- Improved look of certain particle systems
- Increased budget of dynamic, shadow casting lights
- Some good emulation of Subsurface Scattering for theire Ice Landscapes in Ep3, or at least an improved lightmapper
- Again, Vastly improved animation system (listen to the commentary mode, thats what they are actually working on)
- Highly improved AI
- More specular shading stuff
- Higher resoluted textures

…to be continued…

The actual problem is, that source engine uses FFP for compatibility, so.. there is not much space for revolutionary improvements.

My personal hope is, that they do build in a photorealistic raytracing mode, so the Yerli broths. from Crytek getting a shock for life.. the programming quality of source is so waaay better than cryengine [imho]. Yerli broths did not deserve anything better.

I would love to see a new engine. Chances are it won’t be OpenGL based, but I’m right there with Zanpa on that one.

As for subjective assesments, I never said that all amateur level designers had reached “Valve quality” in their work. Even so, you’ll find parts of HL2 itself which look bland, underdetailed and certainly below the quality that fan-made singleplayers maps have reached (your own Powerstation 17 for example). It’s ok because in 2004 it still looked better than most of the stuff available.
Minerva does probably reach the Valve bar (episodic, mind you) in terms of visual polish and sound ambience, but is certainly not the closest thing to Valve’s pacing or level layouts. Not to mention the absence of friendly NPCs (key to the HL2 formula) and the narration method chosen.
Minerva is probably a very bad example of what I was trying to say, since it was in the making for an extremely long time compared to how long it lasts. You are right in that sense. It does feel like Valve!

Try to understand my reasoning. While I’ll never claim The Citizen to be “Valve quality” (even though some people say parts of it get close), the fact that Chris Fox and I made that in 7+3 months (of our spare time!! Not our fulltime jobs!!) makes me wonder how many people really work at Valve and what are they really doing for a living.
If you have the luck of enjoying those multiplayer games they’ve been making, then your reasoning is perfectly valid. Unfortunately I’m not that satisfied and feel we could have so much more of the HL2 universe by now. I’m trying to add my grain of salt with what I can do.

By some statistic, in a little over 10 years, Valve itself has developed just over 20 games, all of which were original IP and of remarkable quality. That’s nothing to scoff at.

As far as the claim that amateur level designers have somehow shown that faster development is possible, that is obviously a subjective assessment. In my opinion, the only SP mod that reached the Valve bar was Minerva. This is not a comparison I throw around lightly.

Even then, Minerva represents a single “chapter” at most. There has been no SP mod that has reached Valve quality that is the length of even an Episode, let alone an entire game.

Not that I’m challenging designers to try. Especially if we’re talking about individuals or small teams, there’s an art to distilling the best ideas down to their core essence and eliminating all the fat and filler that plumps up the larger SP mods.

I guess I’m spoiled by the massive unit that Half-life, Opposing Force and Blue-Shift created in a span of 2 and a half years.
I’d take any HL2 singeplayer addon featuring anyone like Barney, a metrocop, a Combine soldier etc over any multiplayer game or remake of one. And we amateur level designers have shown one time too many that there has been plenty of time to do so IMO.

Left 4 Dead. Team Fortress 2. Portal.

There’s your answer. I don’t see how anyone can just gloss those over as minor achievements. While Valve hasn’t been speedy about producing new Half-Life games, they are still releasing roughly one new game a year. That’s rather prolific in an industry where the average development cycle is somewhere around a couple years.

I hope that Episode3 takes time due to perfection. Episode1 was okey, but Episode2 was an awesome game. So hopefully they continue the quality of Episode2. And if Episode3 would be the end of Half-Life, which I don’t think, it has to be silly good. I feel there is much left to explore and do in this universe, with the story, characters and the connections to Portal. Anyway, we will see.

As long as Half-Life is developed through episodes, I prefer the same look. And with this current engine Valve can produce games that will be accessible by everyone and not requiring some monster computer.

* grenade toggle
* melee combat for all weapons (im tired of bringing out the crowbar every time i want to bust open a crate)
* cover system

anyways, that’s just my opinion, and what i HOPE valve is implementing into the source engine and why it’s taking so long

My guess, actually, is that they are trying to align everything around a new Orange Box. Get Portal 2 done, get Episode 3 done – perhaps something else to round out the package – and release a second Orange Box.

As far as a new engine goes, as I said above, if you roll out a new engine you will invariably have bugs with it. Source has had almost five years to evolve into a stable and reliable engine. On top of that, if you’re going to make a brand new engine, you’d have to consider aiming for a much higher visual bar, which would alienate users with lower-end systems who have been faithful to your product and want to know how the story ends. It also likely means remaking all your assets to fit this new visual bar, which is no small task.

There’s also the issue of the consoles. I’m sure it was no small feat to port the Source Engine for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 – and even the latter was less than spectacular. Nevertheless, that code base exists and therefore basing a new product on it would be much less expensive than having to deal with brand new tech.

What’s more likely is a substantial but largely incremental upgrade to the existing engine, much like has been done for Left 4 Dead 2.

I read everyone’s comments, and it did occur to me that such a “new game” might be HL3 rather than Ep3….

Still, whatever, I’ve got a whole load more grey hair since HL2, and a lot less “disposable” income, the idea of having to shell out for an entirely new rig doesn’t fill me with joy….

as a modder, there is nothing I find more frustrating than working with source’s lighting limitations. regular lights are not dynamic, and if you make them dynamic, they don’t “bounce” making them extremely ugly. subtleties of my mod’s story have changed to accommodate this.

brushes are still brushes. models are still models. I hope you see what I mean.

The delay also has a lot to do with the rescession: A lot of people arn’t gonna be able to afford a new computer just to play Episode Three on the new engine (at least not as many as upgraded ‘just’ for HL2 in ’04). IMO they’re waiting until more people have the odd £1000 of disposable money again.

Is Source outdated compared to more modern engines like Unreal Engine 3 and Crytek? Probably. But that’s where skilled art direction comes in. No amount of gigaflops can make up for slipshod art direction. Unreal Tournament 3 proves that time and time again.

However mods like ‘City 17: Episode 1′ show that there is still enough that can be done with the engine.

Personally I think the wait is in part to do with a game larger in size and scope than Episode 1 & 2. In part with some nifty new additions to the source engine. And perhaps something to bundle it with (especially on the console market)