Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

Can this be used as an alternative to Hammer to develop HL maps/mods?

I replayed Half-life 2 recently and was struck, even without high-res texture packs, how amazing the game still looks today.

Did anyone else find the Design Patterns page? It's a score board with a goal at 100%. I love this so much.

> Most Unity games look like very bad, even with fancy shaders, normal mapping and other techniques.

This seems to be an increasingly common point of view among those of a certain age.

It is definitely the case that the art of a certain sort of texture mapping has been lost. The example I go back to is Ikaruga, where the backgrounds are simply way better than they have any right to be, especially a very simple forest effect early on. Some of the PS2 era train simulators also manage this.

The problem is these all fall apart when you have a strong directional light source like the sun pointed at shiny objects, and the player moves around. If you want to do overcast environments with zero dynamic objects though you totally could bypass a lot of modern hacks.

I think this is because of how extremely cleverly they picked the art style for the game. You have a lot of diffuse surfaces for which prebaking the lighting just works. Overcast skies allow for diffuse ambient lighting rather than very directional lights, which force angle-dependent shading and sharp high contrast shadow outlines. And the overwhelming majority of glossy surfaces are not too shiny which also helps out a lot. All of these are believable choices in this run-down, occupied, extremely dystopian world. And the texturing with its muted color palette pulls it all together.