Half-Life 2 Source Engine Demo

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PC.IGN have thrown up their impressions of Valve's Half-Life 2 Source Engine Demo from this years GDC!

The demonstration was split into several parts, highlighting the renderer, physics, AI, character expression/emotion, sound and multiplayer features of the Source engine, as well as highlighting some of the built-in world creation tools available to developers.

The renderer portion started with a demo of an outdoor area which showed some of the various graphical aspects of the engine, such as bump-mapping, sub-divided surfaces and light blooming. We also got another glimpse of the materials demo from last year's E3 where Gordon walks through a hallway of various hanging materials such as stone, water, stained glass and a security monitor complete with the ominous-looking G-Man. Kevin also showed off that these materials could be used on a variety of different skins, and showed us a model of a human done in all water textures standing in lapping flames. Although we saw this last year, it was still impressive to see again today, and the Source engine is still impressive graphically.

Half-Life 2 Source Engine Demo