On September 30, 2003 Valve has demonstrated their new DX9 feature of the Source Engine - High Dynamic Range (HDR) support. It was shown as part of ATI demonstration at the Alcatraz prison. But since then HDR technology was never introduced in-game until Half-Life 2: Lost Coast release at September of 2005. On release of Half-Life 2 at 2004, HDR was completely cut from the game. The reason of this remains unknown, but leaked version of the game still has this feature. It is still incomplete, since there is no dynamic exposure and bloom feature is not working properly yet.
You are still able to enable HDR in leaked version of Half-Life 2 by following this instruction:
1. Create .bat file with following line at the root game folder - “hl2.exe -shader stdshader_hdr_dx9”;
2. Launch game, load any map and rebuild cubemaps with “buildcubemaps” command in console;
3. Restart loaded map and enjoy the result.
Important note: not all the maps support this, it may cause engine crash or any other kind of errors.
Also it is possible to make Half-Life 2 Leak skybox textures HDR-capable for better looking result:
1) Make sure your skybox materials (VMT) uses “Sky” shader;
2) Add “$ignorez 1” parameter to each VMT of your skybox materials;
3) Make grayscaled versions with low brightness (better use “curves” for fine tweaking) of your every VTF skybox texture and add them to corresponding alpha channel of the same textures.
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