The team behind the amazing Black Mesa mod has announced that Black Mesa Xen will come with some new graphical features like Screenspace Fog, Flashlight Dynamic Shadows and Soft Particles.In order to showcase these effects, the team has released some GIFs that you can also find below.
Going into more details, the team has developed for its new Dynamic Lights system and has added a dynamic, very flexible new fog system that replaces Source’s legacy fog. The new “Xog” can be configured on the fly with instant results ingame, it can change over time with I/O, and it can vary in density and color based on height. Best of all, it’s very inexpensive to render, costing about as much performance as a single dynamic light.
Moreover, for Xen, the flashlight will be positioned on the player to look like it is casting from lower on your chest. This creates interesting shadows and adds to the atmosphere in dark environments while still having a usable flashlight.
Last but not least, Soft Particles have been in other Valve games, but for some reason this feature has been broken in Black Mesa, even from its very first mod release. However, Xen will support them, meaning that there won’t be any hard-edged particle clipping this time around.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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