Comments on: Valve Drop Hints About Episode Three

By: Scandalon

Scandalon — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:55:38 +0000

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – source needs to be fixed. Some people keep mentioning how much time and care Valve put into their game – my contention is I wish they’d put the same care into their work, without having to do so much, well, work. (Then maybe their “episodic” content wouldn’t take 2 years each…)

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/unrealtournament2007/show_msgs.php?topic_id=m-1-44602754&pid=928117 Sums it up nicely.

‘ve done maps for Counter-Strike Source, Team Fortress 2, The Ship, Doom 3 and Unreal Tournament 3. So I’ve used Hammer (Pre- and post Orange Box), Radiant (D3 build) and UnrealED (UE3). And out of these three, I have to say UT3 with the UE3 tools is just the best of the bunch.

I wouldn’t say Radiant/D3 engine was able to make me to happy so I’ll just compare Source and UE3 which are really close in quality to each other. Things that give UE3 an edge over Source are:

1. Your lightning is visible in the editor itself, which is a major advantage, a couple drawbacks though are once your lighting gets fairly complex you’ll need to build your lights to see an accurate representation and because the game is effectively running in the background it makes the UE3 editor a very system intensive one. But overall, it’s an advantage, a fairly big one!

2. Because the game runs in the background, playing your map is a breeze. With Source you always need to compile and go out your editor and into the game, taking time and effort. In UE3 it’s almost effortless, though it does crash occasionally, so save before you play

Before I go ahead, I do wish to say Doom 3 also ran the game in the background and could show lighting in the editor. But the engine wasn’t qualitatively up to Source as a standard and UE3 is, even beyond perhaps. So, on with the list!

3. Importing custom content (textures/models) are excellent!! In Source it all works too, but it’s such a hassle, writing text files and compiling and compiling. In UE3 it’s pretty much as simple as exporting out of your 3d package and importing into UnrealED.

4. UnrealEd (as always) still allows you to scale models. You wouldn’t believe how often I’ve had a model in Source that I’d like to have just slightly skewed.

5. Particles (emitter) effect and sound are audible in real-time in the editor, again, saves lots of time and effort (but again, it’s partially the reason why the editor is very system intensive)

.

By: Bodo

Bodo — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:17:13 +0000

OH COME ON. Valve Is´nt so stupid. They know what is game engine and they know what their customers can run. Everybody doesnt have High-End PC for 600 bucks. And comparing 5 years old Source Engine to the Hyper-Realistic CryEngine 2 that uses all new lighting and shadowing techniques ? THATS BULLSHIT. I think that Crysis was developed for testing, benchmarking and blowing up new graphics cards. That game doesnt beat Half-Life 2 in a terms of gameplay. When you buy Crysis and lagging like hell on every resolution and every detail setting, Crytek will probalby laugh into your face that you are a noob that cant run this beast on 16xQFSAA with 16xAF. But who gives a shi*? I can run HL2 Episode Two on Pentium 4 and 8800 GTS on very high with 16xQFSAA and 16xAF without ANY problems and i get like 40000K better gameplay than i would get with Crysis. CONCLUSION : CryEngine 2 is a future of game graphics. SOURCE is the most comfort and the nicest engine ever created (because it can run on every machine and its shader-based rendering looks incredible). SOURCE BEST. CRYENGINE ONLY FOR FANATICS. Long Live Source, Steam And Valve … The Future Of PC Gaming.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:46:49 +0000

I’m perfectly happy with the source engine. But then again, I much prefer stylized animation over something trying to be realistic. If they want realistic, they should go out and videotape some people. Give me quality art, voice acting and gameplay over anything else. That’s why I only have a PC and a Wii.

By: Andrew Simpson

Andrew Simpson — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:38:55 +0000

In the future, Source games are certain to become less and less CPU bound as they overhaul sub-systems to use their new threading system. Already it’s used for things like particle effects, but it’ll branch out into the renderer, physics, etc.

I don’t think Valve will ever drop Source entirely, there’s not really much point, as an engine is after all a collection of tools for making games with. If you need a hammer, you don’t buy a whole new set of tools, you just replace the hammer!

That said, there are some aspects of Source’s core underlying technology that are very Quake-era in their conception, and probably could do with a good ripping out and replacing. Stuff like changing the way maps are stored to allow seamless loading, that kind of thing, and doing that will require a fairly major overhaul, but of course that won’t touch in a major way things like sound or input, so that code will probably stay the same.

It’s the old Athenian ship question, essentially, how much do you need to change before it’s new?

By: Tuor

Tuor — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:13:23 +0000

As MeestaNob! says, I think we’ll be getting something focused on Barney pretty soon. Notice that there was neither hide nor hair (nor mention) of Barney in Ep 2.

Barney, IMO, was off on a mission.

By: MeestaNob!

MeestaNob! — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:08:04 +0000

Furthermore, regarding the Source engine, it’s been a wonderful servant to Valve and has proven to be very flexible, but it is certainly time for a change.

One thing that strikes me about the Source engine is how vastly superior it is compared to anything in regards to facial expression and skeletal animations. For all it’s beauty Crysis is let down poorly in this department (eg Crysis Warhead, the emotional aftermath of Psycho’s fight with the Korean in the river… His face hardly moves and yet the voice acting depicts a face viciously contorted with grief…).

I think by the Episode 3 is out we’ll begin hearing more than whispers about Source 2 and possibly HL3 shortly afterward. This is quite a long way away, so Crysis spec PCs will be commonplace. I’m excited at the prospect of near life like visuals combined with excellent story telling and acting.

Valve DOES need to move on soon though, they cant upgrade grandpa’s axe forever.

By: Rhalle

Rhalle — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:03:19 +0000

Source is a beautiful game engine, way better than that pseudo-photo-realistic Crytek crap. Source has a depth and artfulness that no other engine even comes close to.

The reason it looks shitty in L4D is because of cross-platforming compromises; the old L4D character models = PC, the new ones = consolitis in action.

By: mister k

mister k — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 08:37:14 +0000

Please don’t let Vavle switch from source engine, because then us poor laptop users won’t be able to play the damn thing anymore. I did actually have to turn the graphics right down to run down episode 1 (theres a couple of set pieces which would crash my computer otherwise). I suspect Valve realise, sensibly, that people don’t actually want to pay however many hundreds of pounds just so their textures “don’t look dated”. The games look amazing already, anything else is incremental improvement.

I’d be happier with smoother performance- i.e. lower loading times and less menu stutter- rather than slighty shinier textures.

Honestly, listen to yourselves… “that lampost looks flat” ARe you freaking kidding me?

By: MeestaNob!

MeestaNob! — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 07:57:15 +0000

Good as confirmed then: Episode 3 = Barney.

Fucking Awesome!

By: Dain

Dain — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 07:41:36 +0000

Also, look at the number of source mods compared to the number of mods in… well, any other engine.

By: Sensitive Artist

Sensitive Artist — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 03:36:44 +0000

Here’s a gallery of shots comparing the Source engine to Cryengine and Unreal3.

By: lilgamefreek

lilgamefreek — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 03:18:33 +0000

Well for one, there is also the often talked about “leveling off” of graphical improvements in recent games, but also I think that the blurriness sometimes adds to the realism in a game. Believe it or not, but I think there is a point where things become to detailed and too realistic. An example I like to point out is the contrast between the effects in Jurassic Park and iRobot or Journey to the Center of the Earth. Jurassic Park’s CGI is obviously less sophisticated than the more recent movies, but somehow the dinosaurs feel far realer. I like to think that it’s because they are a little blurry and that you can’t see ever individual scale and wrinkly on their skin, that makes this so.