Honestly a surprising change, I feel like the software rendered water looks leagues and miles better than what most of us are familiar with with the OpenGL rendering.

GL water actually always existed. It came about with GLQuake, and Valve minimally changed it. You can find it in the GLQuake source release.

software water is gorgeous. never even knew it was different since ive never thought to actually play HL in software mode

This makes that Xen water make so much more sense, I've always felt it looked like fudge like we suddenly entered some sort of Willie Wonka place. The software-rendered version looks a lot more like water over a very rough, uneven ground.

...this explains a lot. The original water looks a lot more like later conventional displacement map shader water that would become popular soon thereafter. Its also amazing to realize Half Life textures in general probably werent designed to be so comically blurry as seen in opengl

I’ve always loved the software water. I hope someone makes a WAD pack of animated textures of those ripples so Modders can use them in OpenGL by placing a brush with the textures on ‘em over the actual water.

Wow software water looked quite good. Almost like it has some refraction.

The GL version, up until a few years ago, was unable to render textures that had a resolution that wasn't a factor of two (512x512, 256x256, etc) but a huge amount of textures were actually designed this way. So what the engine did was to stretch those textures to a square with the nearest suitable dimensions, and then it squashed it back down. Due to the filtering, this created a lot of detail loss and smear, which is a big part of the blurry look of the game. As a kid I remember playing it with software rendering before we could afford 3D acceleration. The GL mode always felt like it lacked depth and detail to me, and the blurry smeary look always puzzled me. But the overall sharpness and clarity of the geometry was well worth it at the time. You can play the game without the texture filtering in GL using console commands, and an employee at Valve actually fixed the texture resolution thing so it renders textures without the squash and stretch thing now!

The pixelation in water can be a sideeffect from rendering an overlay, and software rendering lacking texture smoothing. Same pixelation effect occurs with fade to black. tested it on map c4a1f when falling down.

Feels like I’m watching 2000’s historical channel. But related to video games related topics such as water. This was a pleasant and a calming experience and I did learn a thing or two.

I always play Half-Life on Software and lowest Resolution , very nostalgic.

This is super interesting. I've always thought the water in HL1 looked very goofy and I had no idea it was due to a default setting that i've never ever changed.

Loved the documentary style. This water with the original shadows seen in the magazines just proves how powerful the Quake/GoldSrc engine was for its time.

As a kid i always felt some sort of connection to water stuff in video games, wether that be a sea world in Mario or the water in half life. Something just made me feel so intrigued by them that i would stay in the same area for minutes just jumping around in it. Fun stuff, but weird to think now that it comes back to me.

This talk about the differences with software and hardware rendering reminded me of how big of a rabbit hole the 3D audio in GoldSrc is, might be a cool topic for another video

One further Detail: The Texture type used fro Water is calle Whorley Noise. It is generated, by colouring pixels depending on the Distance for random placed points first.

They both have their pros and cons, also I was thinking of how it reminded me a bit of Source, but then as you said "yeah... maybe not" lol.

Half-Life was based on WinQuake, which contained both the QuakeGL and Software renderers. Most of the development screenshots we have from 1997-98 are taken in OpenGL mode on 3dfx cards. I think it's inaccurate to say that Software mode is the original way that the game looked, given that OpenGL mode was already present from the start of development. By 1997, software renderers were already seen as a bit of a backwards compatibility option for people that hadn't yet got a 3d acceleration card, but in the case of hl1 great care was taken so that people would have a good experience in either mode. The pixelation visible when underwater in software mode is likely a holdover from the old ripple effect in order to reduce the number of pixels that had to be warped, and also occurs when other screenspace effects (like fades) happen in software mode.

Very similar to Unreal's water effects, though with the Unreal ones you can actually paint your own effects in it to customize it, and it works in all renderers. Curious that they wouldn't have tried to do the same thing in Half-Life, Unreal's strategy is basically to take the palette and just manipulate texture coordinates using some ASM code on the CPU. I wonder how Half-Life's version of the effect is implemented in comparison

I love the software water! I'm just generally a fan of seeing HL1 being presented as it was back in the 90s. I love the 4:3 ratio, and the crunchy pixelated-ness of the game. It makes it feel older, and I think that makes it seem even more impressive when you remember the scope of the game. All this was made in 1998, this is what the guys at Valve were working with. It's crazy what they were able to make with such limited resources.

While the software rendering is no doubt impressive from a technical standpoint, the way the texture is always flickering and static-y looks way more distracting. OpenGL is a lot easier on the eyes with its slow warping of the texture.

Thanks for putting this together! The software render water reminds me a lot of Unreal 1 and UT99's water textures, with the circular ripple and general fidelity.

The software mode water looks a lot nicer but the waves effect of the OpenGL water kinda makes up for it, allowing for far more interesting scenes that couldn't be possible with the original water. I think the look of the OpenGL water was probably a compromise, maybe it wasn't possible to make the nicer transparent water in OpenGL mode due to hardware limitations of GPUs of that time so they had to settle for something simpler.

In software rendering you can do whatever effects you want (as long as it's not too slow of course) so they had some extra distortion effects on water surfaces. When going to 3d API you are limited with what the API provides. Today you can just write a shader and generate everything you want but in DirectX and GL before shaders you were stuck with few hardcoded effects. Best they could do is move around the texture coordinates which creates this distortion effect. And I guess at that point they could also move the vertex position to create the 3d wave effect

The software rendering of the water immediately screams "Unreal" at me. I still remember looking at Unreal1's water and being in awe at how good it looked.

Fantastic short but sweet video. The calming vibe was really something I needed today, so thank you very much for that. Wonderfully put together ❤

Hey patbytes, love your videos man! Beautiful voice for commentary and great presentation always 😀

Quite interesting, btw I really liked the background music in this music, definitely going into one of my playlists, keep it up!

Very good video, put together smoothly and flows well. I myself never really paid attention to water, but this is quite interesting.

I never knew, omg!! I'd love if we could get both effects working at the same time, I feel like it'd look its best

This was really interesting, I never know the water looked alot better in software mode, but while looking worse in OpenGL mode, it had access to wave patterns and stuff. The software water almost looks like source engine water.

just found ur channel, love the downtempo look at one of my favourite games to study and pick apart, excited to watch more of ur stuff now lol

i love the pacing of your video here! your speaking voice is great, the video was cool and informative, there wasn't any fluff. all in all just a great vid. i look forward to more!

I remember switching to software render and notice a lot of changes like vortigaunts having a shinier armor, different particles, blurry vision under water, overall more vibrant colors and of course the water in general. It's like shaders without shaders.

This was so cool. Happy to have discovered the channel!

Both quake and half-life seem to halve the pixel resolution when you go underwater to make the wavy effect easier to compute, but I think it's broken in half-life, which is why it only pixelates the screen.

Excellent video! I really like your narrations and examples.

I remembered the software water because that's how I played it back in the day. Now I can't unsee this.

i like how i can get entertained by someone like you talking about water in half life, good video!!

thank you! beautiful video and music and water! i want to play with original water now, so beautiful

1:41 I finally figured out why the oscillating water effect wasn't showing up in Half-Life gameplays here in KZfaq.

I can't believe I'm just now learning this kind of detail. The way HL1 used its engine is a part of many highlights, but I never once picked up on anything about its software rendering.

What's that? A new video about a 1998 video game? Hell yeah I'll watch!

Only clicked on it because youtube kept recommending me this video for 2 weeks. Actually interesting, good recommendation, cool video.

it's the software renderer water that's new. the opengl water effect carried over from quake and was the default for both renderers in the original releases of half life.

Nice pun at the end, the tone and context reminded me of "How It's Made" haha. Really nice stuff and so calming and wistful to see classic games explained in detail like this. I hope we can "return to tradition" back to elegant game philosophy like this.

wake up babe, new patbytes video just dropped

i didnt know that software rendered water looked different, ig just bc im used to playing on opengl, but dang this video really does explain some of the games oddities i never really thought about before amazing video as usual, pat ! ^^

Omgosh thank you for mentioning my experiment with software-style water rendering!

wonderful video. I had no memory of software water, until I saw it and was hit with nostalgia

Now that's what I call high quality H2O

1:58, I wonder why they dropped the 3D waves for the source engine? Imagine how cool it would look with the modern textures.

i LOVE the way software rendering looks. very different.

nice video my dude, never played half life but I will definitely give the software renderer a shot when I do

Hey man, you still active? Not trying to pressure, I just look forward to new videos if there are any planned. The HL1 videos are super fascinating to me. Keep up the good work

I could've sworn I'd played through HL1 in Software mode at one point, but man, now I can't help but wonder. I'd expect to have remembered that water effect, damn.

Best hl content for years

goddamn the music you choose is banger af, great video to!!!

Wow, that is a significant difference, and I honestly had no idea that the water was originally meant to look like that. I remember in the Worldcraft editor, trying hard to make the water look more realistic, without tanking my computer, haha. Thanks for the video, I'll watch any interesting tid-bit regarding Half-Life!

I want to thank you for this video. I watched this last year and I ended up doing another full playthrough of HL1 because of it (I didn't even know software rending was an option before). I also ended up playing Blue Shift, Opposing force, and Black Mesa for the first time. I feel that HL1 looks way better with sharp, unfiltered textures (and also the cool water effects). It really improved the experience for me, and I enjoyed getting back into Half-Life again.

By the way, the algorithm of this water effect is known and was reimplemented it for software renderer in Yamagi Quake 2 fork by me. The only thing is left is to translate the algorithm from pure C to the pixel shader, so it would be possible (and accurate) in GL renderer as well.

Thank you for dropping this vid. I was getting thirsty!

its insane how good the softwarerender water looked how could they not keep this

I still always play HL1 in software rendering mode at 1024x768 resolution. It was the way I was first exposed to the game back in the 90s, and honestly I feel like it the art benefits more from crunchy unfiltered pixels than the smooth ones. The water shown in the video here is a great example of this too

half life/cs 1.6 water is the most nostalgic thing ever

_Damn_ those software rendered shaders were gorgeous.

I prefer the pixelated look over the blurry hardware filter. It just stands up better these days as far as vintage graphics go, at least for PC and Ps1games. A game like Turok though primarily designed for the ultra-blurriness of n64 dies arguably look better with the filter on.

Damn I had no idea software water looked so good, for some reason having that mode selected made my computer crash back then It really looks so good wow Nice video hombre top quality and editing 👍

This was dope. Thanks.

I clicked this so so fast I didn't even notice it was one of yours omg!!

Why was this video so entertaining?!

so weird how they changed the water, very interesting!

Honestly really cool, and its awesome they returned it in the update!

its 3 am but this is more important than sleep

this has reminded me how much more creative limitations make you

WATER!! Loved It! TY! Cheers patbytes!!!!

this video brought back some memories. when i was a kid in early 2000s, i would boot up WON hl1 and just explore the multiplayer maps, admiring the crunchy pixels and what i thought were very pretty graphics at the time. i remember seeing the water waves for the first time when playing sven-coop, thinking it was a brand new feature or something. ever since then i've grown accostumed to the gel-looking openGL water, but the software version has a special place in my heart.

The pudding water always looked off to me. I mean it's Iconic, but not necessarily in a good way.

software water would permanently cure you of thirst

Good job my boy

this is so cool whatttt!!! while i think the weird jell-o water definitely has its charm, it's kind of shocking how well the software water holds up. god this game is so cool. also i would like to sip the forbidden xen baked beans water

awesome video

Had no idea. That's a really impressive water effect for the time.

Combining best of both is the ideal way overall. Other late 90s-2002 3d games used very nice looking texture based water with transparency tok like Warcraft 3 which is an rts so you would thought water doesnt matter much, but they made it nice. It only looks a bit off on big areas without proper variety used between tiles. It started development around 1998/1999 so its in same era graphicly(tho in a bit differenr style, going for more drawn somewhat disney-style textures) I would like to see more of exploration of legacy graphics and tech in games. We had too much time during which people just insulted and mocked og game visuals with childish attitude until people started to appreciate these aesthetics again.

Very interesting!

I finally feel like I understand the miiverse "nice water!" guy now

Some things are better left unsaid. This is one of them.

I noticed that when I played HL1 at first, and my computer at the time couldn't run opengl very well, so I played with software rendering and things looked way better. I played the entire game with SW rendering

Very interesting video

Waiting for Marphitimus Blackimus to add maybe a bit more icing to this wonderfully baked cake of a video.

I find it interesting that they started with the Quake water effect, deliberately changed it, and then when they made the OpenGL rendered, they deliberately added it back in.

Yooo!!! You did a video like me! But professional and actually well done! Thanks!

3:41 Phew, I thought we were gonna have to cancel you for a moment there :)

i KNEW they changed it! I thought I was imagining this but I'm glad to see it wasn't me going crazy. It looked amazing on a TFT laptop screen in 1998

Xen's water looks like when you look at bacteria under a microscope.

I wish someone made a video about those little water bug creatures that you specifically find in the track energy room in “on a rail”

Holy shit so these were supposed to be like rocks distorted with refraction, not some gooey drops. Looks so good.

This brought me back to the day I first bought and installed HL. Gaming back then was so fun and exciting but looking at it now... those graphics are brutal. It's crazy what a child's imagination can fill in when it wants to.

1:09 "in bodies of water it looks OK" It looks like bean soup! 🤣

The water in half life feels dreamy...like is surrealism...the water looks cartoonish yet it also looks realistic from a 90's viewpoint...