Half-Life Trinity Engine Created 12 years ago2011-12-09 11:31:35 UTC by Suparsonik

The Trinity Rendering Engine is a replacement of Half-Life's model renderer and world renderer, it augments original functionalities with new assets, like TGA decals on models and world objects, it allows for advanced lighting effects and fully reflective water, shadow mapping on projective lights. Also supported is the ability to load external textures for existing ones in the game, with unlimited resolution. Model lighting is overall improved and supports light entities in the world that allow for fast, correct per-vertex lighting.
It also allows for more space, some entities can be taken out of the engine's hands and into those of Trinity, allowing for unlimited, fast rendering of props on the client side without filling Half-Life's model cache at all. An advanced particle engine allows for any kind of particle effects with high quality texture support, support for animated textures.
Performance is overall improved on all aspects of the engine, world rendering is faster than previously and the same goes for model rendering. This was done with numerous optimizations to rendering code and the techniques.

A full list of features, detail descriptions and entity entries can be found in the package of the download. The engine was mostly programmed by Andrew "CastleBravo / Highlander" Lucas, but numerous parties were involved. For a complete list of credits, see the description in the files.

Hope you all have fun using it, this is pretty much my parting gift from the modding community to everyone still active and making mods.

Andrew "CastleBravo / Highlander" Lucas.

Download!

Update:
A new version of Trinity got released. It includes some improvements over old code, some new additions and a few bugfixes. For a full list of changes, please see "Changes to v2.0".
Also, don't forget to read the files in order to know how it works. Any bugs you might see, report them to my e-mail address.

https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=ce9cc3fbfe20ab9a&resid=CE9CC3FBFE20AB9A!163&parid=CE9CC3FBFE20AB9A!161

Is this a game mod?

I guess you could say that.

Sounds awesome. ;o
Could do with a demo vid or something though.

You'd have to ask Highlander for that, heh.

Goldsource will never die. It's too simple and fun to mess with.

hmm, is it openGL only?

HLFX allowed dynamic shadows, projected textures, shaders and so on like 5 years ago. But it's cool, maybe this is more optimized because HLFX ran like 30fps as far as I remember.

Bruce can u explain those projected textures and dynamic shadows? Also, pleez explain how you got to learn so much knowledge about GS!?

Also, pleez explain how you got to learn so much knowledge about GS!?

All i can say is Russians.
They have A LOT of resources on their native language web sites, plus its pretty popular there, lots of communities, lots of resources. Most, if not all, dont follow piracy rules, giving them more freedom to do what they want and improve faster.

I know a few people from the days i played CS on IgroNET, there were mappers that were ultra pro, i learned the basics from them.
And than there are people like Skaarj, and others.

Basically, lots of resources, people and freedom.

yea russians are good in modding HL1

Russians lived through wars and other shit they're very strong, talented and determined people. While Americans and others are lazy pussies.

Lol

Truth hurts sometimes, well, usually most the time. =)

I wouldn't say that. Check China.

I managed to get HL1 to run in DX9 without having to even modify my game...

Jest do a simple search for the simple program called GLDirect...

It makes any opengl software/program render in true DX9 instead...

Tried it before, thought could run hl in nvidia 3d, but turned out that i could only see white walls with black sky :D, worked great on quake 2 though

Also imo, opengl is underused nowadays, it has much more potential than dx

I have HD videos of me running Goldsrc mods and games on my youtube channel clearly showing how much better DX9 looks than opengl...

If ya wanna example visit here: http://youtu.be/6MoLJVjOxzU?hd=1

Hmm, only noticed a slight lighting improvement

Hehe...I too at first had tuff times viewing/seeing any diffs between DX9 and opengl but if you watch the video in 1080p HD and pay close attention to details...you can see a slight improvement in lighting and texturing...

Btw did yall know that I can also use the cgshader bloom mod with GLDirect and still get DX9 rendering with that mod running 100% fine? Bet not...but it IS possible...I jest dont feel that it is a need tho...

Rewatched some parts, textures are not blurred like in default mode but looks as if some film grain is applied now to the perceived image

The engine offers some graphical improvements, but it's mostly got utilities that extend engine usage and are meant to make the game faster. A major feature though is the particle engine and the client side entity manager, read up on these in the documentation in the package.

YES RUSSIA STRONG THEY LIVE THROUGH WARS THAT MAKES THEM GOOD MODDERS OH YES YEP INDEED EVERYONE ELSE SUCKS ASS RUSSIANS ROCK OH YEAH AMERICANS ARE THE WORST

Next time, think before you post. That was the dumbest statement I've ever read.

Well I have tried using this rendering mod or w/e and well from what ive expereienced...no blood splatter ingame with it...makes barney's entire body except his face dark as ever and well his face becomes pale as ever...

Besides that nothing really noticeable...

I don't think this engine is meant for use with Low Definition models.

e/ It's a texture flag. Remove the entry from gfx/textures/texture_flags.txt
Then remove the model. He used barney to demonstrate the uses of texture flags.

I jest tried again with HD models...still no blood splatter...and not much else noticeable that you cant get from using GLDirect to run in DX9...

It's not meant to upgrade your normal Half-Life. Most of it's features are meant to be experimented with with your own work you made for it. It has shadows and mirrors. Look at the documentation package that came with it.

This is a pretty slick system. Goldsource finally has those 'pain skin' NPC decals Valve had to cut from HL1, as well as brilliant smokey explosions, nice impact particles, and even still-decent performance while fighting a spawned battalion of HD grunts with a bunch of grenades involved. Which would be enough rendering to choke vanilla HL to death. Not without its bugs, but all in all, a shiny new rendering system that I'd be more than happy to work with if Hammer 3.x wasn't so clunky now that I've tried source mapping. Any chance of getting this stuff into a custom build of Spirit, or should I start learning C++ and do it myself?

Hmm, I'm not sure but I think he actually based the engine off of Spirit's code.

Which version of Spirit?

1.2, I think.

Link no worky.

As posted by KotKillerKot:

"Highlander asked me to post this on some sites:
A new version of Trinity got released. It includes some improvements over old code, some new additions and a few bugfixes. For a full list of changes, please see "Changes to v2.0".
Also, don't forget to read the files in order to know how it works. Any bugs you might see, report them to my e-mail address."

Here's the new link:

Download!

Urby&Archie, is The Core based on the original Goldsrc engine, or are you going to upgrade to something like this?

The Core is based on Spirit.

How do they achieve putting new stuff into the renderer if they don't have the gsrc engine. Do they just strip the rendering part and emulate it themselves or is it just hooked up to the engine to inject those features ? Obviously im not a good coder, but i haz to know !?

Well, if I remember correctly, the source code is included in the download, so if you wanted to, you could take a look at that, see how it works, figure out how to implement it.
Talking to both rufee and Urby.

Bruce is right. We have plenty of genius guys doing some magic with GS.

can u post some screenshoots in the thread?

This may sound crazy but would it be possible to implement dynamic radiosity (aka real-time global illumination)? I have seen it done in old games like Quake 2.

Why do I need to sign in to download? Can someone provide a working direct link?
Edit: just noticed that OP is really old.

You would still have to pre-compute visibility. Even then it's a pretty slim chance it could work on a modern game, because radiosity generation time scales up with geometric complexity.

Even so I dont see the advantage to dynamic radiosity. Most of a scene stays static and unchanging anyway, so it is a ton of extra GPU work for barely any graphical difference.

Deferred rendering provides more bang for the buck.

Like Grim said it doesn't give you much difference, hl would look exactly the same as it did with static lighting at a performance drop.
Does BF3 look good ? Not really and it also sucks all your cpu out.

Thanks for finally posting some media, Highlander. I'm sure you can understand why people were hesitant to bother downloading something based on text alone.
I still think it's pretty pointless and your talents would be better served on a modern engine, but it's pretty cool what you've achieved here. Won't be using it myself, but congrats!

Does BF3 look good ? Not really

I think you played on the wrong settings...

Ultra all the way, but the shadows are horrible in MP atleast.

Most of a scene stays static and unchanging anyway

It's static because static lighting doesn't allow it to be more dynamic.

It's static because static lighting doesn't allow it to be more dynamic.

Here's a question for you then, what would you do with it ?

That's my fucking problem, my friend.

There are multitude of reasons why somebody would use dynamic lighting over static lighting. The problem is whether or not the average half life map would truly make use of it over static lighting to justify it.

That's the problem of the mapper, Mr. Problem.

Well lighting entities is one way i can think this would be useful and even that could be made static. If BF3 is the only game with d.radiosity (correct me if wrong), why isn't it any different from Crysis 2 or some other good looking game?