HL 2 Lost Coast HDR video
Value releases a Lost Coast video featuring its new HDR rendering technology.
The latest [url=http://www.steampowered.com/Steam/Marketing/June24.2005/]Steam client news[/url] provides details of Valve's new HDR (High Dynamic Range) lighting technology. This new technology, which is available only to suporting hardware, will be included in the upcoming HL2: The Lost Coast and according to the news will then be available in Valve's future product releases such as Day of Defeat: Source. A video is also linked from the news report which showcases the technology, its 12MB - Windows Media format and can be found [url=http://storefront.steampowered.com/video/LostCoastHDR.wmv]here[/url].
"We're getting much closer to having Lost Coast ready to release. Originally planned as a section of the Highway 17 chapter of Half-Life 2, Lost Coast is a playable technology showcase that introduces High Dynamic Range lighting to the Source engine.
One of the fundamental pieces of HDR rendering lies in "dynamic tonemapping." In the Source engine, by varying the exposure of a scene based on how much light is visible, we can accurately simulate a range of brightness that is beyond what a computer monitor is physically capable of displaying. A real-world example of this effect happens every time you walk from a very dark room to an outdoor area with very bright sunlight -- your eye takes a few moments to adjust to the variance in the amount of light hitting the retina. If you have a video card that supports HDR, you'll be able to see this in the engine when Lost Coast is released."