Half-Life - A Look at Water

[@KellySteam]

Honestly a surprising change, I feel like the software rendered water looks leagues and miles better than what most of us are familiar with with the OpenGL rendering.

[@Tester-sh1mn]

People always shit on Jp Trespasser for being bad and half life coming out a month later, but it’s ripple effect are better still are far superior than even the software rendering of half life.

[@writershard5065]

To us today yes. But remember that OpenGL was new at the time, and people would've cared less about the water looking a bit jelly-like, if it meant that they could see actual wavy-effects for the first time. It's the appeal of the new, over practical appearance.

[@WangleLine]

I agree!!

[@PandemonicHypercube]

It's due to the limitations of early graphics cards, rather than being an artistic choice. Early GPUs didn't have pixel shaders, as those wouldn't come about until the GeForce 3 generation (and the equivalent generation of ATI cards). This meant that per-pixel effects, like the water effect you see in software rendering mode became very expensive. It was much cheaper instead to just mess with the texture coordinates on the water vertices to give the effect you see here. Quake 2 also lost the wavy effect you see underwater when you switched on hardware rendering for the same reason.

[@NeovanGoth]

@@PandemonicHypercubeUnreal did very similar effects including water rendering with what they called "procedural textures". No pixel shaders needed, basically just an animated texture.

[@dagaypussayeatah]

software water is gorgeous. never even knew it was different since ive never thought to actually play HL in software mode

[@Zenkibou]

I probably did use software mode a few times, but it was usually with a low-end PC without a GPU, and it meant a crappy resolution and slow FPS, so I'm not sure many people were able to properly compare between GL and SW because it would have needed a much more powerful CPU for SW mode.

[@Autunite]

I had a PC without a GPU that could support OpenGL, it only supported D3D or Software, and D3D was way too laggy to be playable, so I played mostly in software. Didn't think much of the water, even after going over to a newer PC that supported OpenGL.

[@henry-u5t]

bladee pfp!

[@xj58]

i actually played in software render when my GPU burned for no reason

[@dsfadfdag6534]

GL water actually always existed. It came about with GLQuake, and Valve minimally changed it. You can find it in the GLQuake source release.

[@кук-б2з]

omahadd tuss pfp

[@monkeywithocd]

This makes that Xen water make so much more sense, I've always felt it looked like fudge like we suddenly entered some sort of Willie Wonka place. The software-rendered version looks a lot more like water over a very rough, uneven ground.

[@S1nwar]

i assumed it is supposed to look like an organic goo similar to zerg creep or that slime from ghostbusters 2

[@ivanich_v_upupe]

lmao imagine wonka doing chocolatic grunts

[@joebolts2934]

1:58, I wonder why they dropped the 3D waves for the source engine? Imagine how cool it would look with the modern textures.

[@fretzil]

maybe ran out of time to do it, or it just didn't work

[@DJ3lectrical]

I’ve always loved the software water. I hope someone makes a WAD pack of animated textures of those ripples so Modders can use them in OpenGL by placing a brush with the textures on ‘em over the actual water.

[@DJ3lectrical]

@@OpposingFork Really?

[@DJ3lectrical]

@@OpposingFork Where can I find this WAD file and what build is it?

[@MadamLava094]

...this explains a lot. The original water looks a lot more like later conventional displacement map shader water that would become popular soon thereafter. Its also amazing to realize Half Life textures in general probably werent designed to be so comically blurry as seen in opengl

[@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413]

thats why noone likes texture smoothing in goldsrc games, its even worse in doom

[@user-k5y8l]

​@@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413i think that's just a gzdoom issue

[@Beansman-gp3ws]

​@@user-k5y8l gzdoom is the most notable example but it just generally looks bad filtered doom 64 looks fine with it though, since the sprites are way higher res

[@eugenebarrett]

@@user-k5y8l more like a graf zahl issue lmao gzdoom can pull off a ridiculously amazing semi-oldschool look (it does have an apparently exclusive renderer that is leagues better than nearly any other out there at emulating the original visuals in high detail), but zahl insists on it having the shittiest defaults you could possibly pick

[@n646n]

texture smoothing just looks right in goldsrc

[@B.M.Skyforest]

Wow software water looked quite good. Almost like it has some refraction.

[@Razorkiller]

Feels like I’m watching 2000’s historical channel. But related to video games related topics such as water. This was a pleasant and a calming experience and I did learn a thing or two.

[@seronymus]

Haha 4:00 my comment just now had a similar thought comparing it to How It's Made

[@ldxlu]

As a kid i always felt some sort of connection to water stuff in video games, wether that be a sea world in Mario or the water in half life. Something just made me feel so intrigued by them that i would stay in the same area for minutes just jumping around in it. Fun stuff, but weird to think now that it comes back to me.

[@Analog-to-digital-cotinual]

The water in gta vice city stood out in my mind as it is very similar to the half life water

[@Ribulose15diphosphat]

One further Detail: The Texture type used fro Water is calle Whorley Noise. It is generated, by colouring pixels depending on the Distance for random placed points first.

[@Dr.W.Krueger]

The 2D implementation of Worley / Cell noise, that is, due to performance. A nice guy btw (Steven Worley), worked with him in the past.

[@HASL96]

The pixelation in water can be a sideeffect from rendering an overlay, and software rendering lacking texture smoothing. Same pixelation effect occurs with fade to black. tested it on map c4a1f when falling down.

[@MysticRixel]

Loved the documentary style. This water with the original shadows seen in the magazines just proves how powerful the Quake/GoldSrc engine was for its time.

[@Infarlock]

Are you still with us Dr Patbytes?

[@stuff31]

I love the software water! I'm just generally a fan of seeing HL1 being presented as it was back in the 90s. I love the 4:3 ratio, and the crunchy pixelated-ness of the game. It makes it feel older, and I think that makes it seem even more impressive when you remember the scope of the game. All this was made in 1998, this is what the guys at Valve were working with. It's crazy what they were able to make with such limited resources.

[@Delamortes]

I always play Half-Life on Software and lowest Resolution , very nostalgic.

[@elimcgamerguy]

coulda told us about the water lol

[@SuperXzm]

I remember switching to software render and notice a lot of changes like vortigaunts having a shinier armor, different particles, blurry vision under water, overall more vibrant colors and of course the water in general. It's like shaders without shaders.

[@MFKitten]

The GL version, up until a few years ago, was unable to render textures that had a resolution that wasn't a factor of two (512x512, 256x256, etc) but a huge amount of textures were actually designed this way. So what the engine did was to stretch those textures to a square with the nearest suitable dimensions, and then it squashed it back down. Due to the filtering, this created a lot of detail loss and smear, which is a big part of the blurry look of the game. As a kid I remember playing it with software rendering before we could afford 3D acceleration. The GL mode always felt like it lacked depth and detail to me, and the blurry smeary look always puzzled me. But the overall sharpness and clarity of the geometry was well worth it at the time. You can play the game without the texture filtering in GL using console commands, and an employee at Valve actually fixed the texture resolution thing so it renders textures without the squash and stretch thing now!

[@hey7514]

Wait all the textures are fixed in Opengl now?

[@MFKitten]

​@@hey7514 Yes. less blur than the original version on a bunch of textures.

[@hey7514]

@@MFKitten cool! Glad Valve are visiting their games to this day and fixing stuff

[@ottergauze]

I honestly just wanted this to be a four second video where you look at water and go "hmm yes this is water"

[@polar-star64]

Fantastic short but sweet video. The calming vibe was really something I needed today, so thank you very much for that. Wonderfully put together ❤

[@NiiRubra]

They both have their pros and cons, also I was thinking of how it reminded me a bit of Source, but then as you said "yeah... maybe not" lol.

[@Netsuko]

The software rendering of the water immediately screams "Unreal" at me. I still remember looking at Unreal1's water and being in awe at how good it looked.

[@Dr.W.Krueger]

With the difference that Unreal always supported texture displacement in software mode as well as all accelerated APIs. The effect is also used on fire / force-field textures.

[@ToothpasteVixen]

Half-Life was based on WinQuake, which contained both the QuakeGL and Software renderers. Most of the development screenshots we have from 1997-98 are taken in OpenGL mode on 3dfx cards. I think it's inaccurate to say that Software mode is the original way that the game looked, given that OpenGL mode was already present from the start of development. By 1997, software renderers were already seen as a bit of a backwards compatibility option for people that hadn't yet got a 3d acceleration card, but in the case of hl1 great care was taken so that people would have a good experience in either mode. The pixelation visible when underwater in software mode is likely a holdover from the old ripple effect in order to reduce the number of pixels that had to be warped, and also occurs when other screenspace effects (like fades) happen in software mode.

[@patbytes]

Thank you very much for this disambiguation and history. Me referring to software mode as the "original" or being "changed" into OpenGL is incorrect, and I have added an addendum to the description. Thanks also for the info on the pixelation - I noticed it specifically during the Xen teleports, but didn't know if I could fit that into the video.

[@Banzeken]

Unless you were playing games with voxel-based 3D graphics in ‘97 to ‘99, then software rendering wasn’t a legacy option. It was a way of life and potentially a laggy one if your CPU wasn’t up to snuff. Time to upgrade to a Pentium II!

[@OmegaRC59]

Very similar to Unreal's water effects, though with the Unreal ones you can actually paint your own effects in it to customize it, and it works in all renderers. Curious that they wouldn't have tried to do the same thing in Half-Life, Unreal's strategy is basically to take the palette and just manipulate texture coordinates using some ASM code on the CPU. I wonder how Half-Life's version of the effect is implemented in comparison

[@Rensence]

Quite interesting, btw I really liked the background music in this music, definitely going into one of my playlists, keep it up!

[@LOLYOU1337]

Hey patbytes, love your videos man! Beautiful voice for commentary and great presentation always 😀

[@christiansmemefactory1513]

where tf you go wtf????

[@Nico-qx1zx]

Yo, can you throw ass?

[@KClO3]

Yo wassup man

[@Admer456]

Omgosh thank you for mentioning my experiment with software-style water rendering!

[@MichelleSleeper]

Is the software water rendering a shader? I'd love to implement something similar to how it looks in another engine like Unity

[@Admer456]

@@MichelleSleeper I keep trying to write a reply but it gets deleted :(

[@Admer456]

@@MichelleSleeper Okay, trying one more time: in short, it's not done via shaders, but on the CPU. I was grabbing an OpenGL texture handle and modifying that texture in real time, about 10 times per second. I did it nearly 5 years ago, so I've no idea where the code went. I only started using Git a year after that Since then, I've done a couple more shader-based experiments which I published on GitHub. One is a standalone OpenGL app playing with the colour palette, and the other implements a pixelated ripple shader in HL SDK A friend of mine also figured out the OG algorithm and is available in, well, essentially a Quake engine fork that mimics GoldSRC These days I'd probably use a compute shader to calculate a UV offset map, mimicking the above algorithm, and use that when rendering water

[@GraveUypo]

it's the software renderer water that's new. the opengl water effect carried over from quake and was the default for both renderers in the original releases of half life.

[@QTwoSix]

Very good video, put together smoothly and flows well. I myself never really paid attention to water, but this is quite interesting.

[@Fregatte86]

Best hl content for years

[@golarac6433]

In software rendering you can do whatever effects you want (as long as it's not too slow of course) so they had some extra distortion effects on water surfaces. When going to 3d API you are limited with what the API provides. Today you can just write a shader and generate everything you want but in DirectX and GL before shaders you were stuck with few hardcoded effects. Best they could do is move around the texture coordinates which creates this distortion effect. And I guess at that point they could also move the vertex position to create the 3d wave effect

[@stargazer162]

The software mode water looks a lot nicer but the waves effect of the OpenGL water kinda makes up for it, allowing for far more interesting scenes that couldn't be possible with the original water. I think the look of the OpenGL water was probably a compromise, maybe it wasn't possible to make the nicer transparent water in OpenGL mode due to hardware limitations of GPUs of that time so they had to settle for something simpler.

[@AnnoyingNoisesProductions]

I want to thank you for this video. I watched this last year and I ended up doing another full playthrough of HL1 because of it (I didn't even know software rending was an option before). I also ended up playing Blue Shift, Opposing force, and Black Mesa for the first time. I feel that HL1 looks way better with sharp, unfiltered textures (and also the cool water effects). It really improved the experience for me, and I enjoyed getting back into Half-Life again.

[@jasperfox6821]

This was really interesting, I never know the water looked alot better in software mode, but while looking worse in OpenGL mode, it had access to wave patterns and stuff. The software water almost looks like source engine water.

[@scantyer]

This is super interesting. I've always thought the water in HL1 looked very goofy and I had no idea it was due to a default setting that i've never ever changed.

[@kinneticsand5787]

Hey man, you still active? Not trying to pressure, I just look forward to new videos if there are any planned. The HL1 videos are super fascinating to me. Keep up the good work

[@VictorCampos87]

1:41 I finally figured out why the oscillating water effect wasn't showing up in Half-Life gameplays here in KZbin.

[@SusietheSkelethor]

i like how i can get entertained by someone like you talking about water in half life, good video!!

[@OddsTheo]

What's that? A new video about a 1998 video game? Hell yeah I'll watch!

[@featherfruit]

i love the pacing of your video here! your speaking voice is great, the video was cool and informative, there wasn't any fluff. all in all just a great vid. i look forward to more!

[@Kythrea]

Only clicked on it because youtube kept recommending me this video for 2 weeks. Actually interesting, good recommendation, cool video.

[@RaposaCadela]

I never knew, omg!! I'd love if we could get both effects working at the same time, I feel like it'd look its best

[@_Fly_trap_]

wonderful video. I had no memory of software water, until I saw it and was hit with nostalgia

[@GlowingOrangeOoze]

Very cool. I enjoy the look of the software renderer in general. Also neat is that I find map loads to be so fast in software rendering mode that they feel more like a small lag spike than a map transition.

[@stryhuns]

thank you! beautiful video and music and water! i want to play with original water now, so beautiful

[@S1nwar]

its insane how good the softwarerender water looked how could they not keep this

[@Tera_GX]

I can't believe I'm just now learning this kind of detail. The way HL1 used its engine is a part of many highlights, but I never once picked up on anything about its software rendering.

[@oliverbertrand]

I wish someone made a video about those little water bug creatures that you specifically find in the track energy room in “on a rail”

[@krazzy6440]

This was so cool. Happy to have discovered the channel!

[@Andres33AU]

Wow, that is a significant difference, and I honestly had no idea that the water was originally meant to look like that. I remember in the Worldcraft editor, trying hard to make the water look more realistic, without tanking my computer, haha. Thanks for the video, I'll watch any interesting tid-bit regarding Half-Life!

[@scotdotwtf]

i LOVE the way software rendering looks. very different.

[@_vh]

i didnt know that software rendered water looked different, ig just bc im used to playing on opengl, but dang this video really does explain some of the games oddities i never really thought about before amazing video as usual, pat ! ^^

[@seronymus]

Nice pun at the end, the tone and context reminded me of "How It's Made" haha. Really nice stuff and so calming and wistful to see classic games explained in detail like this. I hope we can "return to tradition" back to elegant game philosophy like this.

[@mihailos8701]

Thanks for a good video about this, pointing out missing details like that can be important in a long term

[@Kyle-xv5kv]

I remembered the software water because that's how I played it back in the day. Now I can't unsee this.

[@kleadron]

Both quake and half-life seem to halve the pixel resolution when you go underwater to make the wavy effect easier to compute, but I think it's broken in half-life, which is why it only pixelates the screen.

[@themonotonist]

I still always play HL1 in software rendering mode at 1024x768 resolution. It was the way I was first exposed to the game back in the 90s, and honestly I feel like it the art benefits more from crunchy unfiltered pixels than the smooth ones. The water shown in the video here is a great example of this too

[@AlphaEnt2]

I kinda do the same with Quake 2. For as colourful the opengl mode is, there's the "idk what" from software mode that I like, pixelated models, white lights, 4:3 aspect ratio. I eventually reached a middle ground by setting gl_nearest on opengl to make textures pixellated, but quake 2 has some strong texture smoothener that i'm not entirely fan of.

[@purple7filth]

I do the same but at 480 on my crt. Aliasing is noticeable, but not that noticeable & even the HD models look better though software.

[@Zedek]

DooMer here. It took me 0.5 seconds of washed-out, filtered OpenGL mess to back to crunchy pixels.

[@atifarshad7624]

​​@@AlphaEnt2nless you are using a source port like Yamagi, Quake 2 really really suffers from texture resolution getting round-down in gl mode and thus textures looking blurrier/lower res than they are in software renderer even when using gl_nearest. Yamagi fixes this and also even allows colored lighting in software renderer (and likewise also allows to turn off colored lighting for opengl renderers)

[@AlphaEnt2]

@@atifarshad7624 i've been using the official renaster since august, so my previous statement no longer applies on me.

[@williamarthurfenton1496]

I prefer the pixelated look over the blurry hardware filter. It just stands up better these days as far as vintage graphics go, at least for PC and Ps1games. A game like Turok though primarily designed for the ultra-blurriness of n64 dies arguably look better with the filter on.

[@thefatduck5598]

After playing HL for years with texture filtering enabled, disabling it feels like getting a pair of glasses and recognizing that before you had them you were blind.

[@solargoth]

software water would permanently cure you of thirst

[@dominicjackson6122]

I had no clue Half-Life came from Quake. Awesome.

[@Y2F0]

goddamn the music you choose is banger af, great video to!!!

[@matheusgraef]

this video brought back some memories. when i was a kid in early 2000s, i would boot up WON hl1 and just explore the multiplayer maps, admiring the crunchy pixels and what i thought were very pretty graphics at the time. i remember seeing the water waves for the first time when playing sven-coop, thinking it was a brand new feature or something. ever since then i've grown accostumed to the gel-looking openGL water, but the software version has a special place in my heart.

[@huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhn]

nice video my dude, never played half life but I will definitely give the software renderer a shot when I do

[@Qtheman3456]

I could've sworn I'd played through HL1 in Software mode at one point, but man, now I can't help but wonder. I'd expect to have remembered that water effect, damn.

[@RogueAI]

1:09 "in bodies of water it looks OK" It looks like bean soup! 🤣

[@Kidder936]

Did not know I could go back to OG water graphics like this!!!!!!! So coool!!!! Been looking for over a decade!!!!

[@iLikeTheUDK]

Software water looks almost exactly like the water in many Unreal Engine 1 games, funnily enough

[@Bazztoner]

Excellent video! I really like your narrations and examples.

[@item459]

just found ur channel, love the downtempo look at one of my favourite games to study and pick apart, excited to watch more of ur stuff now lol

[@foodforthegods]

Thanks for putting this together! The software render water reminds me a lot of Unreal 1 and UT99's water textures, with the circular ripple and general fidelity.

[@bluustreak6578]

I noticed that when I played HL1 at first, and my computer at the time couldn't run opengl very well, so I played with software rendering and things looked way better. I played the entire game with SW rendering

[@SighFi]

this is so cool whatttt!!! while i think the weird jell-o water definitely has its charm, it's kind of shocking how well the software water holds up. god this game is so cool. also i would like to sip the forbidden xen baked beans water

[@anitabath8315]

Thank you for dropping this vid. I was getting thirsty!

[@a1batross_]

By the way, the algorithm of this water effect is known and was reimplemented it for software renderer in Yamagi Quake 2 fork by me. The only thing is left is to translate the algorithm from pure C to the pixel shader, so it would be possible (and accurate) in GL renderer as well.

[@SirYodaJedi]

Ooh, neat; looking forward to the GL3 port.

[@a1batross_]

@@SirYodaJedi nobody works on it yet :(

[@codiivt]

wake up babe, new patbytes video just dropped

[@Kacpa2]

Combining best of both is the ideal way overall. Other late 90s-2002 3d games used very nice looking texture based water with transparency tok like Warcraft 3 which is an rts so you would thought water doesnt matter much, but they made it nice. It only looks a bit off on big areas without proper variety used between tiles. It started development around 1998/1999 so its in same era graphicly(tho in a bit differenr style, going for more drawn somewhat disney-style textures) I would like to see more of exploration of legacy graphics and tech in games. We had too much time during which people just insulted and mocked og game visuals with childish attitude until people started to appreciate these aesthetics again.

[@John_Smith_Dumfugg]

The pudding water always looked off to me. I mean it's Iconic, but not necessarily in a good way.

[@APopov]

Software water reminds me of Unreal water. And in Unreal, it also works with OpenGL/D3D renderers.

[@EliseyzScripts]

Why was this video so entertaining?!

[@skullthrower8904]

Damn I had no idea software water looked so good, for some reason having that mode selected made my computer crash back then It really looks so good wow Nice video hombre top quality and editing 👍

[@formdusktilldeath]

That software water look exactly like Unreals water...

[@marscaleb]

I find it interesting that they started with the Quake water effect, deliberately changed it, and then when they made the OpenGL rendered, they deliberately added it back in.

[@m.r.mcguire7433]

WATER!! Loved It! TY! Cheers patbytes!!!!

[@hardhat777]

Now that's what I call high quality H2O

[@RarefoilB]

1:48 When I saw the water clipping through geometry in Half-Life, I always interpreted that as the waves splashing water onto the surrounding surfaces. I remember being kinda impressed with that "clearly intentional" detail.😅

[@mondoprime]

Had no idea. That's a really impressive water effect for the time.

[@Decay.Constant]

We miss you patbytes

[@puppable]

I clicked this so so fast I didn't even notice it was one of yours omg!!

[@Sonic_the_kidnapper]

half life/cs 1.6 water is the most nostalgic thing ever

[@therealtony2009]

so weird how they changed the water, very interesting!

[@CrysisFear]

Argued in steam forums. That software renderer was the original look. Got bashed it is a pixelated mess. 3:16 alone proves how its way superior. Its not only sharper but has a way better coloring scheme in general.

[@EvilStevilTheKenevilPEN15]

_Damn_ those software rendered shaders were gorgeous.

[@GwendalLeRoux]

Haha nice video ! If you want answers, you should go back to the roots : Quake 1 engine. You'll see a pattern between the rendering of the water. It would be interesting to see if the implementation of Open GL in Half Life correspond to the open source release of GL Quake

[@Zarnubius]

i KNEW they changed it! I thought I was imagining this but I'm glad to see it wasn't me going crazy. It looked amazing on a TFT laptop screen in 1998

[@zdspider6778]

This was dope. Thanks.

[@nickjohnson410]

This brought me back to the day I first bought and installed HL. Gaming back then was so fun and exciting but looking at it now... those graphics are brutal. It's crazy what a child's imagination can fill in when it wants to.

[@DonkeyDongs9000]

I finally feel like I understand the miiverse "nice water!" guy now

[@deliciouspops]

this has reminded me how much more creative limitations make you

[@havenbastion]

Some things are better left unsaid. This is one of them.

[@deus_nsf]

Yooo!!! You did a video like me! But professional and actually well done! Thanks!