Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
Encyclopedia
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast is a small additional level for the 2004 first-person shooter
video game Half-Life 2
. Developed by Valve Software
, it was released on October 27, 2005, through the Steam content delivery service as a free download to owners of the Microsoft Windows
version of Half-Life 2. Lost Coast serves as a technology demonstration
, specifically showcasing the high dynamic range rendering
implemented in the Source engine. The level was designed with a variety of appropriate environments to emphasize these effects. In addition, Lost Coast was the first video game developed by Valve to allow developers to explain various elements of design as the player progresses through the level.
Lost Coast follows Half-Life protagonist Gordon Freeman
as he travels up a coastal cliff to destroy a Combine artillery launcher in a monastery, which is firing on a nearby town. The Lost Coast level was originally created for Half-Life 2, but was ultimately removed from the game. As a result, it has several minor story details that were not included in Half-Life 2. The level received a generally positive reception, and there was consensus among reviewers that the new features included in Lost Coast should be integrated into future games released by Valve.
gameplay mechanics as Half-Life 2. The game is viewed from the perspective of the player character
, and plot information is imparted through scripted sequences rather than cut scenes. A heads-up display at the bottom of the screen shows the player's health
, energy gauge, and ammunition status, while available weapons are shown at the top. Health and armor energy can be replenished by picking up medical supplies and energy cells respectively, or by using wall-mounted charging devices. The player character is equipped with a small armory of weapons from Half-Life 2 at the beginning of the level, including a pistol, shotgun, crossbow, and gravity gun
. The gravity gun allows the player to manipulate physical objects in the world; it can be used to pick up nearby objects and throw them at enemies or create cover from enemy fire. The gravity gun can also be used to perform several non-combat functions, such as grabbing out-of-reach supply crates.
, finding himself near a group of decaying piers, underneath a monastery
set up on rocks and overlooking the small town of St. Olga. A fisherman recognizes Gordon and directs him to the monastery, which the enemy Combine are using as a platform to launch artillery shells filled with headcrab
s into the town. The fisherman opens a gate, allowing the player to proceed, and waits for Gordon's return.
As Gordon proceeds up the cliffside to the monastery, he encounters heavy resistance from Combine soldiers who rappel down the cliff to try to stop him. Gordon fights his way up, enters the monastery's sanctuary, and disables the artillery launcher. This alerts nearby soldiers, who assault the sanctuary in force, while a Combine attack helicopter
arrives to support the soldiers. After defeating the soldiers in the courtyard, Freeman moves to scaffolding over the side of the cliff and destroys the helicopter with RPGs. The helicopter crashes into the scaffolding, freeing up a path to a crude elevator which lowers Gordon back down to the pier. The fisherman congratulates Freeman on his success, invites him to a feast in St. Olga, and the screen fades out. As the level ends, the fisherman exclaims that Gordon is "getting all fuzzy round the edges"...
was deliberately chosen for the monastery, as buildings of this type "are very colorful and have a large variety of materials" and are "often lit naturally, with extremes of darkness and brightness," providing an ideal showcase for the HDR lighting effects. Valve also thought that the use of a monastery would help provide a starker contrast between old human architecture and futuristic Combine technology found within it. The cliffside that leads to the monastery had a gameplay-oriented purpose, and was meant to emulate a similar cliffside combat scene in Half-Life. The cliffside also forces the player to be observant of threats from above and below, breaking from normal horizontal combat. The monastery's courtyard was designed as an area where the player recovers from the cliffside combat, while also presenting a contained combat arena later in the level in which the player must hold their ground while they are attacked from multiple directions.
(HDR) rendering implemented into the Source game engine. Valve first attempted to implement HDR rendering in Source in late 2003. The first method stored textures in RGBA color space
, allowing for multisample anti-aliasing
and pixel shaders to be used, but this prevented alpha mapping
and fog effects from working properly, as well as making textures appear sharp and jagged. The second method involved saving two versions of a texture: one with regular data, and the other with overbrightening data. However, this technique did not allow for multisample anti-aliasing and consumed twice as much video card
memory, making it unfeasible. The third method, shown at the E3 convention in 2005, used floating point
data to define the RGB color space
, allowing for reasonably efficient storage of the HDR data. However, this method also did not allow for multisample anti-aliasing, and was only compatible with Nvidia
video cards, leaving ATI
cards unable to run HDR. The fourth and final method compromised between the second and third methods, using overbrightening textures sparingly and allowing ATI cards to render HDR in a different way to the Nvidia ones while nearly producing the same end result.
The final version of Valve's HDR technology adds a significant number of lighting effects to the engine, aimed at making the game appear more realistic. Bloom shading
was introduced, blurring bright edges in the game world and emulating a camera's overexposure to light. This is combined with exposure control
to tailor the effect to represent the human eye
. For example, as the player exits a dark area into a light area, the new area is initially glaringly bright, but quickly darkens, representing the adjustment of the player character's eyes to the light. New cube mapping
techniques allow the reflection cast by an object to correspond with the brightness of the light source, and lightmap
s enable light bouncing and global illumination to be taken into account in the rendering. Refraction
effects were added to make light account for the physical attributes of an object and to emulate the way light is reflected by water. The Lost Coast level is specifically designed to showcase these effects. It uses the sea and beach as opportunities to demonstrate water-based effects, the monastery to demonstrate bloom from its whitewash walls, and the sanctuary to provide the means to show refraction through stained glass windows and cube maps on golden urns and candlesticks.
As a technology showcase, Valve considered Lost Coast to have very demanding system requirements. The game runs on computers with specifications lower than what is recommended, albeit without some key features such as HDR. If a non-HDR capable card is used, the developer commentary is changed slightly to reflect this. For example, Gabe Newell
would describe the effects that are seen in a different manner.
, would be made available for free to owners of ATI Radeon
cards. It was later released without charge to Nvidia
graphics card owners along with Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Peggle Extreme, and the first eleven levels of Portal.
Lost Coast was generally well-received by video game critics. 1UP.com
enjoyed the amount of detail, including the graphics, puzzles, and intelligent enemies, saying, "Valve just packed more atmosphere into a tiny snippet than most shooters muster, period." The review also praised the level's commentary system, calling it an informative addition, and enjoyed the interesting and insightful comments made by some of its creators. The level satisfied UGO
because "it would be harder not to enjoy this level in all its beautifully rendered glory—even after you've broken all the windows and spattered the walls with Combine blood," and GameSpot
commented that "the textures in Lost Coast are noticeably more detailed and numerous than in the retail game." The review concluded by hoping that the features introduced in Lost Coast would be included in future games released by Valve.
Negative reaction to the game focused on its length and gameplay. 1UP.com and UGO both considered it short; Shawn Elliott of 1UP.com described it as "a lickety-split run through postcard-pretty tide pools, up cliffs, and into a church turned Combine outpost". UGO's Nigel Grammer stated that Lost Coasts gameplay seemed to be secondary to the level's graphics. Lost Coasts gameplay disappointed Brad Shoemaker of GameSpot, who compared it to that of Half-Life 2
and considered them to be very similar, saying that it "isn't going to set the world on fire".
First-person shooter
First-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...
video game Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2 , the sequel to Half-Life, is a first-person shooter video game and a signature title in the Half-Life series. It is singleplayer, story-driven, science fiction, and linear...
. Developed by Valve Software
Valve Corporation
Valve Corporation is an American video game development and digital distribution company based in Bellevue, Washington, United States...
, it was released on October 27, 2005, through the Steam content delivery service as a free download to owners of the Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
version of Half-Life 2. Lost Coast serves as a technology demonstration
Tech demo
A tech demo is a prototype, rough example or an otherwise incomplete version of a product, put together with the primary purpose of showcasing the idea, performance, method or the features of the product...
, specifically showcasing the high dynamic range rendering
High dynamic range rendering
In 3D computer graphics, high dynamic range rendering , also known as high dynamic range lighting, is the rendering of computer graphics scenes by using lighting calculations done in a larger dynamic range. This allows preservation of details that may be lost due to limiting contrast ratios...
implemented in the Source engine. The level was designed with a variety of appropriate environments to emphasize these effects. In addition, Lost Coast was the first video game developed by Valve to allow developers to explain various elements of design as the player progresses through the level.
Lost Coast follows Half-Life protagonist Gordon Freeman
Gordon Freeman
Gordon Freeman is a fictional character and the main protagonist of the Half-Life video game series. He is a theoretical physicist who finds himself thrust into a battle for survival against both alien and human forces. Throughout the series, Gordon must prevail in hostile situations despite...
as he travels up a coastal cliff to destroy a Combine artillery launcher in a monastery, which is firing on a nearby town. The Lost Coast level was originally created for Half-Life 2, but was ultimately removed from the game. As a result, it has several minor story details that were not included in Half-Life 2. The level received a generally positive reception, and there was consensus among reviewers that the new features included in Lost Coast should be integrated into future games released by Valve.
Gameplay
Lost Coast uses the same first-person shooterFirst-person shooter
First-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...
gameplay mechanics as Half-Life 2. The game is viewed from the perspective of the player character
Player character
A player character or playable character is a character in a video game or role playing game who is controlled or controllable by a player, and is typically a protagonist of the story told in the course of the game. A player character is a persona of the player who controls it. Player characters...
, and plot information is imparted through scripted sequences rather than cut scenes. A heads-up display at the bottom of the screen shows the player's health
Health (game mechanic)
Health is a game mechanic used in role-playing, computer and video games to give value to characters, enemies, NPCs, and related objects. This value can either be numerical, semi-numerical as in hit/health points, or arbitrary as in a life bar....
, energy gauge, and ammunition status, while available weapons are shown at the top. Health and armor energy can be replenished by picking up medical supplies and energy cells respectively, or by using wall-mounted charging devices. The player character is equipped with a small armory of weapons from Half-Life 2 at the beginning of the level, including a pistol, shotgun, crossbow, and gravity gun
Gravity gun
Gravity gun can refer to various fictional devices:* Gravity gun, a gameplay concept in video games that allows players to manipulate the game's physics.* Gravitational Beam Emitter, a fictional gun used by Killy in the manga series Blame! and NOiSE...
. The gravity gun allows the player to manipulate physical objects in the world; it can be used to pick up nearby objects and throw them at enemies or create cover from enemy fire. The gravity gun can also be used to perform several non-combat functions, such as grabbing out-of-reach supply crates.
Plot
Lost Coast opens with the protagonist, Gordon FreemanGordon Freeman
Gordon Freeman is a fictional character and the main protagonist of the Half-Life video game series. He is a theoretical physicist who finds himself thrust into a battle for survival against both alien and human forces. Throughout the series, Gordon must prevail in hostile situations despite...
, finding himself near a group of decaying piers, underneath a monastery
Monastery
Monastery denotes the building, or complex of buildings, that houses a room reserved for prayer as well as the domestic quarters and workplace of monastics, whether monks or nuns, and whether living in community or alone .Monasteries may vary greatly in size – a small dwelling accommodating only...
set up on rocks and overlooking the small town of St. Olga. A fisherman recognizes Gordon and directs him to the monastery, which the enemy Combine are using as a platform to launch artillery shells filled with headcrab
Headcrab
A headcrab is a fictional alien parasitoid found in the Half-Life video game series created by Valve Software. They are the most numerous and arguably most iconic aliens in the series.- Overview :...
s into the town. The fisherman opens a gate, allowing the player to proceed, and waits for Gordon's return.
As Gordon proceeds up the cliffside to the monastery, he encounters heavy resistance from Combine soldiers who rappel down the cliff to try to stop him. Gordon fights his way up, enters the monastery's sanctuary, and disables the artillery launcher. This alerts nearby soldiers, who assault the sanctuary in force, while a Combine attack helicopter
Attack helicopter
An attack helicopter is a military helicopter with the primary role of an attack aircraft, with the capability of engaging targets on the ground, such as enemy infantry and armored vehicles...
arrives to support the soldiers. After defeating the soldiers in the courtyard, Freeman moves to scaffolding over the side of the cliff and destroys the helicopter with RPGs. The helicopter crashes into the scaffolding, freeing up a path to a crude elevator which lowers Gordon back down to the pier. The fisherman congratulates Freeman on his success, invites him to a feast in St. Olga, and the screen fades out. As the level ends, the fisherman exclaims that Gordon is "getting all fuzzy round the edges"...
Level design
Lost Coast was originally conceived as a part of the Highway 17 chapter in Half-Life 2 (Highway 17's development name was "Coast", hence the name "Lost Coast"), but was later discarded during development. As a result, Lost Coast features minor storyline details that were removed from Half-Life 2, such as the headcrab artillery launchers. Each area of the level was designed with a specific purpose. An Eastern Orthodox architectural styleEastern Orthodox church architecture
An Orthodox church as a church building of Eastern Orthodoxy has a distinct, recognizable style among church architectures.-History:While sharing many traditions, East and West in Christianity began to diverge from each other from an early date...
was deliberately chosen for the monastery, as buildings of this type "are very colorful and have a large variety of materials" and are "often lit naturally, with extremes of darkness and brightness," providing an ideal showcase for the HDR lighting effects. Valve also thought that the use of a monastery would help provide a starker contrast between old human architecture and futuristic Combine technology found within it. The cliffside that leads to the monastery had a gameplay-oriented purpose, and was meant to emulate a similar cliffside combat scene in Half-Life. The cliffside also forces the player to be observant of threats from above and below, breaking from normal horizontal combat. The monastery's courtyard was designed as an area where the player recovers from the cliffside combat, while also presenting a contained combat arena later in the level in which the player must hold their ground while they are attacked from multiple directions.
High dynamic range rendering
The goal of Lost Coast was to demonstrate the new high dynamic rangeHigh dynamic range rendering
In 3D computer graphics, high dynamic range rendering , also known as high dynamic range lighting, is the rendering of computer graphics scenes by using lighting calculations done in a larger dynamic range. This allows preservation of details that may be lost due to limiting contrast ratios...
(HDR) rendering implemented into the Source game engine. Valve first attempted to implement HDR rendering in Source in late 2003. The first method stored textures in RGBA color space
RGBA color space
RGBA stands for Red Green Blue Alpha. While it is sometimes described as a color space, it is actually simply a use of the RGB color model, with extra information. The color is RGB, and may belong to any RGB color space, but an integral alpha value as invented by Catmull and Smith between 1971 and...
, allowing for multisample anti-aliasing
Multisample Anti-Aliasing
Multisample anti-aliasing is a type of anti-aliasing, a technique used in computer graphics to improve image quality.- Definition :The term generally refers to a special case of supersampling. Initial implementations of full-scene anti-aliasing worked conceptually by simply rendering a scene at a...
and pixel shaders to be used, but this prevented alpha mapping
Alpha mapping
Alpha mapping is a technique in 3D computer graphics where an image is mapped to a 3D object, and designates certain areas of the object to be transparent or translucent. The transparency can vary in strength, based on the image texture, which can be greyscale, or the alpha channel of an RGBA...
and fog effects from working properly, as well as making textures appear sharp and jagged. The second method involved saving two versions of a texture: one with regular data, and the other with overbrightening data. However, this technique did not allow for multisample anti-aliasing and consumed twice as much video card
Video card
A video card, Graphics Card, or Graphics adapter is an expansion card which generates output images to a display. Most video cards offer various functions such as accelerated rendering of 3D scenes and 2D graphics, MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding, TV output, or the ability to connect multiple monitors...
memory, making it unfeasible. The third method, shown at the E3 convention in 2005, used floating point
Floating point
In computing, floating point describes a method of representing real numbers in a way that can support a wide range of values. Numbers are, in general, represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent. The base for the scaling is normally 2, 10 or 16...
data to define the RGB color space
RGB color space
An RGB color space is any additive color space based on the RGB color model. A particular RGB color space is defined by the three chromaticities of the red, green, and blue additive primaries, and can produce any chromaticity that is the triangle defined by those primary colors...
, allowing for reasonably efficient storage of the HDR data. However, this method also did not allow for multisample anti-aliasing, and was only compatible with Nvidia
NVIDIA
Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...
video cards, leaving ATI
ATI Technologies
ATI Technologies Inc. was a semiconductor technology corporation based in Markham, Ontario, Canada, that specialized in the development of graphics processing units and chipsets. Founded in 1985 as Array Technologies Inc., the company was listed publicly in 1993 and was acquired by Advanced Micro...
cards unable to run HDR. The fourth and final method compromised between the second and third methods, using overbrightening textures sparingly and allowing ATI cards to render HDR in a different way to the Nvidia ones while nearly producing the same end result.
The final version of Valve's HDR technology adds a significant number of lighting effects to the engine, aimed at making the game appear more realistic. Bloom shading
Bloom (shader effect)
Bloom is a computer graphics effect used in computer games, demos and high dynamic range rendering to reproduce an imaging artifact of real-world cameras. The effect produces fringes of light around very bright objects in an image, obscuring fine details...
was introduced, blurring bright edges in the game world and emulating a camera's overexposure to light. This is combined with exposure control
Exposure (photography)
In photography, exposure is the total amount of light allowed to fall on the photographic medium during the process of taking a photograph. Exposure is measured in lux seconds, and can be computed from exposure value and scene luminance over a specified area.In photographic jargon, an exposure...
to tailor the effect to represent the human eye
Human eye
The human eye is an organ which reacts to light for several purposes. As a conscious sense organ, the eye allows vision. Rod and cone cells in the retina allow conscious light perception and vision including color differentiation and the perception of depth...
. For example, as the player exits a dark area into a light area, the new area is initially glaringly bright, but quickly darkens, representing the adjustment of the player character's eyes to the light. New cube mapping
Cube mapping
In computer graphics, cube mapping is a method of environment mapping that uses a six-sided cube as the map shape. The environment is projected onto the six faces of a cube and stored as six square textures, or unfolded into six regions of a single texture...
techniques allow the reflection cast by an object to correspond with the brightness of the light source, and lightmap
Lightmap
A lightmap is a data structure which contains the brightness of surfaces in 3d graphics applications such as video games. Lightmaps are precomputed and used for static objects. Quake was the first computer game to use lightmaps to augment rendering. Before lightmaps were invented, realtime...
s enable light bouncing and global illumination to be taken into account in the rendering. Refraction
Refraction
Refraction is the change in direction of a wave due to a change in its speed. It is essentially a surface phenomenon . The phenomenon is mainly in governance to the law of conservation of energy. The proper explanation would be that due to change of medium, the phase velocity of the wave is changed...
effects were added to make light account for the physical attributes of an object and to emulate the way light is reflected by water. The Lost Coast level is specifically designed to showcase these effects. It uses the sea and beach as opportunities to demonstrate water-based effects, the monastery to demonstrate bloom from its whitewash walls, and the sanctuary to provide the means to show refraction through stained glass windows and cube maps on golden urns and candlesticks.
As a technology showcase, Valve considered Lost Coast to have very demanding system requirements. The game runs on computers with specifications lower than what is recommended, albeit without some key features such as HDR. If a non-HDR capable card is used, the developer commentary is changed slightly to reflect this. For example, Gabe Newell
Gabe Newell
Gabe Logan Newell is the co-founder and managing director of video game development and online distribution company Valve Corporation.-Work:...
would describe the effects that are seen in a different manner.
Commentary system
In addition to a showcase for visual improvements, Lost Coast acted as a testbed for Valve's commentary system. When the feature is enabled, additional items appear in the game that can be interacted with to play an audio commentary. Each audio piece ranges from ten seconds to a minute of commentary. Players hear the developers talk about what the player is seeing, what is happening, why they made certain decisions, and what kinds of challenges they faced. Commentary tracks are represented by floating speech bubbles called commentary nodes. Valve intended for players to first play the level with commentary disabled, and after completing the level, play it again with commentary enabled, learning about each new stage as they progress. The company has made the commentary system standard in all of its later video games.Release and reception
Lost Coast was released on October 27, 2005, as a free download from Valve's Steam content delivery service to anyone who purchased Half-Life 2. People who received Half-Life 2 as a gift from Valve's online store were not eligible to download the level. Valve announced on May 30, 2007 that Lost Coast, along with Half-Life 2: DeathmatchHalf-Life 2: Deathmatch
Half-Life 2: Deathmatch is a multiplayer first-person shooter video game developed by Valve Corporation. Released on Steam on November 30, 2004, it uses many of the assets from Half-Life 2, and the same Source engine. It features unique levels, optimized for multiplayer arena play, and a few new...
, would be made available for free to owners of ATI Radeon
Radeon
Radeon is a brand of graphics processing units and random access memory produced by Advanced Micro Devices , first launched in 2000 by ATI Technologies, which was acquired by AMD in 2006. Radeon is the successor to the Rage line. There are four different groups, which can be differentiated by...
cards. It was later released without charge to Nvidia
NVIDIA
Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...
graphics card owners along with Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Peggle Extreme, and the first eleven levels of Portal.
Lost Coast was generally well-received by video game critics. 1UP.com
1UP.com
1UP.com is a video game website owned by IGN Entertainment, a division of News Corporation. Previously, the site was owned by Ziff Davis before being sold to UGO Entertainment in 2009....
enjoyed the amount of detail, including the graphics, puzzles, and intelligent enemies, saying, "Valve just packed more atmosphere into a tiny snippet than most shooters muster, period." The review also praised the level's commentary system, calling it an informative addition, and enjoyed the interesting and insightful comments made by some of its creators. The level satisfied UGO
UGO
UGO Entertainment, Inc. is a website providing coverage of online media in entertainment targeting males age 18–34. The company is currently based in New York, New York, United States. On July 24, 2007 it was announced that Hearst Corporation would acquire UGO Entertainment...
because "it would be harder not to enjoy this level in all its beautifully rendered glory—even after you've broken all the windows and spattered the walls with Combine blood," and GameSpot
GameSpot
GameSpot is a video gaming website that provides news, reviews, previews, downloads, and other information. The site was launched in May 1, 1996 by Pete Deemer, Vince Broady and Jon Epstein. It was purchased by ZDNet, a brand which was later purchased by CNET Networks. CBS Interactive, which...
commented that "the textures in Lost Coast are noticeably more detailed and numerous than in the retail game." The review concluded by hoping that the features introduced in Lost Coast would be included in future games released by Valve.
Negative reaction to the game focused on its length and gameplay. 1UP.com and UGO both considered it short; Shawn Elliott of 1UP.com described it as "a lickety-split run through postcard-pretty tide pools, up cliffs, and into a church turned Combine outpost". UGO's Nigel Grammer stated that Lost Coasts gameplay seemed to be secondary to the level's graphics. Lost Coasts gameplay disappointed Brad Shoemaker of GameSpot, who compared it to that of Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2 , the sequel to Half-Life, is a first-person shooter video game and a signature title in the Half-Life series. It is singleplayer, story-driven, science fiction, and linear...
and considered them to be very similar, saying that it "isn't going to set the world on fire".
External links
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast on Steam
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast preview by EuroGamerEurogamerEurogamer is a Brighton-based website focused on video games news, reviews, previews and interviews. It is operated by Eurogamer Network Ltd., which was formed in 1999 by brothers Rupert and Nick Loman. Eurogamer has grown to become one of the most important European-based websites focused on...
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast benchmarks by bit-tech.net
- Interview with Gabe Newell on 1UP.com1UP.com1UP.com is a video game website owned by IGN Entertainment, a division of News Corporation. Previously, the site was owned by Ziff Davis before being sold to UGO Entertainment in 2009....