A Valve engineer fixed 3D lighting so hard he had to tell all the graphics card manufacturers their math was wrong, and the reaction was: 'I hate you'
The PC gaming icon that is Half-Life 2 recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, and Valve pulled out all the stops with a major new update integrating the game with its episodes and adding a commentary track. The studio also released a two-hour documentary about the making of the game and what was going on at Valve during its development, which is absolutely crammed with fascinating digressions about the challenge it set itself. And one of them was lighting.
The development of Half-Life 2 was rooted in what multiple staff describe as «the tech wishlist», which would take six years to fully realise and was absolutely foundational to what Valve wanted to achieve with the game.
"[It] was a main feature that the light felt very, very realistic and intuitive because of the Source engine and the work, the collaboration between artists and engineers," says Half-Life 2's lead artist Viktor Antonov, before introducing our hero. «Ken Birdwell, he was a fan about photography and getting the lighting right.»
Ken Birdwell was one of the earliest hires at Valve (he left the company in 2016) and, like pretty much every Valve employee, wore multiple hats over his time there: But he can fairly be described as an extraordinarily talented computer engineer. The now-defunct Half-Life website had a potted biography of Birdwell that listed some of his projects: «in-circuit emulators (CodeTap), 3D surface reconstruction (Surfgen), 3D prosthetics design tools (Shapemaker), and satellite networking (Microsoft's Broadcast PC). He also wrote one of the first graphical shells for multiplayer online games for Compuserve's Sniper.»
Antonov actually undersells the photography angle. Birdwell worked for TeleCalc (a B2B software company) in the 1980s, and clearly saved up enough cash to pursue his passions after leaving: From 1990-94 he studied painting, photography, and animation at Evergreen State University, and was awarded a Bachelor of the Fine Arts degree. Getting back to Valve and
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