ABS: If I could force it I would. It doesn't have to be "official" bloom, it could be faked using a shader effect or an overlay. I did try a few things, but since I know people here probably tried it before, it'll save me precious time to ask.
Drexer: no game on the PS2 has ever been released with HDR rendering. Shadow of the Colossus used FAKE HDR. It's all over the net man. You should verify your sources, because I had to do it for you, and I could've used that 1 min. for something else.
Every game you saw showing an effect that looked like HDR, well, they were awesome enough into convincing you, Drexer, that it's HDR, but it's not.
The machine I had when valve released Lost Coast (featuring "real" HDR) could barely run the map with HDR enabled, so, imagine our poor little PS2 with its 300mhz, 150mhz graphics card applying that effect on a full scale game?
Nope.
If you guys just want to prove me wrong or defy me, fine by me, freedom of speech, but it's just not going to help my cause with bloom in TF2... and it's not fun.
I don't know why it always has to turn into a "what the hell are you talking about" "you're an idiot for wanting to do this" type of war. I guess it's in people's nature to do a little bit of flaming on a daily basis and think they're always smarter. The thing with me is that I just can't let people post false information and argue with me when they're wrong... it's in my nature. I'm sorry I had to say that, but I've had a few helpful posts at first (stickzero,capellan), then the war started based on false information. All I do is ask a question, then everyone always has to deconstruct the intention, analyse it, find the flaws and attack.
My arguing processor is now turned off for the rest of the session.
... back to topic.
BTW, I did compile HDR lighting on my map and it's awesome, but it's the blooming aspect of HDR that make it look nice, the eye adjusting feature is nice, but to a certain point, it's a bit distracting if the effect is too strong. I gotta tone it down, and keep the bloom mostly.
Performance impact doesn't seem to be that bad based on primarily testing.
MQ