Access to the engine itself, time dilation, shaders, etc

[FictiousWill]

I think I heard somewhere that HL2 will support custom shaders in mods, but what else do we know about how much access we will have to the actual engine? Valve doesn't want to make the engine open-source, but they can't truly expect to appease modders for more than 5 years - the source engine isn't reality in a box. Take for example a time dilation effect (like bullet time). This effect would require some code in the actual rendering pipeline of the game specifying a global variable that dictates the speed of each and every element in the game. Without access to the engine code, can it be done? How open do you think source is, or what information have you found to shed some light on the subject?

 

[Ender01]

dude, you just blew my mind.

 

[Mr.Reak]

I don't think so, but who knows, I didn't visit general forums for a long time. Fictious, try and send your question to Gabe himself, he will tell you for sure.

Here is e-mail: [email protected]

 

[Rafael]

Actually, you don't need to touch the rendering engine to do bullet time. You could easily do it by lowering the gravity, slowing the animation and slowing down the amount of space the objets move a second (speed). And you could even place really neat effects in the source, like the trail of the bullet deformating the image behind it, ala Matrix. (Look at the Strider shooting it's big cannon, you can do it).

 

[nw909]

Yeah, e-mail gabe, I would love to see this question answered.

 

[OCybrManO]

You could do most parts of the bullet time effect (except for refracting light in the bullet trail) in HL1... and HL2 can do anything HL1 could do and much more.

HL2 uses HLSL (High Level Shader Language) for its shaders.

 

[Bad^Hat]

See the Specialists mod for HL1, it does Bullet Time quite effectively.

 

[FictiousWill]

I realize that an effect such as bullet time can be hacked/emulated without messing with the renderer, but there will be instances when functionality is only available from the internal engine. I shall email gabe as soon as I get an opportunity.

 

[Anthraxxx]

Originally posted by Rafael
Actually, you don't need to touch the rendering engine to do bullet time. You could easily do it by lowering the gravity, slowing the animation and slowing down the amount of space the objets move a second (speed). And you could even place really neat effects in the source, like the trail of the bullet deformating the image behind it, ala Matrix. (Look at the Strider shooting it's big cannon, you can do it).

You can already do that with the existing Half-Life engine. Go download "The Specialists" and play. Once you figure out the controls, pulling off stunts in bullet time are no problem.


www.thespecialistsmod.net

EDIT: Damn, I'm too late. Its already been posted...