What is "Use Shaders" option?

[Billcimus]

What exactly does this do?

[Lady Alcina Dimitrescu]

It basically disables or enables shaders for the game.
You can disable or enable them.


Also the Half-Life server owners can turn off the usage of Shaders for players when they connect to their servers.

Since Shaders can be edited to gain advantage over other players.

[Billcimus]

Well, of course toggling shaders, well toggles shaders. The question is what does that mean? Is it stuff like GPU effects such as transparency and that kind of stuff?

[Lady Alcina Dimitrescu]

Originally posted by Billcimus:

Well, of course toggling shaders, well toggles shaders. The question is what does that mean? Is it stuff like GPU effects such as transparency and that kind of stuff?

......

I believe you're inquiring about the general functions of shaders in video games. Shaders primarily handle shadow and lighting manipulation, enabling developers to incorporate various beautiful visual effects such as Bloom, dynamic lighting, colors, and textures. Essentially, shaders serve as a tool for developers and games to manipulate lighting effects, altering their influence on the environment and objects within the game world, such as entities, objects, or buildings..

[Veeanith]

Originally posted by Billcimus:

Well, of course toggling shaders, well toggles shaders. The question is what does that mean? Is it stuff like GPU effects such as transparency and that kind of stuff?

if its for opengl its probably the fancy water shader that makes it have moving ripples/waves, im not sure of what other shaders there are but thats one of the most obvious i know

[Lady Alcina Dimitrescu]

Half-Life 1 uses OpenGL renderer.

There is a way to change the in-game shaders with programs like re-shade.
This option basically prevents that I guess.

Like making some items or some THING whatever they are bright or darker or changes how playermodels look and take advantage from that.

[Gog]

That shader options enables Overbright. Which was most likely already enabled for you.

Off

On

Here is an extreme example of what it fixes on a custom DOD map. Without overbright, the dynamic range of the scene is clamped off, which produces incorrect colors of being "greenish".

For half-life, you'll notice the bright areas on walls from a light source will appear correct.

[Billcimus]

Originally posted by Crafty:

That shader options enables Overbright. Which was most likely already enabled for you.

Off

On

Here is an extreme example of what it fixes on a custom DOD map. Without overbright, the dynamic range of the scene is clamped off, which produces incorrect colors of being "greenish".

For half-life, you'll notice the bright areas on walls from a light source will appear correct.

Was overbright a thing in the original release? I did actually play it all the way through back when it was new, but that was rather a long time ago and there's no way I can remember small stuff like that.

I never kept up with it and the community either, and also frankly I wasn't that impressed with the sequel. It is good - only finished it very recently - but to me it lacks the magic of the first one. Found the vehicle section tedious.

Yea, I did a toggle test and noticed the light sources seemed to just be brighter.

[Touchdown]

Yes, it was in the original. The Steam version of HL1 broke it.

Basically what overbright does is that it allows brightness to go above a certain threshold. You can observe it when there's a bright spot on the floor and you shine a flashlight onto it. Without overbright it might not even do anything. With overbright the spot will become even brighter.

It also affects colored lights and makes them more accurate. I won't pretend to know how it works but you can see it for yourself. A good example is the lobby at the start of the game. Notice how without overbright (shaders off) the blue monitors cast some sort of weird greenish light onto nearby surfaces. But with overbright on it'll be a nice blue glow, as it should be.

[DefectiveByDesign]

Overbright was an effect carried over from Quake, which never worked in OpenGL. Quake2-3 fixed that, but OS and driver updates also broke it. GoldSrc was a custom engine, so IDK how it works, but it obviously was broken over time, and now works again.

Games that were built with it, need it working to look correct. You can play it off, but you're missing the original lighting's art style.
https://www.quaddicted.com/engines/software_vs_glquake#overbright_lighting

[Gog]

Shaders are only enabled in HL1 right now but you can get them working in any other game or mod.

For example, in for Counter-Strike, You have to open up "steamapps\common\Half-Life\cstrike" Then go into the "autoexec.cfg" that is within that cstrike folder.

and simply add the line "sv_allow_shaders 1" without quotations. Then save it.

This will make sure the "sv_allow" command stays enabled allowing you to toggle the overbright shader ingame. This goes for basically all GoldSrc games but HL1. I'm sure they'll adjust it though.

[Gog]

Originally posted by Billcimus:

Was overbright a thing in the original release?

Yeah. Like if you had a 3DFX card I think it was just enabled.

I remember playing HL1 way later and thinking (this doesn't look right) which led me down the rabbit hole of figure out that it was because of overbright.

It makes a difference and sometimes like the screenshot examples I posted, the difference can be huge. It depends on how the mapeditor lit the area.

[TyrannoWright]

It's an "Overbright" option, really, that's controlled with OpenGL shaders since newer hardware no longer support it. Makes for a pseudo-bloom/HDR effect with light surfaces makes the game lighting appear better compared to how dull it can get without it.

[Billcimus]

Originally posted by Crafty:

Originally posted by Billcimus:

Was overbright a thing in the original release?

Yeah. Like if you had a 3DFX card I think it was just enabled.

I remember playing HL1 way later and thinking (this doesn't look right) which led me down the rabbit hole of figure out that it was because of overbright.

It makes a difference and sometimes like the screenshot examples I posted, the difference can be huge. It depends on how the mapeditor lit the area.

Better memory than me. I don't remember if I even had a 3d card at the time or not. Certainly had Vodoo cards at some points. All I remember is having a Voodoo 3, but I'm sure I had an earlier model-- probably a 2 because I first had a PC in 1995 (Pentium 60) and don't remember getting a GPU until a few years later.

[DefectiveByDesign]

You could run overbright on Nvidia and ATI back then too. The problem is that it quit working for whatever reason in new hardware and OS. ATI-AMD had issues with it first, then I think it just quit working for everyone. It wasn't designed for modern shader hardware, so switching it to a shader fixes the problem.