I don't dare imagine the future

Does anyone remember the very first time they loaded Quake? When your breath was taken away by the fact that you could look up and down? and that enemies were now polygons rather than just sprites? I remember spending a long time with Nile Warp back in Baghdad trying to get the game to run over a network, just to see what the player looked like! Great stuff.

Ofcourse time has changed and nowadays if a game doesn't have ragdoll physics we don't play it!
When I first ran Quake 4 Single Player (I thought I'd finish F.E.A.R. first before playing Quake 4, then after that I'll start CoD II), I thought the gfx weren't that good. But playing the game more and more I'm still firmly convinced that the Doom III engine is the best ever made. Raven have tweaked it a bit more and the game is absolutely amazing! And gory! and just great fun to play!

But then Valve released The Lost Coast HDR tech demo on valve yesterday! I ran the level and man we haven't seen anything yet!! HDR = High Dynamic Range, a way of rendering light so that it can utilise the whole 100% brightness of your monitor. This makes for amazing lighting effects in games, but the one that impressed me most is the "iris effect", which simulates a human eye's reaction to moving from dark to light and vice versa. The first time I walked out of a dark corridor onto the outside in the level I was astonished!
Truth is, games are just going to get better and better and better. And I do believe that one day they will be a totally immersive experience, like that cyberbar in Minority Report. Or something.

Have a look at the snap below, with special attention to the reflection of light on the sand to the right (the sand on the left is the usual rendering we're used to these days, bland eh?). And obviously, it's all in real time.....



Oh and one last (geeky medic) thing, the effect should really be called the "pupil effect", cos it's the pupil that changes size when the environment light changes, not the iris. We all know that :p