There are about 24,000,000 results when Googling "half life 2 review", so I don't intend to do the 24,000,001st review of this fantastic game published by Sierra and developed by Valve.
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Generally, before releasing games, publishers and developers give game portals some screenshots where you can see the graphic features of the in-development game, and perhaps some game action. I wanted to go further and highlight the architectural and photographic aspects of the game, which I’ll demonstrate with QTVR images shot during game play, the first time (that I’m aware of) that this has been done.
In 1998, when Half Life was first published, it was the first storytelling game of the entertainment history; a movie-like game, where just the intro took about eight minutes of titles of the cast and the directors, moving you on a train while exploring your way to the MESA base station. Valve worked very hard on the game-rendering engine, resulting in spectacular simulated worlds presented in HL2; today, it is probably the state-of-the-art in real-time rendering systems.
The game engine, called SOURCE, offers many features that are oriented to give better realism to the maps inside the game. The physics of the game engine enable you to interact with the surrounding objects in any one particular area, and there are strong analogies between digital photography and the rendering engine; the intent of both mediums is to represent the environment, freezing it in the former and recreating it in the latter. As a result, both are immersed in the basic aspects of the real world: lights, environment, shadows, materials, colors, depth of field, FOV, etc.
For example, the light in HL2 is a central point of development for the engine. Valve implemented dynamic lights, vertex lighting and light maps, and even High Dynamic Range lighting, an advanced feature in digital photography. There are a few professional cameras able to capture HDR images, and you can imagine the difficulty in reproducing it. (see Greg Downing, see HDR SHOP).
The technique I used to ‘shoot’ this kind of QTVR, within the game, is the same as shooting a QTVR in reality, except here I didn’t have a tripod, a camera, and a panoramic head!
The first big problem for me was not to find out how to get the non-existent equipment to work, but to communicate to the characters, telling them "I'm a photographer. Don't shoot at me". Luckily, thanks to Valve, there were tools for ‘modding’ the game; meaning that I could modify the game to my preferences using the basic features of the code. Through some console commands I could disable objects and materialize others.
The first step was disabling all the enemies around me with some code in the game console so that I could take pictures. To improve the already great graphical display of the game, I used a mod that enables bloom effects on the rendering engine, by Neotokyo
(http://www.neotokyohq.com).
After freezing the enemies, I was in the map, and it was a vast one, so I needed to materialize some items that could take me around it. Again, with a few console commands, I provided myself with some vehicles – a jeep and motorboat – so I could search for the appropriate shoot location for my panorama.
I’m quite happy with the results: The light falling inside the buildings is impressive and dramatic (see QTVR wood house) and the outdoor light, with some fog effects and distance blur, gives a depth of field that no one engine can similarly do today.
Comments welcome!
Credits:
Publisher site: www.sierra.com
HL2 offical Website: http://www.half-life2.com
Source engine website: www.valvesoftware.com/sourcelicense
Buying the game. http://www.steampowered.com/
Developers site: www.valvesoftware.com
Special thanks:
Garry's mod for his "Garry's Mod" www.garry.tv/garrysmod
NeoTokyo for his "HL2 R8 HDR Bloom Mini-mod"http://forum.neotokyohq.com/
Andrea Stefanoni for stitching and photoshopping about 50 images for one QTVR
...and thanks to Valve for developing such a great game!
© 2004 Valve Corporation. All rights reserved. Valve, the Valve logo, Half-Life, the Half-Life logo, and the Lambda logo are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Valve Corporation.Sierra and the Sierra logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Sierra Entertainment Inc., in the U.S. and/or other countries. Vivendi Universal Games and the Vivendi Universal Games logo are trademarks of Vivendi Universal Games Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
