Someone posted this over on the Ross's Game Dungeon forum. I'd never seen it before, and a few things about it stuck out to me:
1. They show firing a gun into the water and making real, 3D ripples. I'm tempted to call shananigans because I have never known Source to be able to do that. How would they even achieve it? Particle effect with a distortion map similar to how heatwavers work?
2. Yes, we can all laugh at how they include the not-picking-up-dropped-weapons-for-ammo thing, which is an officially documented and even advertised feature.
3. The grenade launcher in both recordings features fully-modeled bolts, which is odd to me because for as long as I've been playing, it had painted-on ones until they updated some of the viewmodels a couple years ago. The wiki even still shows the old version. So that means they downgraded the viewmodels at one point early on, and then reverted some of the changes many years later.
4. On that note, I'd love to know when each of these changes was made. I suspect a lot of them are either from that recent update, or very early on (like, around when they downgraded the grenade launcher).
5. Most if not all of the changes to map lighting are almost certainly due to compiling with different settings, which makes me wonder if Valve has any kind of internal documentation recommending what settings to use when recompiling existing maps, or if everyone is on their own. I was aware that recompiling with incorrect settings does happen, because it happened when they updated Turbine with some optimization improvements and left weird lighting glitches on the catwalks.
