‘I can’t take it any more…’ ‘Everything’s going to be okay.’
Today I’m going to be staring at walls and harassing the residents of City 17. And there’s
nothing anybody can do about it! ‘When is it all going to endddd?’
‘Don’t worry.’
It doesn’t take much to make me want to replay Half Life 2. And for the first time
ever, I played it through with RAYTRACING, which uses screen-space global illumination
to light the environment as best as possible.
‘Cut it out!’
You know what I like about Half Life 2? Everything. But one thing that often goes unsung about
its many achievements is its portrayal of Alyx: a friendly NPC who assists you throughout
the game. Oh, and did I mention? She’s female. It would have been easy for Half Life 2 to
have sexualised her. To give her exposed skin, bouncy breasts and a slightly tired looking
expression. But they didn’t. They respected her, and treated her as a character, just
like Barney and Doctor Kleiner. I still remember that moment early on when
she rescues me from the combine. And as I come to, I’m greeted by her very normal,
very life-like appearance- -JESUS.
Welcome to the dark side of graphics mods. It’s all fun and games until someone blows
their polygon budget on a virtual nipple. This is NOT using raytracing- this is just
the FakeFactory Cinematic Mod for Half Life 2. If you’re looking to enhance the graphics
of a game you can go about it either by using clever tricks like raytracing, or you can
use a more traditional graphics overhaul mod such as this one. Looking past the questionable
character models, it’s actually really impressive, and I’m inclined to give this a full play-through
at some point as well. But it’s just… why these character models? They’re claimed
to be ‘High Definition’. And sure, they up the texture detail. But at what cost? For
they also strip the personality from every character in the game, swapping them out for
shallow, generic husks of their former selves.
‘C’mon Gordon, let’s go.’
‘That’s my girl.’
They become the sort of characters you’d imagine a horny teenage boy would come up
with, if told to make Half Life 2.
They’re technically superior to the originals, yet also… lacklusture.
Luckily, they’re entirely optional! You now have to go out of your way to activate
them in this mod. Which… I did. Why did I do that. What’s wrong with me. Well I
did it because I feel like, if I’m going to experience a mod, I want to experience
the WHOLE thing. But the whole point is: Fake Factory’s graphics mod changes the game.
Some people will be delighted with every aspect of it! Other people, not so much.
That’s the beauty of mods. There’s one for everyone. Who am I to criticise them?
For surely my tastes are just as perverted? It’s just not for thick-licked Alyx, nor
for waifus. For me, my love raytracing. Even one as limited, as flawed, and as over-the-top
as the one I’m using here. I love it, flaws and all. And I’m not ashamed to admit it.
Again, it’s completely optional. It comes with many sliders so its implementation can
be as subtle as you please. And yet, I want it all! If I’m going to experience it, and
suffer the slowdown, then I’m ramping that stuff up to 11. I do this, partly because
I’m fascinated by the technology, and by having it so visually obvious it helps me
to learn about it, and to be able to spot more subtle examples in other games and real
life. And also, I’ll be honest, I kind of like it like this.
So don’t let this video put you off raytraced global illumination. Nor the FakeFactory graphics
mod. There’s something here for everyone. This reshade plugin, this- this, screen-space
implementation of global illumination, is arguably inferior to Half Life 2’s default
lighting! Sure, the base game doesn’t look great these days. But at least it’s stable.
It won’t glare in places where it isn’t wanted, or to rudely flash in your face. And
surely, the whole point of taking the heavy performance hit of raytracing is to use its
brute-force approach to get the lighting right? Looking at it like that, this raytraced solution
might manage to be both technically AND artistically lacklusture! It is limited to just screenspace
information, so instead of a 3D area, it uses just THIS view and THIS view to mimic the
lighting, based on distances and directions. It looks amazing considering this immense
handicap, but it does mean that as you move about, lighting effects will appear and disappear,
or shimmer distractingly. For some people, that will be reason enough not to try it out.
And I can’t argue with that. But don’t get me wrong- I get the impression
people think I don’t see the limitations here. That I’m so blinded by my love of
technology that I fail to see its flaws! But I see them clearly enough. Their flaws are
part of the novelty for me! And I love messing with graphics options, and until there’s
a better version, I’ll have to make do with this.
Much like some people with their Fakefactory females.
So please, throw your judgements about the raytracing to one side and come on a raytraced
journey through the game with me to understand it from my perspective. You might even gain
an appreciation for it. I played through the whole game. And here are my thoughts on which
bits look best, with this feature enabled… and the ones which looked the worst.
THE GOOD Shine a light on this red tube full of something
here, and the room glows red. This is a very convincing effect, and is what would happen
in this particular instance. When you think about it, proper global illumination
is actually just ‘real time lighting’, and the impact it has on this cactus teleporter
is stunning, casting moving light beams across the wall and generally making the whole experiment
feel more ‘alive’.
‘Oh, fi. It’ll be another week…’
And the same with the fire here. It’s easy to forget that without this effect, the lighting
in this scene is fixed. But turn it on and the leaping flames cast changing lighting
onto the surrounding environment. Nice. It doesn’t have to all be dramatic landscapes
and vivid vistas- I liked this humble crate in a vent. The raytracing convincingly shades
the walls next to the crate, and casts extra, coloured light onto the floor in front of
it, which blends everything in the scene together nicely. Remember, this isn’t a reflection.
I have to tell you that because at points I think I forget it myself. If the vents were
reflective then you’d get yet another yellowy box effect from the surrounding vents, on
top of the lighting bleed seen here. The limitations caused by screenspace result
in something more like a reflection, here, painting this otherwise blue crate almost
creamy white from the lighting bouncing off the wall. This sort of thing is easily missed,
but I found the effect to be extremely visually pleasing on both sides of this object, and
something that’s completely overlooked in the base game.
And the way the lighting from the screen is subtly cast onto the wall behind it here pleases
me, as do the now properly darkened corners. If I had to show you just ONE level to win
you over to the benefits of raytracing, it would have to be that bit just after Alyx
is captured. It’s a sewer, but with brighter walls than normal. And the raytracing makes
them look so right. Really dreamy, but whilst retaining the dark corners. And I knew already
that that huge warehouse near the end would look great, and it didn’t disappoint. Raytracing
revealed to me just how flat it looked previously. The general rule of where raytracing looks
good in Half Life 2 is where there are lightly coloured, or sun-lit surfaces in otherwise
dark looking environments. The raytracing nicely darkens the dark bits, and lights up
the bits which SHOULD be lit by bounce lighting. I simply makes the sewers feel less flat,
and in some places, quite beautiful, despite the brush-based décor.
THE BAD I’ll be honest, it was hard to find the
‘bad’, since most of the time, troublesome results could be mitigated by fiddling with
the settings. I personally love interiors to be flooded with light, or for evening sunlight
to light surrounding surfaces in a warm glow. But I know that reality isn’t always like
that. The coast section of the game was challenging for me, because I had to keep turning the
effect down outside or risk everything being too brightly lit, but then the moment I went
inside I had to ramp it up because otherwise I couldn’t see. It behaved almost like HDR
in reverse! I reckon, with proper support by the game’s levels, even screenspace raytracing
could look appealing. I also wasn’t impressed with Ravenholm,
but for the opposite reason. I think that bit of the game was already well-lit, and
raytracing made the dark bits too dark, and the lit up bits wayyyy too bright unless I
turned the effect down so low that it might as well have been off.
And it does sometimes mistake things like your gun model for being a HUGE distant object,
casting giant shadows in places just because they happen to be behind your weapon. I’ll
admit, I didn’t see this happen too much with the settings I used. I was expecting
this to be hugely distracting throughout but it wasn’t.
Fencing proved a challenge, though. Rooms with fences would plunge the far side into
darkness. It seems the rays aren’t capable of fitting through such small holes. So that’s
another no-no for the glo-glo. And while shadows where they shouldn’t be
can be distracting, LIGHTING where it shouldn’t be can be annoying! Look at how this crate
in the distance is being lit up like it’s right next to the fire in the foreground.
Disgusting. BUT ALSO INTERESTING! And last, the ‘volumetric lighting’ effects
didn’t work too nicely either, like this hazy area below a lit lamp in Kleiner’s
lab. This sort of thing revealed the inner workings of the raytracing, providing a naked-view
into the ambient occlusion model.
THE UGLY And last, there’s the UGLY. As a fan of
the effect, who likes to ramp it up to unnatural levels, it takes a lot to disgust me. But
some parts of the game managed it. Nova Prospekt- you know, the bit with the antlions that you
control- is a phenomenal chapter of the game. And in my opinion, beautifully lit already,
thanks to its strong blue and orange colour-scheme. Well, raytracing gets those colours and amplifies
them. Rooms with a tasteful blue hue would transform into BRIGHT GREEN, and orange would
become brighter than the SUN. It took me a while to realise how ugly this was. I was
there thinking ‘wow this is a great result from the raytracing’, before it dawned on
me that this just didn’t look right. It’s visually stunning, yes. But also butt-ugly.
Especially the blues. But an honourable mention to the antlions.
It’s not their fault that the environments are so stupidly lit up in garish colours.
And yet, I thought the lighting it applied to them looked amazing! Seeing the bugs have
their undersides lit up like this looked stunning! It really made them look like waxy, bulky
beings! I might have to start upscaling antlions next.
IN CONCLUSION, I found raytracing to have mixed results in Half Life 2. I will admit,
most of the time I preferred the effect even when it was deeply flawed, but I do acknowledge
that it isn’t for everybody- especially those who just want to play the game without
being distracted by when it gets it wrong. It is, after all, lighting being added to
lighting. Because the source engine behind Half Life 2 already uses raytracing to calculate
its lighting. It’s just too reserved on the bounce lighting for my liking. I think
Half Life 2’s default lighting works best outside, where there’s perhaps the scale
required to get the effect ‘right’. Because in comparison to the exteriors, the interiors
of Half Life 2 are butt-ugly. Even with its flawed implementation, raytracing greatly
improved the look of the interiors and apartments, and especially the sparse, blocky sewer sections
of the game. I also found it helped to shade small objects outside which are perhaps too
small or dynamic to get Source’s default, baked-in lighting applied to them.
I’ve worked with the Source engine extensively since it came out and I think its lighting
has got better in newer titles such as CS:GO. Half Life 2, in comparison, doesn’t seem
to shade props very well at all and this was particularly evident on levels with lightly
coloured floors- the raytracing helped stuff to blend in better with the scenery, especially
in the coastal segment. I always thought something looked wrong about that crane, and now I know
what it was. All it needed was a bit of raytracing 😉
I think the major problem with global illumination is that it’s hard to know when it gets it
right- it’s only when you compare it with when it’s off that you see how WRONG videogames
tend to get this stuff. I’ve tended to show you the ‘before and after’, but honestly,
the ‘after then before’ is a lot more impactful, because I find showing the raytraced
one first really hammers home how flat and lifeless the environments look once it’s
turned off again. What’s the saying? If you can’t handle it at its worst, you don’t
deserve it at its best!
Very few things in life are black and white. I admit, this raytracing is greyer than most.
And also more colourful. But even if you don’t like the result, I hope you can appreciate
WHY I find the technology so interesting, and why it’s so exciting, even with such
a limited implementation. Because already, in some places, its benefits are undeniable.
Especially indoors, it GREATLY improves how a scene such as this one is lit. Yet in others,
it’s substantially worse, especially in such an over-the-top state.
And believe me, I disagree with people who think it’s better ‘just because it’s
raytraced’ just as much as I disagree with those who think it looks worse ‘because
it isn’t proper raytracing’. It’s nuanced. I can see its nuances. And I love it for those
nuances. 3kliksphilip recently did a video, showcasing
this sort of raytracing on Inferno. And from the comments section, it’s clear that most
people dislike the result. And I expect something similar with this video. But I think that’s
missing the point of it. Now I know 3kliksphilip- and I can say for a fact that he’s also
aware of its limitations! They’re listed in the description, for crying out loud! But
please, see that as a challenge to spot its strengths. Don’t view this as black and
white- and try to understand, from my perspective, why I’m excited about the changes this brings
to the table. So going back to what I was saying at the
beginning: if you want to improve an existing game, sure, one way of going about it is to
download a mod for it. You might find one that’s perfect for you- you might think
that it’s an all-round improvement! Great. Or… you might feel it’s changed the game
too much from how you remembered it. Or it might make changes that you find… questionable.
Or tasteless. If you don’t share the modder’s vision for their makeover, there’s no need
to get upset about it. No need to get angry. Besides, you’re the one who decided to download
the mod. Or to click on his video. So if you don’t like it then you can… do what it
says on the wall just here. Not what it says here. Oh no!
But I hope this video has helped you to understand my obsession with the reshade RTGI plugin.
You might not agree with me, but I hope you now see my point of view, and why I don’t
care about its flaws. Now, if the maker of this mod could please come forward and explain
to me what they were thinking when they made it, I’d appreciate that too. And while we’re
on the topic… what’s the deal with waifus?
‘Let’s see what I can do to clear the waifu.’