Comment by gvfsa
3 days ago
Valve added this as an option to Half-Life in the 25th anniversary update, and I thank them for it - it looks much cooler.
3 days ago
Valve added this as an option to Half-Life in the 25th anniversary update, and I thank them for it - it looks much cooler.
It just feels wrong historically. When HL came out, people were very enthusiastic about texture filtering and the game was clearly designed with hardware rendering in mind.
Considering how many things are broken when you play in d3d or OpenGL mode I’m not so sure. :P
I'll concede that D3D was a dumpster fire.
But, what was actually broken in OpenGL pre-Steampipe update?
The two things I know about were:
1. The different looking water (not worse, just different)
2. In the software renderer some texture sets randomly tiled to make them look less repetitive. It's nice, but I would wager a bet that no one back then even knew about this bug, let alone complained about it.
People also forget that the software renderer was very slow on contemporary hardware, and even a basic 3D card had way better performance.
And so many things are broken in software too.
It was in development for a long time at a critical point in history. It seems to have started off as a software-first project (or possibly even software-only), then switched to hardware-first near the end of development. And not every effect was implemented in the hardware renderers.
Half-Life has a lot of grid textures that really need bilinear filtering and mipmapping to look decent, and they look even better with anisotropic filtering.
Many other games that released a little later (like Decent III) actually fully removed their software renderers before release because games needed to be hardware-only if they actually wanted to compete on visual quality.
That said, Black Mesa is a marvelous piece of work. The Xen levels feel like they finally finished them.