Why the liquids in Half-Life: Alyx look so dang good 

Should have included a texture on the inside bottle bottom

"They also use shaders. Everything does." Second Life is so old it still doesn't utilize them, at least not for creators. But SL is so old at this point.

@@NecrochildK second life needs to move on to 3rd life all ready lol

@@RhizometricReality lol Definitely agree. The engine it's running on is ancient because they want to use their own instead of something like Unity.

@@NecrochildK its a real shame we don't have a SnowCrash style Metaverse, especially with vr.

That's what I like to hear...

Other industry folks thought so too. A whole load of other tech artists tried to recreate the effect in their spare time. For example, this is Ryan Brucks breakdown: mobile.twitter.com/ShaderBits/status/1268968994247249923

?

Learning how games work is a double edged sword. As a dev I can play a game and see how things are working, and defect invisible objects, mistakes, shortcuts etc, but as a player I have to have a split personality to forget everything I know and enjoy someone else's game.

@@Psychol-Snooper Oh yeah, that makes sense. I assume there’s still some enjoyment in going ”Oh, that’s how they did that!” though.

If cats are liquid and liquids are Magic, then cats are Magic!

videogames are magic

Hmm. Fair.

@@thechosenone9361 no, not fair.

@@takahashierik kinda. Half fair.

well THAT'S cool

Doesn't it have some curve to it? I recall hearing something about that in the Alyx Dev Commentary that goes over this particular shader.

i coulda sworn the plane was warping at least a little bit, but I don't have the game so I can't really test it

@@randomcatdude I'd chalk it up to optic illusion. Like when you hold a pencil by the end and wiggle it, it kinda looks like the pencil is actually wobbling.

@@FarhadHakimov There is some distortion, using sine waves. Mentioned in the Alyx Dev Commentary.

I would be so sad if I ended up not liking it then, I want to appreciate their hard work

Forbidden drink

Fallout 76 did something like that didnt they?

Yeah but who would find the perfect gamer liquid? We'd need someone to figure that out. Someone to... Unravel the secret of the perfect gamer liquid... If only

@@chocolatemetalmilk2685 His journey was long, let him rest now.

Did a lot of both offline and real-time graphics, can confirm. Dude really squeezed amazing bang-for-the-buck from this, it looks great AND it also performs well, as it must, it (still) being a minor element in a VR game. It's like figuring out how to make a sportscar that is at least 90% as good as the highest end brands, but costing only $100 to construct. I love it.

@@TehBurek This is the one thing I feel the video should have focused on. It being a shader means that there is pretty much _no_ performance impact. If it were an actual liquid simulation that looks this good, performance would drop to around 0.01 fps

I found the smart people comments.

Yeah. Its like when children finally understand that glass is not blue

Of course a painter has to purely put it down, whereas a 3D artist, can pull from a lot of 3D aspects in the world, and abuse and iterate on them.

@@JohnGottschalk I can conceptualize accurately painting a glass of water. I've painted glass before; it's a simple but challenging exercise in noticing every shadow and reflection. All this math wizardry just scrambles my brains.

i remember hearing that a lot of artists would basically paint glasses and jars and stuff like that as kind of a way to show off that they were just really good

It's always so wild to remember that for many years the knowledge of how to draw 'accurately' like was literally unknown. Like there were points where nobody knew how to draw things in persepective. Not just that kids didn't get it, but NOBODY knew, always messes me up

I would love to get more into that too! - Simone

I love it when the need for a simpler solution creates a better one in the end. I don‘t think CFD could look this good in a game even with infinite computing power.

The reason these types of solutions are necessary goes beyond the fact that we don't have a general solution to the navier-stokes equation. The real limiting factor is processing power. You gotta remember games target 30/60 fps, and in each frame all of the game logic needs to be processed (ok not really ALL of it but that's irrelevant). Something like simulating every particle will never be possible in a video game. The reason being those kinds of simulations take more than 1/60th of a second to process. A lot of people don't really realize it but this kind of "algorithmic complexity" is a huge part of Computer Science. Algorithms that are too complex (or in other words take up too much time) are not very practical at a large scale. That's actually how cryptography works in CS. There are algorithms that can defeat different forms of cyrptography, but they can take hundreds of years to actually finish processing and therefore aren't practical.

Check out how Abzu animated all of the game's fish! It's done entirely with shaders

​@nawdawg4300 a general solution would help immensely because you can downscale simulations based on particle resolution and have them still be accurate looking, with the general equation

Especially game development. "There was this complex problem that we couldn't really solve within our time/processing power requirements, so we built this terrible hack from chewing gum, shoestrings and particle effects. And hey, it passes casual observation!"

Far more interesting is the Presidential Metro Train in Fallout 3’s Broken Steel DLC. It turns out it was easier to make the train car a piece of head armor and slap it onto an NPC than it was to make a working vehicle. The NPC (with train hat) can be spawned wherever it needs to be. All you see is the train car on the tracks, but under the surface is a person with a train on her head. There’s another trick when you actually board the train, and it’s almost as weird. Again, there aren’t physics for making a train car move in the Gamebryo engine, so you’re not actually on the train. Instead, the player is equipped with a piece of head armor that covers the field of view and looks like the inside of a train. Then a camera animation is played that makes it look like you’re on a moving train, but you really just have a helmet on

@@TigreXspalterLP I mean, that doesn't surprise me as much as it should. Bethesdas engine is so dated and janky, it's as if the whole thing is held together with prayers and Dev tears at this point.

@@davescott7680 prayers and dev tears lmaooo

@@granite_planet I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Im afraid not especially game development. Something you realise as a software dev is that the entire world is held together with string and duct tape and people that dont really know what they're doing, but know enough to make something work...most of the time...for now. That hacky gum and shoestrings (but probably not particle systems) are behind the worlds major banking and government systems as well, but they work...most of the time...for now

so much of graphics is lying about things that you think would be easy to represent and actually calculating things you think would be too much to deal with. learning how computers draw things is an inherently comedic endeavor.

I feel so called out lmao I was just thinking I'm glad I chose computer science as a career path, I'm only starting out but making video games is so cool man

I love how she just demonstrated his work as well in that you can just make a black wine bottle and say it's wine but shining a light through it makes it red wine

killed me too

Im pretty sure its green

Look! *smash* Isn’t that… odd? Red wine… isn't red… at all! It's sort of… brown… brown and blue! I never noticed that… What are you staring at? Haven't you ever seen an ACCIDENT BEFORE? you’re fucking right I made a Leonard Bernstein reference in this comments section for a video about graphics programming

She does not drink... Vine...

Oops all bangers, indeed

Rightly so, it may be a small detail but it's one that I and many others not only noticed but took the time to stop and play around with.

Oh trust me, it's not just this one video. He's been noticed since that patch was applied to HL:A

@@hundvd_7 yep. Guys are just stuck on mainstream outlets to know otherwise.

I understand what they're talking about, and as someone currently studying this I wish they'd gone into more technical detail, but even I ended up just watching the liquid move around in the bottles like 👁👄👁

@@notAshildr Apparently there's more info about this liquid shader if you listen to the Alyx Dev Commentary

@@zeikjt I'll try to find that :) Thanks for letting me know

Basically the regular approach to make wine bottle was to create 2 objects, the bottle with glass shader/material and then copy the bottle shape, make it smaller and cut the top to make the wine, and put in wine shader/material. But then animating the wine realistically would require Disney/Pixar unlimited resource, computing power and thousands of hours rendering to create, unfeasible for any real time rendering. That a single man managed to bypass all that and create 1 unique shader for 1 object is just pure revelation.

"research"

@polygon bring back video game theatre

Exactly, if you look at other VR games and how heavy they are to run HL:A is a miracle

@@ivyssauro123 yeah, lighting and animations are better than most modern games, but at 90fps on a gtx 1060 on 2 2k screens lol, and it even looks good at low settings..

Look up GDC talks. It's basically developers explaining how tech like this works, except an hour long.

To be honest, if you wanna get into the technical stuff, you should get into making it. There are plenty of Unreal and Unity shader tutorials out there.

Thank you so much! I was just completely starry-eyed when he was explaining it to me and I'm glad his cleverness comes through! - Simone

Was literally just scrolling through the comments to make sure nobody else had said it. But damn. And it goes with the red/black wine too!

to be fair, even a brand new, but average gaming pc will have trouble running it. ALYX will probably be playable by most people in 5-10 years

@@veno_net Are you kidding? Even mid-end PCs can run it amazingly well. You don't NEED to run it on Ultra--I'm literally unsure what it even adds. Running it on Low is still wonderful, and High is pretty much good enough for anyone and millions of people have the GPU power to do that.

@@Demmrir Average PC user doesn't have a mid-range, it has a low-range. Mid-range is in relation to available tech not in relation to population.

@@ardenorcrush649 I'd say a 1060 is pretty mid-range by now. Yet it runs Alyx flawlessly.

She has what that game top ten channel doesnt. And i think you described it perfectly. She really seems like she cares, not like she is acting.

Right!

Sounds like life goals added to the list

in a way i don't understand

The one and only game that's pushing me towards buying a VR headset

Get around to buy the 1000 dollar index first lol

@@butifarras 200 $ Lenovo WMD headset here on a 1060 , no probs

@@butifarras bought my rift CV1 for 300$ used and it's been treating me so fucking well. you dont need an index.

@@butifarras you can get a Oculus Quest 2 for 300. Plus 30-40 Euro link cable and boom.

From what I've read I think it's a blurred sine wave based with an amplitude based on an agitation value.

Ay, glad you found it useful!!

for all you thirsty bois

Always has been.

selling gamer girl bath water extract 20k

i'd drink alyx's bath water