The Black Mesa team released an image of Xen rendered in-game.
- Thread starter Vel0city
- Start date
Looks like a model to me. Unless they went trough the trouble of getting Source to do tesselation. They've made their own lighting and put that into Source, so it's not entirely unlikely that they just said eff it and put tesselation into Source.
Looks less annoying than the original Xen. That ramp gives me a bit of a Portal vibe.
I thought tesselation made stuff look smoother by adding more polygons? To me, it looks like either a prop, or self-shadowing bump maps on displacements.
I've seen examples of tessellation where it made flat surfaces (or at least smooth terrain) into 3D versions of the textures on them — cobblestone, etc. I have no idea how it works, but it looked awesome.
Thats called parallax mapping. Source has it, just not in any usable way. Not without some code wizardry at least.
It's quite possible that BM devs fixed it for their game.
I'm not doing anything with Black Mesa at the moment, no.
I do know the pipeline, but not intimately. Check the black mesa forums for more. Chon will probably be able to answer your questions.
Lol
GooGuGajoob
L12: Pro-crastinator
- Mar 28, 2014
- 175
- 101
Doesn't really look or feel like an alien planet anymore...especially with that ramp. But maybe it's a certain area I don't recall that should look like that.
On the Black Mesa forum one of the lead devs themselves said this was one of the less alien looking parts of Xen. Probably was full-on alien mode before the Black Mesa team (as in, in-game Black Mesa team, not the game devs) decided it was needed for human exploration of the alien world. Apparently there is way more alien stuff before the map they showcased here, but that would spoil the surprise of the actual Xen levels so they went with this instead. More Xen will be posted in the coming months up to its release, so we'll see.