Windows Lost Coast

My steam is stuck at 67% updating

 

Short but sweet.
Works well as a tech demo imo. Some of the lighting is spectacular and some is a little too bright but all round I would have to say that they have created some pretty impressive lighting.

 

OK!

1. Stack up the two crates from this area like this:


2. Jump up on them, and then onto the butress/remaining wall/whatever it is, so you see this:


3. Run and jump across the gap, then turn right, and walk along 'til you are on top of the arch (my computer renders it like this):


4. Turn right again, and walk close to the edge... but pick up the boxes with the grav gun and drop them over the edge... they break your fall when you walk off.


5. Walk along to the right while circle, to avoid losing health by dropping off, then walk to the left white circle, and drop off there-- you should have enough health!


6. Yay! Screenie time!


On main street!


The bridge isn't solid, so you have to find a place to drop down safely (round to the right of it worked for me)


And walking around the industrial area, you can see some nice windows and some towers. (There's no weapon 'cos I took the screenshot as I swiped with the crowbar.)

Well, that was fun... do I get a cookie?

ch424

PS: Thanks to imageshack.us for hosting and ATi for rendering!

 

Crickey bigz...that's amazing!

Look at the detail on the crossbow and the glove...

 

damn it.... ive lost my half life 2 dvd :'( what can i do?

 

Nope i just cant get it too run smoothly without reducing quite abit in the settings.

I can, and do, run HL2 and CS:S at @1024x768 2xAA, 8xAF, all settings high and all runs sweet, even on heavy servers.

With the lost coast level i have to turn off AA, turn AF down to trilinear filtering, turn off shadows, and set both model and texture detail to medium. Then it's just about playable.

Now with FarCry there is hardly any difference in performance when i play in HDR mode. Obviously i lose AA, when i would normally play with 2x but it's just as smooth as before the patch.

I'm not knocking 'Lost Coast' atall, i still thik it looks stunning and it's as fun to play as HL2. But it's just odd that there's such a performance hit with their HDR version.

Anyway it's a great level, and IMO it only seems short because we're all enjoying it so much. If it was a level for a game you didn't really like i'm sure it would seem alot longer!!

Best of all though, it was free

 

ROFL! Try picking up the fisherman's rod and firing it with the grav gun!
then

They fly for miles!
EDIT: I meant fire it at the combine with the grav gun!

ch424

 

pfft, so full of bugs it really let the whole thing down, From the screenies ive seen for the last few months i was expecting to be able togo through the whole town part, not just the church. Was pretty dissapointing really, So yeah it looked good, but thats not everything.. Did a run through to see how long i could complete the level, took around 5 mins tops..

Mike

 

As you can see from this screen capture, I ran into some pretty bizarre anomalies in Lost Coast!

From the start, HDR ran fine. My system was pegged accurately (3.2GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM, ATi Radeon X800 Pro with 256MB of RAM running Catalyst 5.9), but to be on the safe side, I decided to run the level at a mere 1024x768. Everything else was maxed out.

However, once I accidentally fell off the first ledge, I was able to swim to the opposite shoreline where I found that the buildings there were not complete, and I was able to walk around them and see through them back to where I had started. I was also able to see through mountains and other buildings.

I restarted the game and went back up the steps where I encountered my first batch of Combine soldiers. I spent too much time trying to remember some of the movement commands (I haven't played HL2 in nearly a year), when I got gunned down. When I reloaded the game, the weird (and creepy) anomaly shown above greeted me! This strange bug occured throughout the level, too, not just there. Soldiers would appear frozen and floating in mid-air. I could walk right through them.

Whatever safeguard were in place in the full version of HL2 to prevent you from leaving the preordained map areas definitely seemed to be either completely lacking or not fully locked down throughout this map.

Anyone else experience any strange behavior???

 

Yeah, I got the floating bodies if I quickloaded. Kinda odd bug though -- everything still works in normal HL2.

However, the city buildings are meant to be incomplete, as this reduces the load on your computer -- Valve deliberately use a texture called NODRAW for those faces, so there is no RAM used up holding the texture and no time wasted trying to render them. I guess they must have left out the PLAYER CLIPs (the things that stop you going where you're not meant to) in a rush to meet their own deadline.

ch424

 

Groovy. Thanks, ch424! I guess I missed the bit about the NODRAW in the reviews of Lost Coast .

 

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Releasing it after DOD:S makes it kind of pointless in my opinion since it was designed to demonstrate their HDR implementation. I also know people have been saying it was short, but I wasn't expecting it to be THAT short. As far as DOD:S costing $20, that's only if you didn't buy the HL2 Silver or Gold packages which many people did. If you spread out the cost of what you get from the Silver package it makes DOD:S quite a bit cheaper. But again, I was more disappointed in the lack of story line or continuity with HL2. I was at least hoping for a bit more dialogue or something.

 

In all fairness it's just a tech demo and it's so short that you're not supposed to have to load halfway through. As ch424 said, the buildings are incomplete for a reason. Less surfaces in the map means faster load times and less to potentially render (unless it does that smart z-ordering or whatever, so stuff behind something else doesn't get rendered). Go die in counter-strike and then float around the map, you'll find the same thing to hold true. I managed to get naded over a building in DOD:S and ended up in some half-complete puddle (too slow to nab a screenie )

Anyways, uber textures and HDR are a nice combo, albeit painful for the graphics card. I noticed that if I had the grav gun out I got this strange vertical line, but that could have been due to the quick info being enabled or running at 1680x1050 which is slightly less than common. At least among those that aren't running a 20" widescreen.

 

yeah, it was way too short, although it did stump my friend right the set of stairs break out(right at the begining) got stuck there while i was still pre loading, I finished preloading, set my settings, got in, got over the gap you need to take after the stairs break, up the cliff, up into the town, into the church, killed the mortar and shot the helicopter before he figured out how to get accross the gap. Over all it was cool but it was too short. Mmmmm Leaches..... (in refernce to what the old man says at the end)

 

bah I did ur challenge and posted it in the original news article thread

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=98061&page=4&pp=20

 

Looks nice, seems very buggy and rushed. Runs fantastically on my comp, everything on high etc, but the HDR just wasn't quite as gobsmacking as I'd expected and at times even seems a little... unnatural? The thing with the floating, Christ-posed bad guys was a bit annoying too. More of a tech demo imho than any sort of new HL2 episode, as the design was a bit dull and by-the-numbers by Valves standards. I would love however, to see a proper game based that uses some of the nice ideas in the demo.

 

Yeah... the HDR could be slightly better now I think about it. It's more of a where you are versus where you're looking effect, which isn't how it should work. In that short covered staircase, as soon as you walk out everything goes to not-sunblind mode, but if you walk back in looking exactly at the same point, it goes overbright again, which isn't how it seems that it should work.

 

Bah! You beat me to it! That was the very first thing I did, I thought it was cool when the fisherman dropped the harpoon and it rolled around the floor as the gate swung open, so I grav gunned it into a wall.... ping! It stuck in nicely, then I fired it at a combine and he flew about 250yrds


PS. I thought the textures (on the cliffs and rocks) were crappy... or is that just my retard computer Oh, and yes, I did have texutre detail set to "high"

 

yeah, the textures on the rocks weren't the best.

 

oh, and in reply to that person earlier who could get out the church (lol) if you listened to the fisherman you were supposed to destroy the cannon (which is in the church). Try destroying it.