The blooming texture will abruptly stop, looking like it got cut off by the lightmap on the left side. A good example is one of the orange walls of a house, in Avalanche, ahead of the Wermacht spawn. Take your flashlight, with HDR enabled, and shine it around somes walls. There are lot of areas where the HDR texture looks sculpted around shadowed areas of the lightmap, and in those shadowed areas there is absolutely no blooming. Some of the HDR textures in the new maps just look poorly laid out though. But I saw some of the old Flash map, and what I saw looked similiar to the new Flash, so I just assumed. I only played the original DOD for 5 minutes before shutting it off. So I think since these maps are almost completely new, they do have HDR designed "into them", not just appliedafterwards.Thanks for clearing that up. At the first glance nothing almost is common, with the possible exception of dod_avalanche. GrottenolmThe DOD:S Maps are remakes and thus were not designed with HDR in mind? Although the map names and general theme is similar in DOD and DOD:S, the Source maps have been completely re-built.
Plus Valve said the download would be around 3 gigabytes for an entire HL2 HDR makeover.Įxpect to see the official maps for Counter-Strike: Source remade for HDR in the future (but we're still waiting for those extra player models, ho hum). Valve didn't rule out giving an HDR makeover to Half Life 2 singleplayer maps, but I suppose that is at the near bottom of the company's priority list. The multiplayer only Day of Defeat: Source already incorporates HDR into it's maps - but the maps weren't designed with HDR in mind as they are remakes of older maps.
The announced expansion pack for Half Life 2, called Aftermath, will be the first full featured single player game Valve releases with HDR available. Everyone will be looking foward to seeing what they can do with this flashy eye candy, but hopefully the extra time needed to create assets for HDR won't take away from other areas of the game: time is money remember. Valve was reported saying all future Source games developed by them will incorporate HDR. Judging from the media coverage they got with with it, I suspect we'll be seeing more tech demo/playable levels regardless what gamers think of it. Interestingly, it was said that Valve would do similar demos if the 'community' responded well to the Loast Coast. The demo comes with audio comments from Valve staff who worked on getting HDR for the Source engine and the Lost Coast together.
Although a video would do it more justice, as the lighting is dynamic.
A good collection of screenshots is over at IGN. If you own Half Life 2, you can download it through Steam.