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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

I replayed Half-life 2 recently and was struck, even without high-res texture packs, how amazing the game still looks today.

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I think this is because of how extremely cleverly they picked the art style for the game. You have a lot of diffuse surfaces for which prebaking the lighting just works. Overcast skies allow for diffuse ambient lighting rather than very directional lights, which force angle-dependent shading and sharp high contrast shadow outlines. And the overwhelming majority of glossy surfaces are not too shiny which also helps out a lot. All of these are believable choices in this run-down, occupied, extremely dystopian world. And the texturing with its muted color palette pulls it all together.

There's been a rumor going around that developers move away from prebaked lighting primarily because it complicates their workflow.

Prebaked lighting is a rather crude approximation that only looks good in certain scenarios. Correct dynamic indirect lighting provides a much better integration between different scene elements and better spatial cues. Movable and static objects can share the same lighting model and you don't get an immersion breaking situation where e.g. the one door that you can open in a hallway stands out because it has worse lighting. It is an overall win, not just during production.

That rumor didn't exist 20 years ago when Half Life 2 had come out. Pre-baked was the only way to go. Now we have performant ray-tracing.

That's why I think really good art direction beats raw graphical power any day. Source was pretty impressive back in the day, but the bit that's stood the test of time is just how carefully considered the environments and models are. Valve really put their resources into detailing and maximizing the mileage they got out of their technical constraints, and it still looks cohesive and well-designed 20 years later

Still baffles me how unnerving the Ravenholm level is even today. It's got a creepy, unsettling vibe, 20 years later, entirely due to really decent art direction.

Definitely. A hyper-talented team combining new physics-based gameplay, art style and rendering technology made something just amazing.

Half-life 2 has received multiple updates to shading and level of detail since it was released, so it looks a little better than it did at release. Still, it was already a visually impressive game at release.

I just replayed Half Life 2 less than a week ago! I also caught myself thinking, "the levels may not be as detail filled as modern games, but the artistic direction both in graphics and level design is better than many modern designers with bigger budgets."

Great! I really liked the intro, with the Socialist state-style architecture and processes, and that degrading infrastructure contrasting strongly with the sleek, modern weaponry held by the oppressors. I could've just walked around that world and been pretty happy with the game!

You might enjoy "Black Mesa", HL1 remade with the HL2 engine. Played it during the pandemic. No Regrets.

Black Mesa is how I remember the original game. Worth every second i spent with the game!

Great game - definitely doesn't work well on linux, natively or via proton. Just in case any linux gamers were thinking of buying it.

I don't have a windows machine at all. And until I got myself a Steam Deck I only played linux-native games. So I definitely finished Black Mesa on my 15 inch Ubuntu Dell with a dGPU.

Fair enough I suppose. I had very severe crashing issues playing both natively and via proton. You'll find similar reports on protondb.

Did you play the original Half-Life 2 from 2004 or one of the "remasters" (though they weren't called that) that comes every few years that updates the graphics and/or engine slightly?

I don't think there's any official way to play the original 2004 version (or even the Source 2006/Episode One version either). The Xbox version is probably closest but they used palettised textures for the Xbox version - something that no PC version of Source ever supported - probably to get it to run okay.

That's such a pity, I always wanted to play HL2 on DirectX 6 mode.

There aren't any official methods, but with a little elbow grease, several ways to run a vanilla boxed copy of Half-Life 2 are outlined in this thread: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=70250

I've also wanted to run HL2 in DirectX 6 as well on period correct GPUs. Specifically a TNT2 Ultra and a Voodoo 5 5500 I have laying around. I just haven't gotten around to it.

Those were some fancy graphics cards when they came out.

Maybe you can? If -dxlevel 60 doesn't work any more I think there's a file called dxsupport.cfg (or something like that) that adjusts various graphical settings based on the DirectX level detected. I don't really know how it works but my understanding is that the engine figures out what version of DirectX you have installed and sets the DirectX level based on that, but all the controls is various graphical settings.

Fair question - no, I just played whatever's on Steam, on Linux. Maybe the textures are higher quality, but I remember the physics-based gameplay fresh as when I was playing in 2004!

Yeah, it was great. They really pulled out all the stops when it came to cinematic quality on that one. They also did a lot of second order things like marrying the scenes to the plot that a lot of games don't well or at all.

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