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Why is Source so efficient?

retardedchicken said:
Oh come on you are just asking to be flamed. Make a better engine for us then you can talk about how "trashy" the source engine is.
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Thats not my job.

Flamed? Do I care? 90% of you are skinny nerds defending a GAME engine, I couldn't care less what you have to say.
 
If you want to see efficiency go play Guild Wars. Just about everything in that game is remarkably efficient, I am still impressed by the job the guys at Arena.net did on that game (though the gameplay gets old quick unfortunately).
 
[BB] Rick James said:
Why come HL2, CS:S and DOD run so smooth with everything cranked up and with really nice graphics as compared to other gaming engines?
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How come



And the graphics are not that nice. Textures look horrible up close
 
I just wanted to point out that Bethesda doesn't use Source or they're own engine for that matter, they use Gamebryo 2.0 (look it up its true)

A friend of mine at work pointed something out to me the other day, now let me remind you we are talking on a purely graphicial stand point and please to not comment "well that doesn't make the game good" cause we know. What he said was "its not the engine that makes the game look good, its the artists" and he's right. Yes granted that engines today allow for better looking games then before, but all current engines are pretty equal. Its the artist that make the games look as good as they are, I would say HL2 and company look good because they're artists are good. The Unreal 3.0 stuff looks great because of the artists, Crytek stuff looks good because of the artists, Doom III stuff looks "Ok" because they're artist are "ok"

WIthout the artists the engine would just be empty 3d space.
 
Circuitbreaker8 said:
Thats not my job.

Flamed? Do I care? 90% of you are skinny nerds defending a GAME engine, I couldn't care less what you have to say.
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Tea pot calling the kettle black :)

And yes, I do think Guild Wars has a very efficient engine as well, I play at 1600x1200 4xaa and 8xaf and it doesn't even think about slowing down.
 
I have to agree that the artists make the game look good, but you've got to admit that they did cut a lot of corners, however imo they did it in a proper way - making things as convincing as possible without going overboard in either direction (looks like crap and runs fast or has so many effects that you're spending less time looking at the environment and more time watching the heat haze from the burning zombies).

Imo the one thing they did right was to have most of the textures of a simmilar quality - not too many instances of looking at one extremely sharp-looking object and having a really blurry one right nearby. Also, the sizes of the textures are a little more convincing too. This really just means the art team is doing a good job.

The other small things helped too - choice of textures, just enough shadowing to be convincing, the facial animation system (which feels a bit limited except for a few of the models (namely the highres gman)), the water, the dirtyness of the levels, having the AI just good enough to where you don't worry about them excessively (even if they aren't as crafty as the pre-release stuff made them look), and the fantastic sounds are amazing - they did a really good job with the sounds and it's worth repeating.
 
While source is "efficient," the shadowing looks primitive compared to other engines... It's lighting was poor too, but I haven't checked out the new HDR so I can't comment on that. But worse of all, it is extremely glitchy. Personally I hope that Source gets used as little as possible. Doom3 and CryEngine seem to be much more robust and stable. Unreal3 engine looks excellent also.
 
retardedchicken said:
Oh come on you are just asking to be flamed. Make a better engine for us then you can talk about how "trashy" the source engine is.
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My biggest complaint about the source engine games, is that everything looks too angular and sharp. I may not be a result of the source engine, but both Half Life 2 and Vampires Bloodlines seem like that. Doom 3 OTOH had more realistic textures, and everything was more believable adding to the reality feeling. Too bad you couldn't see much with it being so dark, as they are probably gorgeous without the darkness. Far Cry is also like Doom 3 where the textures are more believable, and it's not so sharp and angular.........
 
xmurderx said:
How come



And the graphics are not that nice. Textures look horrible up close
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duh. All textures do. Why? No one spends their time looking at a wall from two inches away.
 
pistola said:
I just wanted to point out that Bethesda doesn't use Source or they're own engine for that matter, they use Gamebryo 2.0 (look it up its true)

A friend of mine at work pointed something out to me the other day, now let me remind you we are talking on a purely graphicial stand point and please to not comment "well that doesn't make the game good" cause we know. What he said was "its not the engine that makes the game look good, its the artists" and he's right. Yes granted that engines today allow for better looking games then before, but all current engines are pretty equal. Its the artist that make the games look as good as they are, I would say HL2 and company look good because they're artists are good. The Unreal 3.0 stuff looks great because of the artists, Crytek stuff looks good because of the artists, Doom III stuff looks "Ok" because they're artist are "ok"

WIthout the artists the engine would just be empty 3d space.
Click to expand...

Given the different engines and their capabilities. Which do you think has the most potential if you were to pair it with a competent art team? Doom3, FarCry, or Source? Of those three, which is the closest to the upcoming Unreal3 engine?
 
Yiffy said:
So that's why they're were so few enemies on the screen at any given time in Doom 3....

I really don't see how lacking LOD in models is a good thing.
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LOD? Level of Detail? It's a good way of saving processing cycles, reducing the detail in certain parts of the scene allows them to add more detail in others. Let's say the card can only handle 1000 polygons at once. With each helicopter taking up 200 poly's. You can either render 5 helicopters at once (5x200=1000 polys), or just have the closest one be 200 poly's and eight others for just 100 poly's (1x200 + 8x100=1000 polys). If Doom3 scaled, you can probably almost double the number of enemies on screen at once. Most games AFAIK do it, Riddick scaled very aggressively but it still looked good, don't see how the same couldn't be done with Doom3.

People might be able to argue that Source could also do all those things (lighting, normal, bump, etc.) but the fact is, they were barely used in the game. They don't know how the source engine will be able to handle having all those features activated at once. Likewise, they also don't know how the Doom3 engine will fare if the graphics were toned down to match those of HL2's.

Maybe someone here can create a test level and run them on both the Doom3 and Source engines?
 
Sly said:
Given the different engines and their capabilities. Which do you think has the most potential if you were to pair it with a competent art team? Doom3, FarCry, or Source? Of those three, which is the closest to the upcoming Unreal3 engine?
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Honestly I think CryEngine had the most potential. If you put a team like the team at Epic on the CryEngine, it would have been rediculous. Don't get me wrong FarCry looked good, but it could have been better. Then I would say Source comes next, valve does a great job, and then Doom III. Doom III looked plastic to me, and thats because of the way the engine renedered specluar highlights that really annoyed me as well as the horride bump/normal map support it had. The bump/normal maps looked like crap. Where as in the Source engine they were seemless.
 
pistola said:
Honestly I think CryEngine had the most potential. If you put a team like the team at Epic on the CryEngine, it would have been rediculous. Don't get me wrong FarCry looked good, but it could have been better. Then I would say Source comes next, valve does a great job, and then Doom III. Doom III looked plastic to me, and thats because of the way the engine renedered specluar highlights that really annoyed me as well as the horride bump/normal map support it had. The bump/normal maps looked like crap. Where as in the Source engine they were seemless.
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I think that the main reason far cry didn't look as good as it could have is because of the foliage, there were so many damn trees and bushes that it would eat up your graphics card's cycles if they were higher res.
 
Reading this thread, am I the only one who remembers the problems the Source engine had (and occasionally still does) with sound? An hour after HL2's unlocking, everyone was complaining about sound stuttering.

Source is a nice engine, and it's good that the multi-year gap between HL and HL2 produced something this nice, but let's not kid ourselves and say the Source engine is perfection is binary form.
 
Circuitbreaker8 said:
Thats not my job.

Flamed? Do I care? 90% of you are skinny nerds defending a GAME engine, I couldn't care less what you have to say.
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Ha! This MuscleMary is the embodiment of IRONY.
 
from a player's point of view, the Source engine looks and feels just like a tweaked HL1 engine, with a few new 'features' added in, along with higher polygon count and higher resolution textures. The way the map looks along with the lighting/shadows makes me feel like im just playing on the HL1 engine.. i dunno..

i think that valve spent more time refining their creation tools so they could crank out tons of expansion "chapters" and roll in the dough
 
Why all the hate against Steam?

It sucked two or three years ago, but I've had no complaints with it since long before Source and HL2 came out. It's a solid distribution system that keeps me from having to drive an hour to a decent store to buy games.

as for the Source engine:

It ran impressively on my old 32 MB Radeon 7000. Other games couldn't hope to run on a card that weak, but Source did it and still looked reasonably good. I've since bought an X850 Pro and have seen Source in all its glory...it's nowhere near the best engine for graphics but I haven't been particularly impressed by those engines which are supposedly superior.

Source creates an immersive environment, runs smoothly, and makes for a fun game. That's all I care about.
 
Anyone know what the engine is in FEAR? I think that it looks much better than the doom3/far cry/source engines
 
retardedchicken said:
Anyone know what the engine is in FEAR? I think that it looks much better than the doom3/far cry/source engines
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It was made by Monolith, I shall dub it.... the fear engine.
 
I think the reason I like the look of source games is the art team more than the engine team. It's not a bad engine, but it's the precise and polished texturing and modelling I really like. It's crisp, while e.g. doom 3 felt like the entire game was made out of cheap extruded plastic models. (Well lit cheap extruded plastic models, granted.)
Besides, I don't really mind angularity as much as I mind overdone smoothing and glossiness.

Also, I agree with JRPereira. Consistency makes or breaks immersion. (If some random objects are really glossy, or some objects have notably worse textures than others, that's distracting.)

Small tangent: How hard is it to have a separate texture that's used for closeups? UT got this right back in 1999.
 
HHunt said:
Small tangent: How hard is it to have a separate texture that's used for closeups? UT got this right back in 1999.
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yes! few people remember detail textures. the source engine material files have support for these detail textures, the thing is most materials in HL2 don't have one. if you notice in CS:S, the carpet in cs_office has a detail texture.
 
Terpfen said:
Reading this thread, am I the only one who remembers the problems the Source engine had (and occasionally still does) with sound? An hour after HL2's unlocking, everyone was complaining about sound stuttering.

Source is a nice engine, and it's good that the multi-year gap between HL and HL2 produced something this nice, but let's not kid ourselves and say the Source engine is perfection is binary form.
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Thats is one of the reasons why I laughed at the beginning of this thread. Another is the fact that I still get hitching because source is not bug free. If an engine is efficient, then it must not have bugs with popular equipment.

source = 7.8/10
 
retardedchicken said:
Maybe that noob Carmack should take a hint from Valve :p
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Not to be a jackass on this, but Carmacks engines are the most efficient to date with given hardware. I could play, with little difference Doom 3 with a GeForce 3 TI 500 and a Athlon XP 1600+ 512mb of PC2100 at 640x480 with 40-60fps, so in other words it was playable. With the same comp, I tried HL2, and it wasn't playable, I was still only getting 20fps, and hanging often.
 
Bo_Bice said:
yes! few people remember detail textures. the source engine material files have support for these detail textures, the thing is most materials in HL2 don't have one. if you notice in CS:S, the carpet in cs_office has a detail texture.
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I have to look at it the next time I play CS:S.
Detail textures are such a neat concept that I wonder why it's not more popular. Seldom having to see blurred textures was one of many things that made UT feel so polished. :)
 
The problem with detail textures is that they don't play well with normal maps. Notice in Source, you can't have a detail map and normal map on the same object. UT99 made the best use of them, but 2k4's textures were big enough that detail textures were unneccesary. In fact, they made things look worse because of tiling and making everything darker.
 
FlatLine84 said:
Not to be a jackass on this, but Carmacks engines are the most efficient to date with given hardware. I could play, with little difference Doom 3 with a GeForce 3 TI 500 and a Athlon XP 1600+ 512mb of PC2100 at 640x480 with 40-60fps, so in other words it was playable. With the same comp, I tried HL2, and it wasn't playable, I was still only getting 20fps, and hanging often.
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Your sarcasm detector not working? :)
 
FlatLine84 said:
the OS on it was rushed by EA.
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Translation:

It works, but only on full moon Tuesdays, and it only outputs in Klingon. When I ask when it'll be fixed, EA tech support calls me a "pahtk" and hangs up. What's a pahtk?




(yes, I Googled that word. No, I don't know any Klingon.)
 
Sizer said:
People rave about it being scalable and all that, but so is every other engine. Things may run well on your 6600gt as long as you tone down the settings, but by that time the textures look like they came right out of 1998.
I´ve seen the Source engine scale down to a GF4MX and look and play smooth. Care to guess how Doom 3 played and looked on the same machine?

-wil
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i'd have to agree that whatever the F.E.A.R. engine runs on, is certainly the most impressive. Out of all the new games i've played so far, Doom3, HL2, Farcry, F.E.A.R. demo; FEAR has really sucked me in the most. The immersion factor is simply unbeatable. The environment, enemy AI, scare tactics, gameplay. Gameplay definitely beats out HL2. The demo alone scared me more than Doom3 ever will. Seriously the ai is unbelievable. It etiher matches or exceeds Far Cry.

Then again is comes down to this: gameplay makes the game, not the engine.

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is probably my favorite game up to date. The gameplay just can not be matched by the likes of Doom3 or HL2.
 
Xeero said:
i'd have to agree that whatever the F.E.A.R. engine runs on, is certainly the most impressive. Out of all the new games i've played so far, Doom3, HL2, Farcry, F.E.A.R. demo; FEAR has really sucked me in the most. The immersion factor is simply unbeatable. The environment, enemy AI, scare tactics, gameplay. Gameplay definitely beats out HL2. The demo alone scared me more than Doom3 ever will. Seriously the ai is unbelievable. It etiher matches or exceeds Far Cry.

Then again is comes down to this: gameplay makes the game, not the engine.

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is probably my favorite game up to date. The gameplay just can not be matched by the likes of Doom3 or HL2.
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Well that's your opinion. Me personally, I was very turned off by fear at e3. All the monochromatic texturing is not downplayed by pretty shaders. The multiplayer was sub-par at best. The AI seems to be shaping up nicely though. I hope it's a blast but the art makes me cringe.
 
retardedchicken said:
If they toned the game down due to lack of video memory, then why do they have an ultra mode that only works when a card has 512mb of ram? If they would have had HL2 res textures, the game would have been much better. Hopefully quake4 doesnt have shit textures and they realize that cards like the 7800gtx and x1800xl can handle it.

That being said, I liked Far Cry's engine better overall. It had both decent textures and decent lighting.
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Umm, you don't need 512MB of ram for Ultra quality in Doom 3. I didn't notice any performance hit by switching to Ultra quality on my rig.

*NOTE:Do not say that I have 512MB of ram because I have two cards in SLi, I have two seperate 256MB frame buffers, only one of which does anything at all in games.
 
Sizer said:
The problem with detail textures is that they don't play well with normal maps. Notice in Source, you can't have a detail map and normal map on the same object. UT99 made the best use of them, but 2k4's textures were big enough that detail textures were unneccesary. In fact, they made things look worse because of tiling and making everything darker.
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well to me, single textures won't start looking realistic up close till we start seeing 1024x1024 textures and beyond as the norm. 2k4 has, what, 512x512? which look pretty good but meh. when i first started seeing 512x512 textures in games i was thrilled, but now i want more!
 
pigwalk said:
Sizer said:
People rave about it being scalable and all that, but so is every other engine. Things may run well on your 6600gt as long as you tone down the settings, but by that time the textures look like they came right out of 1998.
I´ve seen the Source engine scale down to a GF4MX and look and play smooth. Care to guess how Doom 3 played and looked on the same machine?

-wil
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Yeah, my statement was a GeForce 3 TI 500 for Doom 3 and it ran smooth....
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Source efficient? LOL!!!

That piece of shit engine has no dinamic lights or shadows, that’s why it’s “efficient” and that’s why it looks like a piece of crap from 5 years ago. Valve stopped impressing me after Half Life 1.
 
NowhereMan said:
Source efficient? LOL!!!

That piece of shit engine has no dinamic lights or shadows, that’s why it’s “efficient” and that’s why it looks like a piece of crap from 5 years ago. Valve stopped impressing me after Half Life 1.
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yeah, that game looked so horrible!11!!! Vavle is teh sux0r.






If you think Half Life 2 looked shitty you have no taste.
 
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