with shader effects, first releases of renderers like Povray and the Amiga whathisname are very very primitive when compared to even todays realtime renderers technology vise, I was just pointing out that tomorrows realtime renderers copy the technologies of todays rendering engines, all these normalmapping and HDR shit are old as a fucking rock in renderign engine world, but new and shiny in game engine world. Do you see my point?

People seem to forget that engines are made with clear boundaries set by graphic card manufacturers and OpenGL/DirectX developers, you could make engine with everything imaginable but it wouldn't be much of a joy to play something that takes 15minutes to render a frame, so they optimize and use the features put in graphics cards to help engines render frames faster. Every engine is out dated when a newer version of a graphics card comes out, it's just so simple, when looking something technology vise, but like Tom said, engines become outdated after the developer stop supporting it or developers stop using it.

I think hl1 didnt become outdated until hl2 came around. the community carried hl1 so far, some of the mods were up to date with some of the games on new engines being released on shelves.