water reflections without ray tracing

HL2 was a game WAY ahead of it's time.

enough said! timeless for sure...

Animated textures combined with basic engine tricks

still peak imo :)

Its amazing for the time and still holds for the game. But this ina modern game would be a crime 🤣 we can barely have AAA games runing at 60fps with SSR ... this will make the game performance drop to more than half

RTX is such a wild goose chase. Barely a perceivable benefit for cutting performance in half.

We need Half-Life 3

I NEED THIS GAME SO MUCH

brb wan play hl2 again

haha I can feel that... timeless masterpiece imo

You mean water reflections that double the draw call count, require an extra frustum cull pass and CPU orchestration? If you want this in modern games, use UE5 and plop down a planar reflection component for the exact same effect (and cost). This isn't lost tech.

Half-Life 2 was so ahead of its time, it's crazy

The engineering, design, and art direction on HL 2 was next level for ~2004. For the water, they: - Rendered a planar reflection scene at water level a whole extra time, mirrored with careful clipping and occlusions - very tasteful water surface effects for refraction, and fresnel effects - dynamically animated normal maps for waves - Collapsing everything into a highly optimized pixel shader 2.0 - A ton of tweaking It's basically 3 render passes in one shader execution.

Oh yes, look at Fatekeeper

0 water reflections. It's baked in.

Planar reflections worked well for half-life 2. But the added performance cost ensured that it would only be used sparingly in scenes where there wasn’t a lot of geometry at play.

This tells you ray tracing is a scam, made to sell expensive GPUs

One of the greatest games ever made 💙

Source water is so fucking good. Cause what do you mean in 2002 in a unfinished, janky version of Source it looks THIS good.

There are many ways to do water reflections. Half-Life 2 did lots of cool things but this is one of the least interesting ones.

We’re seeing a game from 2004 that has gotten multiple visual upgrade patches running on modern hardware PCs of that era could not run this smoothly. It’s without RT because it’s doing it the stupid way. Rendering it all twice. Looks pretty, runs horribly. RT is actually faster

Planar reflections are great, though back in the day very computationally expensive. They took time to implement and compared to path, ray, cube map or screen space reflections, they take more time to create. That’s why you never really see them anymore.

I just looked it up, and apparently it cheated by placing a camera under the water then mapping what it saw to the planar cubemaps rendered on the water's surface Not as efficient as screenspace reflections since it rendered the world twice, but at least it's physically accurate

This is even more brute force, they are rendering the scene twice. It can still be done but it is incredibly expensive with how complex shaders and meshes gotten

Just don't look down.

Look down and obscure everything in screen space and they'll all disappear. Ray tracing adds so much to a scene. Not to mention it's an order of magnitude faster than rasterised lighting. If you want faster to build more dynamic worlds back ray tracing.

Simple SSR we got those in Pokemon too, definitely not as accurate 😂🤣

Don’t really know why more games don’t do this with how high poly budgets are these days

It makes me sad that we'll likely never see 3.

It renders world 2 times. Second time upside down and uses for reflections. But in this day an age, thats expensive. The only way to go back and have better performance is to have static weather and baked shadows. But players will say: "Man this is lame. Sun doesnt move".

This is called "planar reflections." They're basically just rendered copies of the world. They look good but they double the work for rendering everything in the reflection. Planar reflections work only on flat surfaces. Pretty fancy for 2004, but it doesn't replace raytracing.

Yes we are aware of screen space reflections and their limitations. Quantum Break has terrible reflections on shiney materials that look horrible with SSR. Compare that to Controls excellent RT reflections.

to have water reflections like this now its required you to have a 1500$ gpu or above, raytracing is ruining gaming, its been apart of the gaming industry for 10 years i think devs should realize its not working.

Watching the original Source tech demo was incredible.

My gods Half Life 2 was awesome. 🤔 (Seriously considering playing it again.. Would consider it more seriously if they'd bothered to finish the damned series.) 😠 😋

Crazy, right? And it gets even better when you look at the system requirements.

planar reflections are an old technique.

i love how half-life 2 achieves realism without a ton of detail, like one of those paintings that clearly looks like a painting from up close, but when you step back it almost looks like a real photograph