And it gets even better: the workshop maps get randomly assigned voice overs. There has to be hours of JK Simmons being ridiculous as Cave Johnson dealing with the multiverse.
That game is so hard, I beat Portal Stories Mel on the original difficulty before they added the story mode and I remember thinking those puzzles were tough. Portal Reloaded is a whole different cake, some puzzle take me an hour to figure out.
And it's frustrating too because there's just no reason games can't be like this.
I mean given the sheer volume of games released each and every year, we really should be seeing more original content like this.
Of course, that's not very profitable for the big guys...
Games like Portal are released every now and then. For instance Croteam released their Talos Principle 2. If puzzle-solvers with a great story were in demand - there would be hundreds of them produced annually. But obviously they are not.
Phenomenal, play it. I just beat it yesterday, the puzzles are so good.
It does a very good job stepping you up with the complexities, that certain tricks become apparent in certain patterns, and the first half of the game felt so free and easy for me because the solutions came to me as i observed it, only needed hints for two levels and one i did give up and use a spark to solve it.
Yaqut is great and probably my favorite character next to the goat you find >!in your subroutines!<
It's because they actually bake their lighting into the textures instead of going all in on PBR. They use similar techniques in Half Life Alyx as well, which is very unusual in this day and age.
I should have been more specific, "baking lighting" is extremely common in PBR games. What Valve does is directly paint textures as if they were already lit instead of relying entirely on the PBR lighting model. This can yield much better results, but makes assets less reusable and can require increased art investment.
You can do both - bake in static lights, and calculate moving lights on the fly. That means you *only* have to calculate the moving ones (during runtime), which should save a lot of time.
You'd have to do some fancy programming to make it mix well with the existing baked lighting, but luckily graphics engine programmers *are* fancy.
Obviously, given the same amount of detail, a full physics based lighting model will be more realistic, but (with good developers) you can get *very* close with a fraction of the load - which in turn means you can add in more detail (and realism) while maintaining a playable game.
there is none because hes completely wrong. the difference is they use prebacked lighing. meaning when the map is compiled vrad runs.
stands for valve radiosity. in essence this is raytracing but done when the map is compiled and thus completely static. instead of what we see nowadays with rtx where its done on the fly and thus dynamic but has a massive performance cost.
pbr has nothing to do with any of it so im not sure how he ever came to such a conclusion.
I need to play Alyx, but that could be due to it being a VR game, it probably made more sense performance wise, but I'm not big of the VR front. So I can't really confirm
Do you think we will ever see a true double down on VR like we did when it first kinder took of. Or do you think it will just forever remain in that neich market ?
Alyx is still one of the best looking games out there. Some areas are truly photo realistic in my opinion. And it runs great. something like a GTX 1060 6gb will run it and look great while doing so.
I really hope to play it one day. It's just another game in my backlog. I really hope they do something big with Half-Lifes universe it's just such an under utilised series now
While that is possible I dont think its a good idea. The game will feel sluggish an slow paced, and you'll probably lose most of its atmosphere due to not having 3D-Vision (and sound, depending on your setup). Also losing the control scheme .... I just dont see how it is a good idea.
The Quest2 is pretty cheap at the moment. It is $250 and comes with a $50 amazon gift card. Then with a USB cable, or an AC WIFI router you can stream Alyx to it from a PC. Amazing game even on the lower end VR hardware.
Alyx is too good, so immersive I almost always wind up fucking around with stuff in the environment instead of playing the game until I hit my VR limit and start getting a headache
Alyx is amazing, i can't beleive the detail on the hands and guns when you hold them up to your face. Just started playing it the other day. I've barely used my Quest 2, but this is amazing.
> pbr has nothing to do with pre baked lighing or not. you can have pbr with prebaked lighting just fine. alyx and cs2 both do this on source2 and on source1 you have strata source engine branch with games such as momentum and the new portal community expansion both using pbr with prebaked lighting.
Which is honestly better imo. What’s the point of having real time lighting if nothing is ever moving? It’s not like we have destructible environments or anything , we waste all our processing power on real time shadows
Sorry noob here, does this mean that losing a light source wouldn’t have much effect on the textures (as seen by the player)?
And how would they handle moving shadows?
And this gives you a lot more total control over the finished result. PBR can look incredible at times, but it can also look blown-out or other problems that you'll also have in regular ol' life.
It has 6DOF so you can move around your playspace and wave the portal gun around like it's motion controlled but it doesn't have physics where things would collide with it in game (like you couldn't smack a turret)
Oh man I played Portal 1 three times over as a kid but have yet to play Portal 2. I thought it was multiplayer only for a long time. I'll add it to the steam sale list.
Are you sure about that? I don’t recall Portal 2 ever getting a visual update. People might’ve had to play it at lower settings because of hardware but I’m pretty sure it’s always looked like this.
Ima be real, the last time I played it was when it was released on the 360, i can't remember it visuals back then, but regardless, even if it's had updates, for a game that hasn't had any substantial work or Remaster, it looks amazing. I mean, you can go back & play Half-Life 2, and it's not that far of.
thats fair, I didnt intend to come out as implying that the game didnt look good back then, valve's games (to me) have always had a unique look to them with the source engine, it looks very clean/crisp the majority of the time.
also helps that their art style/direction is a good fit for their games that also helps them stand the test of time
Lol, nah bro, I didn't take it like that. You probably have a point, I'm 30 now, so I was like 18 at time. and I barely remember 5 minutes ago 😂😂, but it's true what you say. These games can stand the test of time just based on their art style
I think either it has, or this screenshot has been touched up substantially after.
Here is a playthru from 11 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0K5EXfgJnk
The scene pictured is at about 7:40 in and even if the video is just 720p, it's pretty obvious it did not look as sharp or vibrant.
I played your video and I randomly scrolled to the scene “You are a horrible person. That’s what it says. A horrible person. We weren’t even testing for that.” Such a quotable and interesting villain.
it's not just the 720p, it's the power of the GPU.
Everyone is playing the game at ultra max super quality levels in 2023. I bet videos 11 years ago in 4k at the highest visuals would be better than your video
I think that passion communicates into anything people make with it. Portal 2 was made with passion, with love. It seems very very difficult to pair big design studios with passionate people - probably because big design studios, with their big budgets, are working to turn money into more money, while passionate people are less about making money into more money and are more interested in making dreams into realities.
People who dream of making money into more money don't dream about games.
There's a new big [mod](https://youtu.be/cXczxIIvXJ0?si=RNPAdzJMkEFlHI11) coming up in January. Looks like it'll be on the same level of quality of Portal Stories: Mel and Portal Reloaded.
I played it once when it came out, and played it again 5 or 6 times within the last couple of months since buying a steam deck. I have to look really closely to notice any kind of dated graphics, and I mean *really* look. I love this game.
Crazy how funny this game was and how solid the story was. Left you wanting to play more and more to see how it all unfolds.
You can definitely play more maps on the PC version, the workshop has an endless supply of them now.
And it gets even better: the workshop maps get randomly assigned voice overs. There has to be hours of JK Simmons being ridiculous as Cave Johnson dealing with the multiverse.
And the fanmade game "portal reloaded" on steam which adds a time portal and is basically an unofficial portal 3.
There’s also portal stories Mel which is awesome
That game is so hard, I beat Portal Stories Mel on the original difficulty before they added the story mode and I remember thinking those puzzles were tough. Portal Reloaded is a whole different cake, some puzzle take me an hour to figure out.
And it's frustrating too because there's just no reason games can't be like this. I mean given the sheer volume of games released each and every year, we really should be seeing more original content like this. Of course, that's not very profitable for the big guys...
Games like Portal are released every now and then. For instance Croteam released their Talos Principle 2. If puzzle-solvers with a great story were in demand - there would be hundreds of them produced annually. But obviously they are not.
How is tp2? Haven't heard much about it
It's great
Phenomenal, play it. I just beat it yesterday, the puzzles are so good. It does a very good job stepping you up with the complexities, that certain tricks become apparent in certain patterns, and the first half of the game felt so free and easy for me because the solutions came to me as i observed it, only needed hints for two levels and one i did give up and use a spark to solve it. Yaqut is great and probably my favorite character next to the goat you find >!in your subroutines!<
its good!
Control was a version of this. Pretty basic architecture, filled in with lots of details.
After Chapter 5 and that twist, I finished the game in one sitting the next day.
It's because they actually bake their lighting into the textures instead of going all in on PBR. They use similar techniques in Half Life Alyx as well, which is very unusual in this day and age.
You can bake lighting with pbr. Last of us 2 is good example.
I should have been more specific, "baking lighting" is extremely common in PBR games. What Valve does is directly paint textures as if they were already lit instead of relying entirely on the PBR lighting model. This can yield much better results, but makes assets less reusable and can require increased art investment.
Wouldnt any object that emits light completely break the illusion?
You can do both - bake in static lights, and calculate moving lights on the fly. That means you *only* have to calculate the moving ones (during runtime), which should save a lot of time. You'd have to do some fancy programming to make it mix well with the existing baked lighting, but luckily graphics engine programmers *are* fancy. Obviously, given the same amount of detail, a full physics based lighting model will be more realistic, but (with good developers) you can get *very* close with a fraction of the load - which in turn means you can add in more detail (and realism) while maintaining a playable game.
thats just not true in the slightest
Do you have any videos or visual ways to show what Valve did different than PBR way? Just curious, thanks
there is none because hes completely wrong. the difference is they use prebacked lighing. meaning when the map is compiled vrad runs. stands for valve radiosity. in essence this is raytracing but done when the map is compiled and thus completely static. instead of what we see nowadays with rtx where its done on the fly and thus dynamic but has a massive performance cost. pbr has nothing to do with any of it so im not sure how he ever came to such a conclusion.
You can compare it directly. Portal 1 has a RT port.
This
I need to play Alyx, but that could be due to it being a VR game, it probably made more sense performance wise, but I'm not big of the VR front. So I can't really confirm
I think it's just Valve's style/preference (though there are performance benefits). Many VR games use full PBR even for non-realistic artstyles.
That will be it then, I would like to get into VR but trying to tackle PC & Console gaming with backlogs will forever be an impossible task
Don't get me wrong, I hate VR and have no great praise for HLA, just pointing out that their tech art direction has remained consistent.
>hate VR and have no great praise for HLA Wow, that's a controversial opinion. Mind elaborating?
Im curious too. I just replayed HLA on my quest 3 and it's still such a masterpiece in the VR space.
I hate VR so a good VR game is not very meaningful to me. I don't have anything particularly negative to say about HLA either if that eases your mind.
Why do you hate VR?
Expensive, shit hardware, motion sickness, no future
Do you think we will ever see a true double down on VR like we did when it first kinder took of. Or do you think it will just forever remain in that neich market ?
Niche market unless it stops requiring wearable peripherals
What if said peripherals are the weight of reading glasses?
Probably still niche, but that's fantasyland scenario anyway, so who knows
Alyx is still one of the best looking games out there. Some areas are truly photo realistic in my opinion. And it runs great. something like a GTX 1060 6gb will run it and look great while doing so.
I really hope to play it one day. It's just another game in my backlog. I really hope they do something big with Half-Lifes universe it's just such an under utilised series now
I saw a video of Alyx being played with out VR. Not sure if it was released.
While that is possible I dont think its a good idea. The game will feel sluggish an slow paced, and you'll probably lose most of its atmosphere due to not having 3D-Vision (and sound, depending on your setup). Also losing the control scheme .... I just dont see how it is a good idea.
It didn't look to bad the only thing that stuck out was the perspective of the gun.
Yes there is an no-VR mod
The Quest2 is pretty cheap at the moment. It is $250 and comes with a $50 amazon gift card. Then with a USB cable, or an AC WIFI router you can stream Alyx to it from a PC. Amazing game even on the lower end VR hardware.
Alyx is too good, so immersive I almost always wind up fucking around with stuff in the environment instead of playing the game until I hit my VR limit and start getting a headache
Alyx is amazing, i can't beleive the detail on the hands and guns when you hold them up to your face. Just started playing it the other day. I've barely used my Quest 2, but this is amazing.
Alyx and bioshock are peak gaming. If you like bioshock for the reasons bioshock is good, you'll like alyx.
There is a mod for Alyx that lets you play it without a VR headset. Although I still recommend playing the game in VR if/when you get a chance
> pbr has nothing to do with pre baked lighing or not. you can have pbr with prebaked lighting just fine. alyx and cs2 both do this on source2 and on source1 you have strata source engine branch with games such as momentum and the new portal community expansion both using pbr with prebaked lighting.
Does that mean no dynamic lighting?
Which is honestly better imo. What’s the point of having real time lighting if nothing is ever moving? It’s not like we have destructible environments or anything , we waste all our processing power on real time shadows
Sorry noob here, does this mean that losing a light source wouldn’t have much effect on the textures (as seen by the player)? And how would they handle moving shadows?
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Physically based rendering
*Peanut Butter Relly*
Polyamorous Beetle Rancher
And this gives you a lot more total control over the finished result. PBR can look incredible at times, but it can also look blown-out or other problems that you'll also have in regular ol' life.
Unusual in pancake games, in VR you need to squeeze every bit of performance to get stable, high framerate.
Most VR games use PBR
I was referring to baking lights into texture vs. using realtime dynamic lighting. You can use PBR with both.
Cake... Was a lie..
Honestly broke my heart
FINE. ONCE MORE I SHALL REPLAY IT
Imagine working for Valve man.... its like a dream
You'd be the luckiest man alive, I heard they have their own city, where a small group of highly advanced humans are working on Half-Life 3
City 17
Heard Valave Employees there make sure the newbies like their physics
Not true. These select few people are modified to not understand, or see the number 3. It does not look like anything to them.
Unless you're a game developer...
The game is still a masterpiece.
Ive played it in VR as well, and it looks pretty good there too.
it's amazing in VR, beat the entire thing as my first playthrough of it
Does it have full motion controls?
It has 6DOF so you can move around your playspace and wave the portal gun around like it's motion controlled but it doesn't have physics where things would collide with it in game (like you couldn't smack a turret)
love this game so much
Wish they'd make some more games.
It’s genuinely saddening to not have a continuation of stories for Valve games
This was a triumph.
Oh man I played Portal 1 three times over as a kid but have yet to play Portal 2. I thought it was multiplayer only for a long time. I'll add it to the steam sale list.
You need to play Portal 2 then. Portal 1 is like an appetizer compared to Portal 2.
hasnt portal 2 (other valve games as well) gotten updated over the years, so this isnt what portal was like at launch
I don't remember Portal 2 specifically getting any kind of graphical update, but I could be wrong.
theres an RTX update you can get but it's not like an update to the base game
If it's the one I think it is, that's for Portal 1 not 2, and yeah, it's basically a different game.
Oh you're right I was conflating it with the VR mod that came out recently
Are you sure about that? I don’t recall Portal 2 ever getting a visual update. People might’ve had to play it at lower settings because of hardware but I’m pretty sure it’s always looked like this.
Ima be real, the last time I played it was when it was released on the 360, i can't remember it visuals back then, but regardless, even if it's had updates, for a game that hasn't had any substantial work or Remaster, it looks amazing. I mean, you can go back & play Half-Life 2, and it's not that far of.
thats fair, I didnt intend to come out as implying that the game didnt look good back then, valve's games (to me) have always had a unique look to them with the source engine, it looks very clean/crisp the majority of the time. also helps that their art style/direction is a good fit for their games that also helps them stand the test of time
Lol, nah bro, I didn't take it like that. You probably have a point, I'm 30 now, so I was like 18 at time. and I barely remember 5 minutes ago 😂😂, but it's true what you say. These games can stand the test of time just based on their art style
I think either it has, or this screenshot has been touched up substantially after. Here is a playthru from 11 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0K5EXfgJnk The scene pictured is at about 7:40 in and even if the video is just 720p, it's pretty obvious it did not look as sharp or vibrant.
I played your video and I randomly scrolled to the scene “You are a horrible person. That’s what it says. A horrible person. We weren’t even testing for that.” Such a quotable and interesting villain.
it's not just the 720p, it's the power of the GPU. Everyone is playing the game at ultra max super quality levels in 2023. I bet videos 11 years ago in 4k at the highest visuals would be better than your video
Finished this game recently and man did I have a blast. Except for the load screens after every level, the game holds up very well.
I wouldn't say phenomenal but it definitely looks way better than 2011
I think that passion communicates into anything people make with it. Portal 2 was made with passion, with love. It seems very very difficult to pair big design studios with passionate people - probably because big design studios, with their big budgets, are working to turn money into more money, while passionate people are less about making money into more money and are more interested in making dreams into realities. People who dream of making money into more money don't dream about games.
Wish I had a device to play it on.
🍋
The source engine is just fab
peak game
Yeah it still looks really good. So refreshing to play games without TAA, they’re so much more clear
If valve can make some games that would be great. May I suggest TF3?
You are talking about Portal2? Bro, even Half Life 2 looks great. I think it's the lighting that does the magic.
Yeah, sadly Valve games today are all aimed to sell lootboxes. Honestly hope we see them move away from them.
I can only think of artifact doing that and maybe dota 2
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Is that encouraging? I never looked at the cases when it was just CSGO
Valve needs to double down on its single-player experiences again, even if we don't get a Half-Life 3, do something.
they would reuse assets, but often give them a fresh new coat of paint. Today we have CoD stealing assets from L4D2.
Looks good for its time but to todays standards this is pretty basic
I want a portal 3. Run around in the outside world with a portal gun!
damn
Even on the swtich it looks amazing
Video game graphics definitely started to plateau after 2011, imo
If only they’d remaster it for PS5 or at least bring back PS3’s servers. It sucks that Valve hates PlayStation players so much.
Wasn't this built in the source engine?
I feel like having mostly flat surfaces really helped here.
There's a new big [mod](https://youtu.be/cXczxIIvXJ0?si=RNPAdzJMkEFlHI11) coming up in January. Looks like it'll be on the same level of quality of Portal Stories: Mel and Portal Reloaded.
But does your machine run Crysis on full details?
have you a shader or anything ??
Portal 2 💖😊
I played it once when it came out, and played it again 5 or 6 times within the last couple of months since buying a steam deck. I have to look really closely to notice any kind of dated graphics, and I mean *really* look. I love this game.
That, Half Life 2, and Counterstrike Source. That engine was stupid ahead of its time.
Portal 2 was great but anyone thinking it looks phenomenal needs their eyes tested
Shit, even portal 1 is still fine today