Half-Life 2: Lost Coast – HDR with the Source-engine

Those who haven’t heard of Half-Life 2: Lost Coast we should perhaps explain that it is a completely new map for the popular Half-Life 2 by Valve. This isn’t just any map but a place for Valve to reveal its new graphic technologies it has integrated into its engine Source. It is simply a demo that shows the level of details possible with the new verison of the Source-engine. The technology before any other is HDR (High Dynamic Range) has been used with several other games where FarCry is the probably best known example.

HDR has been tormented by side effects such as performance hits and that you were unable to use antialiasing with HDR activated. Valve has been working for a couple of years now with bringing HDR to the Source-engine and decided to make no compromises with this promising technology. The result shows it, with more developed effects, a small performance loss and support for antialiasing.

“By the fourth interation, the lads had cracked it: MSAA worked; it worked on all DX9 hardware, with reasonable performance on even a Radeon 9600; indeed the performance was the best of the four methods, with only a small performance hit over Half-Life 2’s LDR solution.”

All this and more will be available with Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and coming games based on the Source-engine, among others Day of Defeat: Source which will be released at the end of the month. At Bit-Tech they written an interesting article about Valve’s work with HDR and how it is used in Lost Coast.

:: Read on at Bit-Tech