Dynamic Sky ?

[Sat]

Hi all,

Do you think HL2 supports dynamic sky (clouds moving and so on) or is it still the old sky box system from HL1 ?

If you know anything about it, please post it

 

[EVIL]

I think it uses dynamic sky. the sky looks alot like the sky in STALKER

 

[FiShEh]

its dynamic, i think i even saw lightning effect on the e3 demo :O

 

[Sat]

Yeah i also saw a kind of lightning effects
But I tried to see if clouds were moving out of the full video, but no way to see it

 

[smilez]

Has anyone played an old game called carnivores? The game itself sucked but it had the most realistic sky effect.. there was a shadow map cast over the whole ground for all the clouds, and it dynamically shifted as the clouds moved and changed.

Just looked awsome

 

[Sushi]

Hope it will have a sunrise and sunset (Vice City did this VERY well)

 

[Spiffae]

I'd say the two options are

1. A huge-res (2048x2048?) skybox, that mostly doesn't change (that's more realistic than fast moving clouds, anyway) that has the sun mapped onto it (for lightsourcing and lens flares)

2. A dynamic and incredibly realistic sky, which would probably use up some pretty valuable processor and video cycles

if you look at the scene on the dock, that sky looks painted to me. don't get me wrong, it looks fantastic, but i don't see it moving. Valve has more control over performance if they can just make a great skybox, but it could go either way.

What i like to see is skies like in the dune buggy video. I can't remember a game that dared to make flat, bright sky, and frankly, i think it's a big step for game graphics. It looks real.

 

[Spiffae]

also, about sunrises and sunsets:

Not really a possibility for valve for a couple reasons: first, it removes a lot of control from the developer. moody scary alleyway? go get a cup of coffee, and when you get back, it's daylight! For valve, who are using every element of their engine to make the game cinematic and scary, losing control over the lighting seems like it might be too great a sacrifice.

Certainly, you will see sunrises and sunstets, you already have in the dock video, but they won't be dynamic.

 

[Farrowlesparrow]

You dont need to make a new post to test a new sig. just look at one of your old posts.


I tihnk the sky in Morrowing was done quite well.

 

[RoyalEF]

Originally posted by Sat
Yeah i also saw a kind of lightning effects

I think you are referring to the poor cam copies of E3 which had color cycling flowing through several scenes including flashes of color in the sky. That was an artifact of the crappy video transfer. In the 600Mb movie there are no such flashes anywhere and the sky looks completely static.

No reason to think they bothered with that

 

[Spiffae]

yeah, my mistake...i edited it into something useful anyhow sorry!

 

[EVIL]

http://www.halflife2.net/image_files/Halflife14.jpg

you see the clouds? i think this is dynamic

 

[Dile]

Originally posted by Farrowlesparrow
You dont need to make a new post to test a new sig. just look at one of your old posts.


I tihnk the sky in Morrowing was done quite well.

Morrowing...HEHE:cheers:

 

[Sat]

Originally posted by RoyalEF
I think you are referring to the poor cam copies of E3 which had color cycling flowing through several scenes including flashes of color in the sky. That was an artifact of the crappy video transfer. In the 600Mb movie there are no such flashes anywhere and the sky looks completely static.

No reason to think they bothered with that

No i'm talking about the 600mb video too. Look at: 00:05:49 (not frame by frame) and look in the top left corner, you'll clearly see it.

And:

Originally posted by EVIL
http://www.halflife2.net/image_files/Halflife14.jpg

you see the clouds? i think this is dynamic

Yes but it is just 'fog'. If you look at the docks scene from the vid, you'll see that this stuff can't be used to create a sky like the one in the scene(it could be it will be too intensive for the comp).

Anyway HL2 will rox :afro:

 

[A.A]

The sky is not dynamic, but has a very very realistic look. Have you seen the game Dragon Empires? It's a MMORPG but has a dynamic sky. But the the rest of the game ain't that impressing, the characters look real bad and so do their animations, it has some goodlooking terrain, but it just looks good on pictures.
Note that I've made this judgement from seeing to videos from the game, not a very good quality on them, but it was enough.
But one should note judge a game before he's seen it for real.

 

[A.A]

Originally posted by smilez
Has anyone played an old game called carnivores? The game itself sucked but it had the most realistic sky effect.. there was a shadow map cast over the whole ground for all the clouds, and it dynamically shifted as the clouds moved and changed.

Just looked awsome

I think I've played Carnivores2. Those meateating dinos scared me like hell At sometimes in the game, I wish i had a minigun or something.

 

[RoyalEF]

I do see some faint flashes... patches of cloud flash brighter for a moment. It might be a QUicktime artifact. on repeated playing it sometimes seemed much brighter and other times very faint.

It also occurs when you are staring toward the sunset also a few seconds before. It may be an animated sky-much like an animated texture. It seemed to have the same shape each time it lighted.

As for the fog in the picture of the COmbine tower... That is just LOD/distance fog. In the QT MOV you can see that sll over the strider scene at the beginning. Give better perspective of depth and distance. When the movie pans up to look at the tower, there is a second line where the tower become much fainter...like the edge of the WorldMap or entering cloud

 

[Xelnein]

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by smilez
Has anyone played an old game called carnivores? The game itself sucked but it had the most realistic sky effect.. there was a shadow map cast over the whole ground for all the clouds, and it dynamically shifted as the clouds moved and changed.

Just looked awsome
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

shoot him in the eye!!!!!!1111111111111111111111.....sdfasdf..... good sniper game.. sort of crazy and eventually bland.. but.. pretty good.

 

[derby]

The e3 video moves very quickly, it doesn't stay put long enough to see if the clouds were moving. So we can't tell at the momnet wether it is dynamic or not. I is not [iI]obviously[/I] dynamic, but a realitic weather system would have to support very slow moving clouds for subtle effects.

I doubt there will be a full dynamic sky, as this would involve moving the sun, which would require realtime lighting on all outside scenes, a large performance hit. What could be done is a skybox with cloud plains drawn in front of it, like in 'fortresss' screenshot posted earlier (that isn't simple distance fog, as it has a texturer to it). Also, they could adjust the brightness/colour of the skybox to simulate a slight change in the time of day.

If the skyboxes are static it introduces a new gameplay constraint: The player has to remain 'in doors' for long enough for the time of day to have changed. We know that there are some day, night and evening scenes as there were in HL1. However in HL1, most of the game took place underground, Gordon only reached the surface periodically and a new skybox was usewd everytime representing the time of day.

This would be harder in HL2 as the game is largely set on the surface, in city 17. Even when the player is inside, I expect there to be windows and skylights.

 

[howser]

dynamic sky's arent that complex folks... and arent that hefty on the processors... normally done by a skybox with layers and shit.
a Huge world texture is definetly not how they did it, think HL sky's high res with animations, layers n other things.
I guess thats how they did it anyway.

 

[derby]

It depends on how you implement dynamic skies, Q1 had dynamic skies so it isn't that hard. However there are many things that would be hard to do using a skybox with layers. for example, how would you do a moving cloudplane with a multilayered sky box? This isn't a criticism of your post, howsers, I'm interested to know.

 

[djkanuk]

Compare the screenshots to the video and what stands out most to me is the realism of the 'air' environment. Hard to explain, but in the screenshots everything looks crystal clear. In the videos there's a fogginess to objects further away, a blurriness in the sky and around tall buildings. I'm sure this is the particle effects engine in action. It will probably be one of the least obvious features of HL2 but will make a HUGE difference to the feel of the game. With this general cloudy mist floating around the sky, you don't need a dynamic sky map, because the particle dust is doing the blurring and moving.

 

[vann7]

STAlker and HALo have very nice SKy....

here is a pic.. of STalker..

now here is a cloudy day..

it would be pretty cool a Snipe fest in those buildings

 

[Stone]

Originally posted by Farrowlesparrow
You dont need to make a new post to test a new sig. just look at one of your old posts.


I tihnk the sky in Morrowind was done quite well.

Yes, I loved the sky in that, I spent 2 hours just sitting and watching the sky...

/me goes off and watches the sky...

so pritty

 

[howser]

I dont know the technical details but I do know it isnt '3d' when doing layers in dynamic sky's.
level designers determin the sky as normal (sky texture with HL1) and the engine does the rest. When I say layers i dont mean full 3d stuff Im just saying one stays still while the other moves and blocks out visbility of the under layer..... but that would be very basic thats what they used In Hitman games.
Looks good and has almost no effect in terms of lag. Just one way to make dynamic sky's.

Another thing i could say about dynamic sky's is.... who the **** cares? LoL the skys HL2 look nothing short of jaw dropping with their real time ambient lighting n all that shit they are great. Chances are they are dynamic, but im not going to cry over a time wasting feature that wasnt implemented by valve. If they dont add them Im sure there is many peeps out there that will its a flexible engine and stuff like that one be hard. Unless the sky is the limit!!?? Get it?! Hmmm shit joke sorry

 

[Tr0n]

omg...sweet.When you look closley at top left corner on E3 video you can see the lighting going off in that black cloud!Also the clouds don't look like there moving

 

[Styloid]

I have to agree with Spiffae.. HL2 is a narrative. It has a story with structure. Stalker is about being free to do whatever you want. They are both good ideas.
A dynamic sky is not a universally good thing. It can be used better in one game than another.

 

[EVIL]

Originally posted by derby
It depends on how you implement dynamic skies, Q1 had dynamic skies so it isn't that hard. However there are many things that would be hard to do using a skybox with layers. for example, how would you do a moving cloudplane with a multilayered sky box? This isn't a criticism of your post, howsers, I'm interested to know.

Q1 didnt had dynamic sky's but Animated sky's (big diffrence)

 

[smilez]

Still.. animated is better than no sky (like in halflife) where the background is just a blocky picture

 

[derby]

Quake 1 skies were dynamic in the sense that they were continually changing. Anyway that is not really relevent.

Wether or not HL2 supports dynamic skies is of importance to mod creators who want to know wether it is worth creating skyboxes for their mod ahead of time. As tthe format for skyboxes is pretty standard it would save time to have them all done before the SDK ships.

As for the sky being a blocky picture, I'm sure HL2 skies will be hi-res no matter how they're implemented.

 

[Punisher454]

Define "Dynamic sky".
Its no prob to pull a few tricks and make the sky look like its moving.
And with what we've seen with the video camera theres a few other things you can do to simulate a "Dynamic Sky"(something similar was done somewhere in RTCW). It may also be possible to play back recorded video files on the skybox.
There's lots of ways to simulate a "Dynamic Sky" even if its not a built in function.

 

[A.A]

I would define it as a sky that's not just a moving pic or a little animation, but clouds that really move (and why not change form) and can be seen from above as moving to, with a night and day cycle also as a requierment.
Dragon Empires has, what I would call, a dynamic sky. See it.

 

[ShinRa]

dynamic skies probably arent in hl2, but something with the sky will be cool, i doubt theyre just throw an 8-bit texture in the air

 

[ComradeBadger]

I think that it really doesn't matter.... HL2 does look awesome sky-wise... I think personally there won't be a day/night cycle becuase as someone said earlier... it would spoil the atmosphere being carefully built up by Valve ... STALKER and HL2 are two conflicting design philosophies

 

[ShinRa]

besides STALKERS story, everything in the game so far of what ive seen is unoriginal.

 

[EVIL]

its hard to be un original in this genre these days.. so I dont blaim them

 

[ShinRa]

yea true, story kicks ass though, but from the pics, the creepy feeling just isnt there

 

[A.A]

Originally posted by guinny
yea true, story kicks ass though, but from the pics, the creepy feeling just isnt there

Pictures can't tell you the feeling of a game. It might be creepy playing it, for all we know.

 

[EVIL]

I find a big world (40 (Virtual)km²) that is almost empty but filled with ugly mutated creatures and scary abbandoned powerplants pretty scary. I also think you have t play it to feel the atmosphere

 

[Farrowlesparrow]

Deffinately, the vids dont show the true potential of the game, in any way especially the atmosphere.