Studio Radi-8 HL2 HDR-Bloom FAQ: 2) What are the requirements? 3) How do I install? 4) Is this really HDR? 5) Can I tweak the effect? 6) Any thing else I should know about? 7) Would you like to thank any one? 8) Who is Studio Radi-8?
1) What is this?
This mini-modification of Half-life 2 allows you to play Half-Life 2 singleplayer with an HDR Bloom effect. Simply, it makes the game more pretty.
This mini-modification requires a video card that can use Vertex & Pixel Shader 2.0.
After you've unzipped and read this readme, simply run the installer. It should choose your Steam SourceMods directory as the default installation directory. That is exactly where it should be installed. After installation is completed, restart Steam and it should be listed in the 3rd Party games section. Not too hard eh?
That's a good question. With out getting too technical, the effect itself is processed in a High Dynamic Range before it is Tone-Mapped to the low dynamic range Half-Life 2 and your video card are using. So yes and no ;D.
Yes! Below are the console commands you can use to tweak the effect:
mat_R8Bloom (Default: 1) : 0=Turns the effect off, 1=The default setting, 2=Blurs the Bloom effect a bit more.
mat_R8BloomLvl (Default: 0.55) : This controls the brightness of the bloom.
mat_R8BloomGamma (Default: 0.75) : This controls the overall gamma of the scene while the effect is enabled, lower is brighter, higher is darker.
Well there is one more bonus effect included. mat_R8Illustration which defaults to 0=off. 1 turns on a shader that mimics a cool Photoshop plug-in.
Of course! Valve for providing an awesome game and sdk. Masaki Kawase for his initial work on these effects and others, the guy rocks.
Studio Radi-8 is the team behind Neotokyo --> http://www.neotokyohq.com. Watch this modification - it's going to blow you away.
