What type of lighting and shadowing does HL2 support?

[mayro]

Awsome source videos, but i was wondering what type of lighting / shadowing valve will use for halflife 2 and source.

From the looks of it, their is dynamik shadows but the lighting seems a little weird. Is that becuase this is a beta or is that the real / final lighting that HL2 will have? Ive noticed alot of the peeps that actually have played it only run it on medium settings, does the higher mode support better lighting/shadowing?

***I did a search and it came up with nothing on what hl2 uses for this stuff***

 

[Sparta]

I think it uses the same kind of lighting as engines like the Unreal Warfare engine and the Crytek engine. A combination of Static lightmaps and dynamic lighting/shadows

 

[blahblahblah]

Apparently, the Source engine supports everything and the kitchen sink.

HL2 the game will most likely use lightmaps and static shadows (though it will be supplemented on certain objects like enemies and whatnot). This is done for performance reasons (and rightly so).

 

[Cath0de]

I think Doom3 is the first game to feature entirely dynamic lighting.

 

[Sparta]

I think Doom3 is the first game to feature entirely dynamic lighting.

Yup, and it looks all puuuurdy too

 

[Big Fat Duck]

Half-Life 2 engine right now uses radiosity, which is basically light maps being generated (coloring of certain areas of a texture on a brush) when a mapper compiles his/her map.

Dynamic shadows are on for models and physics boxes (anything that has physics applied to it), but have static direction and shape.

Specularity is applied to textures to reflect objects and act like a mirror somewhat.

 

[Mr Neutron]

As far as we've heard, Source doesn't do anything really nextgen with lights. I believe shadows only cast from set directions (within a whole level or a mapper-defined area, all shadows cast in one direction specified by the mapper), and real-time lights don't cast shadows.

There are essentially two classes of objects for lighting:

1) static "bsp" (don't know if Source is strictly a bsp engine), parts of the level that can't move, have lightmaps generated from the static lights during the map compiling process.

2) moveables (monsters, moveable objects, players, etc.) are dynamically affected by all lights (both dynamic AND static; confusing, isn't it?); the direction of shadows cast by moving objects is dependent upon a preset point or direction set by the mapper (by splitting the level into areas, this direction/point can change). For instance, in an outdoor area, all shadows should be parallely cast from the effect of the sun because it's the strongest source of light and because it's virtually infinitely far away; on the other hand, in a room with a light bulp hanging down, the direction of the shadows will be cast away from the bulb, a fixed point. One of the hardest parts in-game is for the program to decide which origins of light should cast shadows and what the intensity should be: if I'm outside in daylight, a flashlight shouldn't cast shadows. In fact, though our eyes adjust for sunlight so that it doesn't look that our experience of it isn't THAT much brighter than daylight, it really is a lot brighter such that shining a flashlight into a quite dark shadow outside on a bright day will be barely noticeable. So a really accurate lighting model would take into account the way eyes set their aperture.

Having dynamic lights cast shadows takes a lot of resources or clever programming, and it creates as many aesthetic problems as it solves (like making everything really dark a la Doom3). HL2 won't have this.