Alien Swarm Deferred

Alien Swarm ▶

Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop Alien Swarm Deferred

Alien Swarm Deferred was released in 2012. It's a third-party mod created by Kristjan Skutta a.k.a. Biohazard90. This fork of Alien Swarm has support for deferred lighting and shadows (similar to Xengine). It's among very few Source games that have dynamic shadows not based on projected textures, while still having its source code available to the public. Performance-wise, it is extremely impressive as the mod can support hundreds of dynamic shadows with very little performance impact.

Important:Alien Swarm Deferred's lighting implementation and Xengine's are completely different, for example MSAA is not supported in Black Mesa while in Alien Swarm Deferred it is!, however it is highly recommended that user uses post-processing alternatives such as FXAA instead as deferred lighting/shading in general works better with post-processing anti-aliasing methods.

Warning:Alien swarm deferred's lighting implementation will disable all baked lighting and the world will only receive realtime lighting and shadows!

Note:In Lambda Wars it was changed so that deferred lighting blends with lightmaps instead of disabling them.

Features

New since Alien Swarm:

CSM

Real time deferred shadows and lighting from light_deferred and light_deferred_global entities.

Light cookies

Now light_deferred is capable of projecting textures with cookies.

 Blinn–Phong reflection model

New reflections on Phong materials, somewhat similar to specular from Xengine.

Volumetric lighting

Light_deferred is capable of enabling volumetrics that react to the environment in real time.

Source shader editor

Make and edit shader graphs in real-time, in-engine.

Light editor

Edit your map's light entities dynamically.

Media

Phong reflections

Volumetric lights and god rays

Realtime shadows

Availability/Code usage

• 2014 Lambda Wars (Uses an enhanced version of ASD's deferred lighting implementation.)
• TBA Director's Cut (Initially. Switched to Source 2013 Multiplayer.)
• TBA Portal 2: Desolation (Light editor only, the rendering code for lighting has been rewritten from scratch.)

Bugs

• No hardware filtering support for AMD Radeon

See also

• Engine branches
• Alien Swarm engine branch
• Mapbase
• CSM

External links

• Google Code page
  • Download is currently broken, see GitLab mirror instead.
• GitLab Repository Download Mirror
• 2013MP Port GitHub Repository
• YouTube - Deferred lighting in action.