I know it's a bit silly to criticize something offered for free -- I'm glad it's there for those who want it! -- but I really feel like something of the original aesthetic has been lost in translation here. The before-and-afters aren't always flattering to the new version; everything is glowing orange. Darker atmospheres have become brighter.
It reminds me of the Alan Parsons quote
"Audiophiles don't use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment"
Yeah, well, HN top-posters mirror popular opinions to obtain upvotes rather than using upvotes to make correct opinions popular :P
(I'd like to draw attention to posts down-thread from people who have actually played the damn thing, who seem to agree that the overblown lights are more prominent in the marketing material than in the actual game.)
The original aesthetic, including lighting, was made keeping the original limitations in minds. Kind of running old sprite games on LCDs instead of CRTs makes them look jagged.
So it's different and a tech demo, but I agree it's not necessarily better and could be one the reasons it is free.
Yeah when looking at games like Alyx it seems like the vision isn't too far off. Personally I don't mind the RTX version as I always found hl2 to be depressingly boring to look at.
I thought exactly the same things about the illumination, i feel like it's too much "look how cool rtx is" and not enough "this should be scary and dark". In this, and other demos, i also felt like refractions are exaggerated, like floors that seem like mirrors is not really realistic to the end user.
Sometimes it reminds me of when hdr pics came out and everyone was overdoing it.
(But it should be a settings problem more than anything else!)
With ray tracing Nvidia made a new technology that breaks everyone's PC performance then they sold the solution to that broken performance as a card upgrade with better ray tracing hardware. Even though the Ray tracing doesn't necessarily look any better, just different, we now have to upgrade cards to solve the broken PC performance Nvidia caused themselves...
I think what parent is complaining about is the "Art Direction" rather than the technology itself, and I think I agree. Some of the feeling and mood been lost in the translation, sadly. I'm sure if they had some better art direction (maybe they didn't have a person from Valve to help with this?), it could have been a lot better in that regard, even with ray tracing and the rest.
I actually like it; but I think the point is more to demonstrate cool tech than to be true to Half Life's mood. It kind of reminds me of when in the 90s games started supporting colored lightings, and briefly everything was uh, very colorful. Although I think this is a lot more tasteful than that!
Can someone who has played it tell me if they really lit up most/all of Ravenholm like this or if they are just showing us a few lights cranked to 12 in the promotional material?
I used Alt + X to get into settings and decrease the brightness from 50 to 40, but even without that it felt dark, dark enough that I couldn't see anything down an unilluminated hallway.
It looks and feels great though, I'm excited for the full release.
Digital Foundry have a side-by-side playthrough and discussion of Ravenholm comparing HL2 RTX and the launch-day HL2 from DVD on a period-correct machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHRS0TO89UI
It's funny how, in my opinion, whenever the RTX On/Off comparison shows up, the older has better mood, atmosphere and design. The "RTX On" almost feels like "Generic UE5 pseudo-realism On".
Based on other comments, I'm not the only one. Is "RTX On" the "bloom/motionblur/green filter" of this generation?
Personally, the two most alluring things about RTX for me is a) better global illumination, none of that silly "you can see sunrise shining through the mountain/cave's ceiling" stuff; b) better local illumination: a glowing object should be an actual light source and make its surroundings brighter, dammit.
Everything else, including insanely accurate shadows and reflections, weird lenses/out-of-focus effects, etc. is much lower on my list.
While I think the ray-traced version looks better in a technical sense, it seems to me that they have completely forgotten to apply darkness and shadow appropriately in the scenes to create an immersive atmosphere.
Keep all the new tech and dial the ambient lighting down. That would look way better.
Make it feel dark, uncertain and risky again. You’re not supposed to know what’s in that corner or that room before it comes lounging at you.
In the RTX version you can see everything in every location, completely killing any sense of suspense.
I've always wondered that by gaining the ability to simulate light (or basically anything) in a more accurate manner, we reduce artists' ability to control the final result.
Back in 2D times, an artist could just set a pixel to a given color, and it would be that color, in early 3d, they had the ability to paint in shadows/highlights or control the texture colors directly.
With the physically based workflow, they had to author roughness/metalness and albedo maps, and were hoping for the best that the final result looked good in the game.
Nowadays with simulated light bounces, changing anyting in the scene could affect everything else, making controlling the final result that much harder.
Yes it does look better automatically, but at the cost of adding difficult of channeling the artists' vision.
I'm not a fan of graphics mods, but there is a similar problem with fan made RPG mods that "bring a game up to date with the technology" (wide screen, qol etc). A lot of mod packs feel like they have to add content (characters, quests) that is not so likely to fit in with the original game just because they can.
At least in Gibberlings mod packs for the infinity engine games the extra content is non existing or optional...
It matters that the original lighting was carefully hand-crafted by (presumably) environment artists and level designers working with strict limitations. What couldn’t be rendered was faked.
But yeah, I tend to find RTX a massive waste of framerate for little practical gain.
Hm, have I watched the same video? Most of the difference I saw on the floors is lighting and shadows, the only case where the floor was really "shiny" was a tiled floor, and that is actually reflective in real life, so...
The trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j31ISEd8xRM) actually shows the old lighting has much more mood and atmosphere.. RTX is far too bright. Ravenholm is supposed to be scary!
This is mostly a consequence of designing the ambiance using the tools of the time. You really need someone to go in and relight every environment with RTX in mind now, to properly take advantage of the capabilities.
I had a similar experience when I bought an OLED gaming monitor. It has perfect black, but when you go to play any game, they've all been lit assuming LCD screens, so blacks are really grey and the superior OLED contrast is basically useless.
Simply inserting the new tech isnt enough. The games need a redesign incorporating these new technological capabilities.
I wouldn't say I prefer it. There are a ton of top tier modern games. But you are right that there is this persistent blurriness. I have no clue what it is but it just looks super ugly and the result is for me that even some 10 year old game in effect do look better...
>Temporal anti-aliasing is another form of super-sampling, but instead of downscaling from a much larger image, data from prior frames is reprojected into the current one.
I had Macs growing up and missed out on all the Half Lives until I finally got to play Alyx last year. I tried HL1 after that, but couldn't really get into it.
That said, Valve released the Anniversary Update for Half Life 2 a few months back which includes a bunch of quality of life improvements for modern setups.
There's also a VR mod for Half Life 2, which is supposed to make it one of the best games available in VR.
HL1 is a very different experience compared to HL2. If you haven't played through HL2 I would still give that a shot. I love both games, but the second one was a lot more polished.
Does anyone have any details on how this was implemented? I thought that Source was a closed source engine. They rewrote the rendering pipeline using only the sdk?
Maybe they relied on the source engine leaks from a decade ago?
For some reason, I am very curious how this was pulled off.
> the RTX Remix application lets modders drag and drop lights, move objects, copy-paste existing objects into a scene to increase clutter and grass coverage, convert lights to be fully ray-traced, AI enhance textures, and add DLSS to improve image quality and accelerate performance.
For those wondering about AMD performance, I did some very brief testing. I have an Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card and a Ryzen 7800X3D running Fedora 41 with Proton Experimental on a 1920x1200 display.
I booted into the Ravenholm level and immediately got mid-50 FPS with no obvious stuttering. The framerate jumped over 70 once I got inside the first couple buildings. Those framerates are not ideal given the cost of my hardware, but I'd consider them to be perfectly playable. Or at least I would if not for the bigger problem...
The image quality was extremely blurry such that I could not clearly see anything over 10ft/3m away. There were no obvious graphics options I could change to fix this. I don't know if this is a result of some upscaling tech not working with my AMD card, a weird Proton issue, an anti-aliasing or depth-of-field feature gone horribly wrong, or something else entirely. Regardless, I'd consider it to be unplayable until the blur issue is resolved.
Readit News
(I'd like to draw attention to posts down-thread from people who have actually played the damn thing, who seem to agree that the overblown lights are more prominent in the marketing material than in the actual game.)
Sorry if this doesn't add anything, I normally just vote when I feel that about a comment.
So it's different and a tech demo, but I agree it's not necessarily better and could be one the reasons it is free.
Or old games that oversold insane amounts of bloom[0] as HDR..
[0]https://i.imgur.com/NdgHLCy.jpg
I used Alt + X to get into settings and decrease the brightness from 50 to 40, but even without that it felt dark, dark enough that I couldn't see anything down an unilluminated hallway.
It looks and feels great though, I'm excited for the full release.
My impression is that they were more interested in showing the improvements than being faithful to the original atmosphere.
Deleted Comment
Based on other comments, I'm not the only one. Is "RTX On" the "bloom/motionblur/green filter" of this generation?
Everything else, including insanely accurate shadows and reflections, weird lenses/out-of-focus effects, etc. is much lower on my list.
Keep all the new tech and dial the ambient lighting down. That would look way better.
Make it feel dark, uncertain and risky again. You’re not supposed to know what’s in that corner or that room before it comes lounging at you.
In the RTX version you can see everything in every location, completely killing any sense of suspense.
Back in 2D times, an artist could just set a pixel to a given color, and it would be that color, in early 3d, they had the ability to paint in shadows/highlights or control the texture colors directly.
With the physically based workflow, they had to author roughness/metalness and albedo maps, and were hoping for the best that the final result looked good in the game.
Nowadays with simulated light bounces, changing anyting in the scene could affect everything else, making controlling the final result that much harder.
Yes it does look better automatically, but at the cost of adding difficult of channeling the artists' vision.
At least in Gibberlings mod packs for the infinity engine games the extra content is non existing or optional...
Deleted Comment
But yeah, I tend to find RTX a massive waste of framerate for little practical gain.
Dead Comment
I had a similar experience when I bought an OLED gaming monitor. It has perfect black, but when you go to play any game, they've all been lit assuming LCD screens, so blacks are really grey and the superior OLED contrast is basically useless.
Simply inserting the new tech isnt enough. The games need a redesign incorporating these new technological capabilities.
Half-Life 2 RTX Remix Developers Respond to Concern From Some Fans That It Ruins the Original Game's Atmosphere
https://www.ign.com/articles/half-life-2-rtx-remix-developer...
>Temporal anti-aliasing is another form of super-sampling, but instead of downscaling from a much larger image, data from prior frames is reprojected into the current one.
https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2024-temporal-anti-...
That said, Valve released the Anniversary Update for Half Life 2 a few months back which includes a bunch of quality of life improvements for modern setups.
There's also a VR mod for Half Life 2, which is supposed to make it one of the best games available in VR.
Try Black Mesa. It's a modern remake but very true to the original.
Maybe they relied on the source engine leaks from a decade ago?
For some reason, I am very curious how this was pulled off.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-remix-half-lif...
I booted into the Ravenholm level and immediately got mid-50 FPS with no obvious stuttering. The framerate jumped over 70 once I got inside the first couple buildings. Those framerates are not ideal given the cost of my hardware, but I'd consider them to be perfectly playable. Or at least I would if not for the bigger problem...
The image quality was extremely blurry such that I could not clearly see anything over 10ft/3m away. There were no obvious graphics options I could change to fix this. I don't know if this is a result of some upscaling tech not working with my AMD card, a weird Proton issue, an anti-aliasing or depth-of-field feature gone horribly wrong, or something else entirely. Regardless, I'd consider it to be unplayable until the blur issue is resolved.