Technical feats and thank you! news - Half-Life Creations ModDB

As many of you did see in a previous update, we are excited to share a few technical improvements we did the last couple of weeks. Those include:

• Massive update for studiorendering that includes ATI support, now models can cast shadows with VBO rendering system.
• GPU Skinning fixes, DDS Loading, GPU Lighting
• VBO rendering + baked lighting
• Enhanced cubemapping
• DDS support
• Studiomodel cubemapping, studiomodel lighting, studiomodel normalmapping.
• Some fixes.

Okay nerds, but... what does it means exactly? Means, less limitations, more creativity and enhanced content ;)

Here's a comparision picture between the effects ON and OFF. Notice that the HD Textures are still loaded on the OFF section:

The good aspect of it, is that let us add more polys with more detail than before. The bad side? Well, completing a map now takes more additional time.

Having more details with less impact on the performance lets us do massive rendering distances:

Specially as you can see below. Scenes like this just wouldn't be possible before (notice the tiny cars and the HD sky):

These are WIP pictures, meaning it will look even cooler once they are final :)

More improvements also include (remember that we did a clean up and started from scratch, using SDK 2.4):

• Implementation of FMOD Studio (or FMOD 5) which allow us to have:

1. Dynamic music system (music switching from stealth/ambience to action/fighting in the same style as SoF 2)
2. Playing HQ sounds and place them in the world with a pre-defined min and max distance, they can also follow an entity (all weapon sounds follow it's owner : the player)
3. Reverberation which allow us to imitate quarry, city, arena, hangar, underwater or other environments.

• Reimplemented and reviewed most of Am's weapons in terms of coding and assets :
• Sound assets cleaning, they are better organized with better names/paths
• Unused animations were removed
• Many other stuff

You can thank Alexander 'Hawk' Bakanov and Joël "Shepard" Troch :)
We also like to take the opportunity to thank those who were involved on our sucessful Dropbox thingy mission

You guys rock!

Also, for the end of this tiny news article, a really close to final church. I noticed you guys loved it sooo... here's an update for your viewing pleasure:

You can suscribe to our studio's channel to get updates about our projects, ARRANGEMENT included!: Youtube.com

Thanks!