Half-Life 2 is coming. Can you hang on? Well, Many high-tech junkies tend to wait around for a triple a no-comprimises true advantage taking programmable shader full 3D real time game on the market to arrive, thats got it all: Amazing technological visuals, sound, AI, physics, core game mechanics, network code, options, a solid, integral storyline, a kick-ass easy to use level editor, amazing gameplay, and more.




   Lots of high-tech junkies presumed the holy grail of programmable shader games would be DOOM 3--especially after playing through an unoptimized, rough, unfinished, yet technologically stunning and breathtaking early E3 2002 alpha build tech-demo of DOOM 3, which was leaked onto and all over the Internet over one year ago, supposedly and surprisingly by ATI.


   But then, a few months later, Valve Software announced that Half-Life 2 would be released on September 30th of 2003, and many John Carmack's DOOM 3 engine praising fan's attention was divided and shifted to Gabe Newell's Half-Life 2 Source Engine. Yet, half-life 2 was unfortunately delayed and speculated to ship sometime late this summer this year(2004), thanks to the hacked, stolen, and leaked source code pre-beta demo of half-life 2, by an unidentified, anonmalous hacker.




   Half-Life 2 is being 100% developed and designed to take advantage of every single transitor and every single bit of power software and hardware wise on and by a range of Direct-X 6 to Direct-X 9 compatible, compliant generation graphics cards. Half-Life 2, stand-alone, may proove to be the tripe-a game fans have been anxiously anticipating. If Half-Life 2 can match the general scripting, base story, and gameplay of the original Half-Life, plus with it's new, defined improved engine, then perhaps Half-Life 2 would be defined as the most successfull, and greatest game of all time, along with the majority of gamer's and reviewer's opinions, perhaps.




   The Half-Life 2 Demonstration displayed at E3 this year was absolutely phenomenal, outsanding, and truly impressed and satysfied my taste in every way. I was truly eager to get my hands on an official Half-Life 2 Demo after calming down my anticipation after the demonstration. But anyways, this article will inform you on if your PC has the juice and is ready to handle Half-Life 2. Want to know? Then read on!




   Creating and polishing a properly working, lush, vast, incredibly detailed and variety filling realistic 3D environment in a computer video game is certainly not a simple, trivial task. There are three main elements in first-person shooter maps that are required to be considered. First off, the designer must tie together thousands of polygons to create a 3D wire-frame that represents the shape and size of the game world. Second, an artist applies textures to the faces of those polygons to give them the apperance of real-world materials, like brick, wood, and rock. Finally, the designer positions lights and shadows so the world has bright areas and shaded areas. After these basic elements are created, developers write shader programs that impart surfaces with texture--water is rippled, metal is made shiny, shadows are at a full scale of being dynamic and are accurately projected complete with soft, realistic edges that even cast back onto characters and their engulfing environment, all areas are correctly lighted, and fog is rendered with infinite realism.




   Valve's goal with its Half-Life 2 proprietary Source engine is to make everything in the game look optimistically lifelike(if not other-worldly). That's the beauty of DirectX 9 Professional Pixar rendering style programmable shaders technology, and here's how Valve puts them to use(not all Direct-X 9 shader graphics capabilities alogrithims are reliant, but they are undoubtly cool.)




   Half-Life 2 features a variety of Direct-X powered graphics alogrithims. Those include normal mapping, specularity, texture variety, reflective and refractive water, cameras & monitors, normal-mapped displacement maps, detail props, static props, particle effects, dynamic lights and shadows, fresnel reflections, and a spectacular quality of level of detail. Here are the definitions of these graphics alogrithims(in the case of Half-Life 2):




   Cameras & Monitors: The Source Engine takes surveilance cameras to an unprecedented level. In all previous games, cameras are fixed on a specific area, but in Half-Life 2, you can actually move the position of some cameras at will, so whatever the cameras are pointing at will appear on the appropiate monitors. Perfect for peeking around corners to see what adventures wait!