CS-Nation Valve Trip - 10/4/07

Zips over at CS-Nation recently went on a trip to Valve Headquarters to play the Orange Box games and Left 4 Dead. They have posted the first portion of their previews which included mostly technical information on the engine and some Steam Community bits. Explaining the new "Extended" HDR:

Extended HDR uses full floating-point 32 methods for calculating the HDR. Essentially, in the Orange Box titles it allows for better handling of the particle effects and other minor visual improvements. On particles, there is full feather filtering. This is in contrast to the “Full HDR” setting that only partially feathers the particles and creates a rather abrupt cut-off line where the particle effect meets the rest of the world. The feathering allows for smoother visual transitions for particles.

Mike Booth has confirmed that if you've got the hardware to support it, this Extended HDR will be available in Left 4 Dead. Again from the article, speaking about multicore support:

Their multicore solution will scale dynamically with however many cores you have on your system. The more cores you have, the more Source engine subsystems will be offloaded to these cores. What are these “subsystems” I speak of, you may be wondering. Areas such as the particle simulation, the materials system, and artificial intelligence are just a few of these subsystems that can be offloaded onto other cores for increased performance across the board.

Left 4 Dead will also feature this dynamically scaling multicore support, great news for everybody with dual or quad core systems! Thanks to Mike for providing this information. We can expect CS-Nation's write-up on Left 4 Dead sometime after their Orange Box title reviews, so keep your eyes peeled. We have set up a special page dedicated to World Cyber Games coverage, hopefully more information will come in soon!