IMPORTANT: I have found that this mod uses a LOT of work by someone called 'SEV' - please go and check out their channel at: www.youtube.com/@I_SEV_I These shaders also are not related to the original E3 stencil shadows, they are a different shader added in and not related to the original Bungie stencil engine.
thanks for the update about SEV. Although he was credited in the mod since the beggining, apparently a lot of people missed the mention or were confused as to who/what SEV was. The current mod description also has a link ot both his channel and his github page
Apart from the obvious visual anomalies, this looks really, really good. Looks more like an early 360 launch title as it should have been to begin with.
@@charlesmaclellan8124You don't have to worry about expressing disappointment with the Bungie games, no one would fault you for it. Bungie themselves were critical with what they weren't able to do in their games, why should the fans act like it's all perfect regardless?
The game was originaly supposed to release in fall 2003 but they found out in june after e3 that the gamengine they had been working on for 1 and half year woudnt work on the original xbox. In a miraculous move they managed to convince the microsoft executives to push the release to 2004, they had little amount of time to recreate the game from scratch and the lighting system was downgraded heavily.
@raulion97 while that's true, i watched the DVD when it came out....how can they work on an engine for a year and half and not realise it wasn't possible to squeeze it all in!!! That was a COLASSAL oversight!
Even though the shadows themselves look extremely flat, the biggest benefit is how it brings out the normal maps and makes them pop. So much more detail and color under the dynamic lights that instantly improves the look of the game
Modders save the day once again, this is such an important game to me but inevitably it looked a lot less cohesive than CE due to its rush. So nice to see such a big step towards reintroducing a semblance of what it was "meant to be" so to speak
Tbh im gonna work a lot more on Delta Halo cuz i didn't like the way it looks that much. Im gonna see if i can fill the rest of the map with dynamic lights that dont cast any shadows so i can partially solve the light pop in problem
Good luck with that. I'd personally prefer no shadows at all then distracting pop-in. But it's a shame Halo 2 was rushed and they had to scrap parts of their engine mid dev cycle. Game looks so flat
Honestly you're already doing an amazing job. The game wasn't built for these lights so bugs are bound to happen, the fact that it runs at all and does end up looking so much better is a miracle. Glad you're still working on it though, if you need any help hmu.
@@gonnsolo8506 Well the game _was_ built for them, the hardware of the original Xbox wasn't, and the engine had trouble handling the shadows mostly due to the hardware limitations
It looks very promising, but if I'm being honest, it needs more indirect lighting for areas that aren't directly lit by the sun, indirectly lit areas still look very flat. But I know this is still very work in progress of course. This is a game that would GREATLY benefit from a path tracing mod.
I believe Halo 2 on the original Xbox could have handled real-time shadow maps like in this mod, with some compromises. Sudeki and Far Cry: Instincts on Xbox both use shadow mapping on a similar scale to this mod (i.e. environments and objects/characters cast shadows, with projection onto other objects and self-shadowing), but with a reduced resolution on the shadows maps and a limited distance at which shadow maps are visible. They used shadow mapping because stencil shadows can only cast shadows from polygons (and performance gets worse with more polygons, not to mention when tessellation is involved), not from alpha/transparent textures needed for things like vegetation (grass, plants, tree leaves), hair and chain-link fences (etc.). Of course, it worked for these games but it’s very possible Bungie didn’t think doing it in Halo 2 was worth the extra slow-down, especially considering the large-scale vehicle and infantry battles found within.
No it couldn't, Halo2 was already pushing the original Xbox to its limits as it was, that's why they had to cut so many features just so it could run stable at all. Trying to add any kind of dynamic lighting would have had it running as a slideshow at best, constant crashing at worst. Even if they could somehow have gotten it to work it would have almost certainly required major sacrifices elsewhere that they weren't willing to make, they already had to make major cuts to encounters throughout the game as it was and didn't want to have to cut down even further.
@@Joe-xq3zu Not to mention that Far Cry Instincts already ran poorly in the OG Xbox, with noticeable performance drops at many points during the game, not to mention the multitude of visual bugs present throughout, even when the game was ported to the Xbox 360 later down the line.
@@Joe-xq3zu There already exists real-time shadow mapping in Halo 2, it’s just relegated to cutscenes and the occasional light spot in some levels, so it’s certainly possible to extend its usage. If Trespasser (1998) could have shadow maps casting from *every* object (like plants/bushes/trees, rocks, enemies, physics objects etc.) in a scene at run-time (no baking), then I’m sure Halo 2 could have managed it too, especially considering static geometry doesn’t have to be updated for each frame (outside of dynamic lights like muzzle flashes or explosions). I don’t doubt that time constraints played a role in Bungie excluding or cutting the feature, but it would certainly have been technically possible (with slow-down, of course).
@@Th3_L30n It’s still perfectly playable. Every late-gen Xbox game had to make some sort of visual and/or performance sacrifice in order to accommodate more advanced lighting or multi-texturing effects.
I mean wow what a difference. I cant wait for this mod to develop further in the coming years. When its consistent and refined its goong to absolutely transform this game to where it was always meant to be
I love the work the lighting does on the weapons, especially the magnum the lighting is usually a lot more flat so it just feels like a generic pistol. The lighting actually makes it look like the magnum and brings out all those details
It's crazy to see how the environments were obviously designed for this in the first place. The interiors look beautiful with the shadows draping over them
Honestly, i'd love to make a mod for h2 that RUNS on the ORIGINAL xbox and has improved lighting. Obv would take up extra space, but i'd LOVE that project -- just to show what is possible in h2, without any extra tech, but just extra time.
17:00 - They EASILY could have imported the baked lighting hybrid system from hce / other games and baked most of those shadows/lights and added minor shadow calculation.... But they ran out of time and had to cut it.
I'd like to see visuals on the High Charity and the later levels to compare... The light effects from the Elite armor interacting with the shadows is someting that is truly special.
13:53 - I feel they could have done a lot of tricks for lighting and just ran out of time. They had space they could have used on the disc to "bake" lightmaps and various other techniques, as well as adding "faked" shadows to everything, but they just ran out of time once they got the game populated and ran into performance issues.
They attempted to use stencil shadows (which are very detailed dynamic shadows) but the Xbox just wasnt powerful enough to run them with a playable framerate, so they got rid of dynamic shadows entirely
How would this mod work with other mods, such as Halo 2 Uncut? I assume these edits are made on the levels themselves, thus modders would have to use these map files, correct? Because I hope this mod gets to be an "standard" across other mods.
@@limoneadeGlass yeah the edits are made to the maps themselves as these light placements literally dont exist in the vanilla game (the tags do, but are mostly unused). Every modder that wanted to use this kind of lighting would need to go through the process of lighting the maps for their mods from scratch. This lighting can work on H2 Uncut, sure, but VKMT or Vengaful Vadam would need to add all of these lights by themselves
I really wish Bungie was given another six months or a year to finish and polish Halo 2. The game is fantastic but it really could have been so much greater than it is.
IMHO, my biggest complaint is the lighting on surfaces at times feels too bright -- eg: the walls look pure bright yellow vs having more specular limits, and adding in stone details. Could be because of missing lightmap/detail textures -- or less info in them vs later titles. But if you could fix this with basic shader changes to limit the max brightness, this would look SO MUCH better.
I think the mod is great so far with where it's going but I have some issues. - No matter where you are, indoors or outdoors, you will always have a shadow, sometimes 2 which outside doesn't make sense, or next to a window peering into space. - If there are too many light sources, say you're looking outside but in your field of vision are maybe 2 or 3 lamps that also cast shadows, it hinders the performance significantly, dropping my frames way down to the 30s. - There are some parts on a few levels, most notably thr first, that are both way too bright and too saturated from either lighting or bloom.
I always thought halo 2 looked like ass when I played it on the mcc and now I see that the game was missing the proper implementation of a feature it relied on heavily to bring a lot of texture and depth to the game because I always thought it looked flat but ti looks beautiful here.
The xenoanthropology of those ruins are a lot more interesting than the lighting but they're not so alien. Sadly, lots of it had to be damaged or destroyed in the fighting.
I really wish the mods could be like Left 4 dead where its a list of what you want in the campaign, guns for example would be cool or just let me play with what modders made in others playspaces instead of hey modder this modder made that can you input this into yours, getting the BR demo version in one sucked its cool but i prefer the og so if i could play with the toys in this campaign but take out things while playing if you know what i mean o god
