Codename Bor3λ mod for Half-Life

Hey, it's been a while since the last article

I've been mostly busy with my studies, eventhough im kind of failing

without further ado, heres some of the improvement i've been bringing to this mod

FXAA + New Bloom

You've might noticed in several footages i've sent, there is alot of artifacts in the distance or around small sized objects. This was caused because Half-Life originally has MSAA built-in onto the engine. Unfortunately, their approach was using FBO, and it completely destroys Trinity depth reading. The fix is to disable it using the -nofbo parameter. However now you're left with no AA at all, which is a big problem for some people (including me)

I decided to implement a whole another Antialiasing method called the FXAA. While its far from perfect (you can see, its basically just blurring), it does the job quite well.

Another issue that had been fixed is the bloom. If you notice in some of my old footages, you can see theres alot of colour banding happening all around bright surfaces. This happened because my initial implementation of bloom were using immediate-mode OpenGL calls to modify textures. Its quite slow and also wonky. So i decided to rewrite it using GLSL.

(Lensflare Texture from WAR, Lensflare Code originally from Raven City, added implementation for scaling)

More Volumetrics

As i've mentioned in the last article, the renderer is actually capable of rendering real-time volumetrics. However, due to artistic and performance choices, it won't be possible to use this technique at all times. So i ended up doing what source had been doing for the past decades. Beam sprites.

Credit to Aynekko (check out his project, called Diffusion!) and Simbl (also check out his project, called Solitary Echoes!), these two helped me alot in the developing of this feature. Simbl told me about these sprites used in dm_hellhole maps and taught me how to recreate it, and provided with the assets Aynekko began writing the optimized renderer for this feature

End of article

Thats all for now, i've been quite burned out due to the countless exams that recently held up. This article is pretty short, and i am really sorry for that. However, next updates will probably be bigger, just stay tuned!. And thanks alot for reading all these stuff