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Re: Anger rage flaming mode!
Posted By: uberfoop	Date: 5/8/12 11:12 p.m.
In Response To: Re: Anger rage flaming mode! (Mator) : HPC is different from CEA, obviously. That's actually a tricky statement to pick apart. Obviously, yes, they are two different programs. However, CEA is a port of Halo PC, and (in terms of core functionality, and ignoring the added stuff) has much more in common with Halo PC than with the original game. : There is fog in Halo PC, just not as dense near the skybox. Halo PC does not have animated fog. It only has the regular static distance-based stuff, which as I noted doesn't even work correctly in AotCR's case. But it does not have this stuff. : I don't know what : went wrong with skyboxes in HPC, but obviously something did, but how : often do you look at the sky in a game, really? Not that often. This is : trivial. I would differ drastically. Skies are insanely important to the aesthetics of the Halo games. Even in Reach, which probably has my least favorite skyboxes of the series, I look up occasionally. In Halo's 1, 2, and ODST, I look up a lot. And the only reason I don't look up quite as much in Halo 3 is that many of those skyboxes are very horizontally-focused. If I don't look at skies much, it'll be because they're either uninteresting or graphically broken. : Halo PC has: functional fog, the correct model and texture assets, proper fog : fade with distance, reasonable rendering of transparent objects, and : proper display of hanging vines and stuff in 343GS. Halo PC also has : higher resolution, better specular/reflections, and overall BETTER : graphics. The only place it's lacking is the skybox thing you pointed out : on AotCR. Wait a second. Do you think that I only posted the AotCR sky because it was the only argumentative point I had, and all the other things I listed were pulled out of nowhere? Here is an analysis and critique I wrote of CEA's classic mode. There are a few things in it (like the issue with the skybox water on Halo, and the poor colour balance) that aren't applicable to Halo PC, but the vast majority of things in it are. When I wrote that the fog doesn't work, it's because (as I linked in my youtube video above) none of Halo 1's animated fog works in HPC. When I wrote that the model and texture assets were incorrect, it's because Halo PC actually is using different assets on many objects, such as jackals and Covenant dropships. When I wrote that the transparencies weren't redered correctly, it's because: 1-Many objects (like the PoA's windows) are far more transparent than they should be, and 2-Some objects (like the waterfall animated "mist" planes) don't react properly to different background types (in that case, the mist obscures the sky correctly but not the cliffs). When I wrote that HPC doesn't render vines on 343GS properly, it's because (as you can see in my fog comparison video I linked to above) it flat-out isn't capable of rendering any of the hanging vines or upright tree planes on that level (specifically, the only skybox plane objects it seems to render are the horizontal tree "branch" clumps. When I wrote that HPC renders skybox textures with poor colour balance, I admit that I was being unfair; I should have said "T&R skybox texture" rather than incorrectly using the plural. : better reflections Hmm. I'm not sure what you're referring to. Very technically speaking, there is a quirk with how the control room door is rendered from the real-time reflection on the control room's catwalk that was fixed in Halo PC, but it's a minor thing that almost nobody knows about and is almost certainly not what you mean. : higher resolution Yes. Halo PC does naturally have higher picture quality, more powerful texture filtering (specifically, the use of AF), and the capacity for higher framerates. I don't dispute this, but it's also not really what I meant by "the graphics are mangled." You could render it gorgeously in 8K resolution at 600fps with 16xFSAA, and blast that onto some mystical 27" 600Hz trinitron from an awesome fantasy world, and it would be irrelevant to my point. //=============================== : better specular I'd like clarification here, too. Much of the video I've seen of Halo PC actually has rather flat-looking lighting, and the stuff that doesn't also doesn't seem to have particularly richer lighting than the Xbox game. And when I've looked for videos that specifically note that they have the specular cranked up, it almost just looks like someone decided to crank up the opacity of all the baked reflection maps; I certainly haven't seen anything that looks decidedly unlike a Halo 1 reflection system and much like a proper specular lighting scheme. Unless I see reasoning otherwise, my suspicion is that the "specular" option in Halo PC is a selector to adjust the rendering parameters on an effect that actually does exist in the Xbox version of Halo 1. If anything, I'd suggest that the Xbox version of the game actually has a more complete specular lighting model. Why? Because of this: See how far the flashlight reaches in the hallway, and how shiny it is? There's a reason this occurs. Let's look at it from a different angle and distance: Notice how, on that big grey spot of the wall in the middle, it's brighter on the normal from wall to player (toward the left side of the wall section) than it ought to be if the lighting was diffuse-only? That's a pseudo-specular effect, and it's why the shiny metallic objects in the hallways are so well-illuminated. And speaking of how it emphasizes lighting along the normal, see how it even mildly illuminates things along the normal when the heavy diffuse effect from the flashlight isn't directed straight at the object: This pseudo-specularity is a bit sloppy, but it's nonetheless an interesting aspect of Halo's lighting that certainly adds to the character of PoA and the darker areas of Halo, T&R, and Keyes. And as far as I can tell, it doesn't exist in Halo PC.

Message Index

Halo 1 Single Segment Speedrun in 1:19:37	slYnki	5/7/12 12:02 p.m.
Re: Halo 1 Single Segment Speedrun in 1:19:37	Cody Miller	5/7/12 12:18 p.m.
Re: Halo 1 Single Segment Speedrun in 1:19:37	Cody Miller	5/7/12 12:24 p.m.
Re: Halo 1 Single Segment Speedrun in 1:19:37	uberfoop	5/7/12 12:33 p.m.
Re: Halo 1 Single Segment Speedrun in 1:19:37	Cody Miller	5/7/12 12:35 p.m.
Re: Halo 1 Single Segment Speedrun in 1:19:37	slYnki	5/7/12 1:13 p.m.
Re: Halo 1 Single Segment Speedrun in 1:19:37	Cody Miller	5/7/12 2:13 p.m.
Re: Halo 1 Single Segment Speedrun in 1:19:37	uberfoop	5/7/12 12:28 p.m.
Re: Halo 1 Single Segment Speedrun in 1:19:37	Mator	5/7/12 8:44 p.m.
Anger rage flaming mode!	uberfoop	5/7/12 9:23 p.m.
Re: Anger rage flaming mode!	Mator	5/8/12 7:37 p.m.
Re: Anger rage flaming mode!	uberfoop	5/8/12 11:12 p.m.
Re: Anger rage flaming mode!	uberfoop	5/9/12 2:42 a.m.
Re: Halo 1 Single Segment Speedrun in 1:19:37	uberfoop	5/7/12 5:36 p.m.