>>>  I thought all games used per-pixel lighting now?
>>
>> Apparently HL2 doesn't.
> 
> Yes, it does.
> 
>> (They've upgraded the Source engine several times since then, so maybe 
>> it does now. I doubt it.)
> 
> It did from the start, just like pretty much every other game from the 
> last five years.

OK, well... In level one, where you meet Barney and he walks past the 
light fitting, why does the shading follow the polygons in the character 
mesh?

>> Look at the belt. It's circular. Ever tried drawing a circle using 
>> pencil and paper? (Hint: It's physically impossible.)
> 
> Do you seriously believe that the modeling software does not help you 
> place things on a circle?

Maybe it'll draw a perfect circle or even an ellipse for you. But this 
is neither. It's more of a "stadium" shape, following the contours of 
the human hips.

>> And that's just making the outline; next you have to somehow model the 
>> height of the belt, not to mention its thickness.
> 
> Those are fairly trivial operations.

Sure. Drawing hundreds of polygons with perfectly parallel surfaces is 
drop-dead easy.

If they're aligned to the coordinate axies. :-P

>> Impossibility upon impossibility.
> 
> You use that word a lot, but I do not think you know what it means.

I mean "impossible" in the same sense that it's "impossible" to throw a 
dart at dart board and hit a particular atom with the point. Technically 
if you throw the dart there is a finite, non-zero probability of hitting 
that specific atom. But given the radius of such an atom, the 
probability is so utterly minute as to be considered zero for any 
imaginable real-world purpose.

Theoretically, I could type some random numbers into my PC and 
accidentally enter an exact description of this polygon mesh. But what 
are the chances of it happening? Pretty tiny. Much like the probability 
of being able to draw this thing one dot at a time. :-P

>> Also... no triangles. Only quadrilaterals, as far as I can tell.
> 
> Most modelers these days can handle quads, and indeed prefer them over 
> triangles.

That, at least, makes sense. (And quads would seem easier for a human to 
draw...)

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