-Runs around the room screaming in excitement-

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

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[mr_lebowski]

1. HOLY BALLS ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?1!!!!?!!!

NO FREAKIN WAY ...

(still not HL3 but I'll take ... anything at this point)

Just watched ... ELI IS ALIVE!?! (either that, or this is in the past).

And boy does the Source Engine look spruced up!!!

I OFFICIALLY CANNOT WAIT!!!!

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

2. Exactly what I thought.

It's not Half-Life 3 but it shows that Valve really does want to do more in that universe. And the Source 2 engine:

[mr_lebowski]

3. See my edit above :) ... (nt)

[mr_lebowski]

4. Now that I think of it ... I hope it's not VR only ... Since I don't have VR ...

But man will this be a boon for the makers of the gear if it IS ... they'll sell literally millions of headsets in the next 4 months.

Including mine lol ...

Edit: Apparently it IS VR only. Oh well ... got a few months to save up lol ...

Also ... "Set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2..."

So it's HL 1.5 w/no word on Eli's Ep. 2 fate.

But hell, Alyx died in that same Episode ... then she didn't. So ...

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

5. Yeah, sadly it's a VR Exclusive

But the good news is that is is possible to get a VR headset for $200 now, and you don't need a supercomputer to use it. There's a few videos out there about how to do VR on a slight budget.

And yeah. I did notice they don't have Robert Guillaume's voice for Eli (Rest in peace, Mr Guillaume) but whomever they did get sounds a lot like him.

And I hear Tony Todd's back as the Vortigaunts, too.

I personally am quite excited that it's a prequel because I really want to know more about the whole story. I hope this fills in some gaps.

[mr_lebowski]

6. Fortunately for me, my computer is pretty capable with a Vega 56 GPU and Xeon i7

It's a first gen i7 from circa 2011 (X-58) but it's 6c/12th and overclocks up to 4.1GHz quite nicely ... it's no 9900x but I won't need that kinda CPU perf for this title ... looking at those graphics, I'm quite sure I can force the bottleneck to GPU, esp. at VR resolutions.

And my refresh is only 75Hz anyways ... wait, that's my monitor. VR pretty sure does, what 30Hz? 60Hz? The trusty ol' i7 has only rarely had an issue pushin 60fps ... and Source has always been mild on CPU in the past ... we'll see about Source 2 though

And yeah, I don't care when it takes place all that much ... it'll just be cool to FINALLY get a new title in HL universe.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

7. That should be powerful enough.

I don't recall what refresh rate the Vive is (the one I have). The Index has a much higher refresh rate (and field of view).

Rise and shine, Mister Freeman.

Rise and...
...shine.

[mr_lebowski]

8. FUUUUUUUUUU I CAN'T WAIT!!!

FYI:

Vive Headset: The Vive headset has a refresh rate of 90 Hz and a 110 degree field of view. The device uses two OLED panels, one per eye, each having a display resolution of 1080×1200 (2160×1200 combined pixels).

So, about 54% the pixels of my current res of 3440x1400 ... I typically get 30-80 fps in newer games on High (Ultra is usually
crushing) ... but that's almost always GPU bound.

Oh well, even at 2160x1200 I can still get rid of CPU bottlenecks (if any) by upping the graphics settings, right!?!

Then again, those new 3700x Ryzen chips are looking REAL nice ... be neat to have an M.2 drive on a native port too ... and PCI-Ex 4.0 instead of 2.0 like I still have!


So wake up Mr. Freeman ... wake up and ... smell the ashes!