Valve delivers more insight into the graphics of Left 4 Dead.
When it comes to perfect pop-culture storms, Left 4 Dead is it for me. My favourite musician, Mike Patton, is responsible for sounds of the infected, while two of the greatest games writers of all time, Chet and Erik from Old Man Murray, are also on the team. The gameplay even reminds me of the frenetic shooting that made Serious Sam awesome. It’s an all-around wondrous bit of fun.
It also continues Valve’s trend from Team Fortress 2 of pushing for highly stylised graphics rather than photorealism. Valve does the graphics so well that you don’t notice most of the tricks employed to make the game fun. Thankfully, more of Left 4 Dead’s little graphical tricks are explained in a wonderfully clear way by Valve artist Rany Lundeen in a blog post focusing on lighting.
This follows up his post from November which talked about the various shader effects used to give the game a filmic style. This time, the article is all about the small things they do to make the environments enhance gameplay. It shows deep design savvy, with most of the effects stuff you wouldn’t even be cognisant of while playing the game – yet, after reading the article, things like background fog just make so much more sense.
I really wish more developers could explain the hows and whys of their shader porn. Considering the sheer amount of money forked out for graphics cards, it is always nice to know exactly what they are being used for.
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