The Halo 2 E3 2003 demo has officially been released as a playable level for Halo: The Master Chief Collection by the Digsite team!
Earth Will Never Be The Same
Revisit the debut prototype of Halo 2 in this restoration of the notorious "Earth City" demonstration, initially unveiled at the Xbox press conference during E3 2003.
For the first time ever, take it to the streets, your way, with support for cooperative action, optional navigation points to rehearse the exact demo path and an included 'Playground' version of the level, allowing free roam of the city.
This release represents an effort to rebuild content originally designed for a different functioning game engine, the first campaign collaboration between Digsite and Halo Studios.
Several elements are updated to accommodate differences in Halo: The Master Chief Collection, however some inconsistencies will exist. Your play experience may vary.
Download here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3360515088
November 16th marks the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2. Back in 2004, Half-Life 2 left an unforgettable mark on a generation of gamers. Learn more about the development team at Orbifold Studios and their challenging journey to bring full ray tracing, remastered assets, and DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction to one of the greatest games of all time.
- Added HDR output (scRGB 16bit) (improved tonemapping, reworked all post processing effects)
- Increased buffers quality in SDR and HDR, reducing banding all around
- Improved the quality of dynamic shadow, especially from up close (they had broken filtering that causes them to be blocky) (the maximum shadow render distance is also increased through configs)
- Added a more modern Ambient Occlusion solution (GTAO) (the original AO is also improved in quality)
- Improved Screen Space Reflections (they are not cropped close to the camera anymore, they now get progressively more diffuse with distance, they blend in and out of view more nicely etc etc, their math in general has been refactored for much better looking and more "physically accurate" results)
- Added DLAA+DLSS Super Resolution (on Nvidia GPUs) (OptiScaler can be used to inject FSR 3) (this looks drastically better than the native TAA and has no noticeable ghosting)
- Added RCAS sharpening after TAA (replacing the original basic sharpening implementation, making it look a lot more natural)
- Added Perspective Correction (optional) (a modern type of "lens distortion" that makes the rendering projection look natural)
- Improved all of the native Anti Aliasing implementations (e.g. SMAA/TAA)
- Improved Anisotropic Filtering (it was not set to 16x on all textures that would benefit from it)
- Improved quality and look of the Sun, Sun Shaft effects and Lens "Optics" effects (e.g. lens flare)
- Improved Motion Blur quality and fixes multiple issues with its motion vectors
- Improved Bloom quality and fixes multiple issues with its generation (e.g. it was trailing at the edge of the screen)
- Improved Ultrawide Aspect Ratio support (Bloom, AO, SSR, Sun Shafts, Lens Optics, Lens Distortion etc did not scale properly with it, e.g. causing the sun to be huge in UW or causing bloom to be stretched, chromatic aberration was stretched in UW) (the game now also exposes the vertical FOV instead of the horizontal one, which was limited to 120 and not ultrawide friendly)
- Improved High Resolution support (the game was mostly developed for 1080p resolution, a multitude of effects did not scale properly to 4k, like the objects highlights overlay, or stars/sun sprites)
- Improved Dynamic Resolution Scaling support (Film Grain, Bloom, TAA, AO, SSR, Sun Shafts, Lens Optics and many other effects did not scale properly with it, causing visible changes in the image when the resolution changed, and its upscaling implementation just did not look very nice)
- Improved High Frame Rate support by unlocking the frame rate beyond 144 (you can change the limit in the menu now) (with DRS you can easily reach 240FPS now, thanks to tweaked settings that made it more stable)
- Improved Swapchain flip model (more responsive for VRR)
- More (e.g. added optional HDR post process filter on pre-rendered video, added settings to turn off Vignette or Camera Motion Blur)!