Afterlight — temporal replay playground

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frame —GPU —adapter —

Sequence

Capture

Cadence

Each capture is a separate Half-Life 2 recording with its own colour video, lossless 16-bit depth sidecar, measured phase, and measured field of view. Switching keeps every control below where you left it and resets only the temporal history, so the same settings can be judged against different content. The selection is in the address bar (?seq= and ?cadence=) if you want to come back to one.

View

Live percentages

Whole effect100%

Ambient occlusion Only100%

Reality extension Only100%

One control over how far the effect is allowed to go. It scales transport reach exponentially (50% reaches about 2.8 m, 100% reaches 4 m, 200% reaches 8 m, 400% reaches 32 m) and the ceilings linearly: the positive-fill ceiling, the AO relief budget (half a stop at 100%, one at 200%), and colour transfer. Fill fades out as a surface approaches white, so pushing the control cannot wash out authored highlights, and the sharp contact band never moves. 0-200% is the conservative range — positive energy never exceeds one exposure stop. 200-400% is the dramatic tier: up to two stops of fill and one and a half of AO relief. It exists so there is somewhere to tone down from while grading a look; it is not the recommended default and it has not been through temporal qualification, so expect the underlying gather's instability to be amplified along with everything else.

Protect detected lights100%

Diffuse history85%

Diffuse light stabilization350 ms

Applied light softness100%

Damps both rising and falling diffuse illumination during a pan. History is clipped to the current frame's local radius-32 light field before blending, so stale light cannot paint an unrestricted trail over newly revealed geometry. Applied light softness adds a cheap, post-history depth/normal-aware filter. Its radius grows with the measured light-travel distance: local colour bleed stays tighter while sky/environment fill is broader. The percentage scales that model globally; 0% is the unblurred comparison. Neither control filters sharp AO.

Temporal caveat: this capture has no engine motion vectors. Stationary holds rotate samples and converge at the selected history strength. During depth-detected motion, sharp AO stays current-frame while rising and falling changes in the softened bounce use bounded, neighborhood-clipped same-pixel history. Hard cuts reset both. This is not motion reprojection—production camera-motion history still needs pose, vectors, or qualified flow.

Execution

AO radius model

Maximum AO reach1.00 m

Adaptive mode uses a per-pixel radius of roughly 10% of view depth, capped by the maximum above. Near geometry stays sharp; distant geometry receives broader world-space shading. Every direction reserves taps near 10%, 50%, and 90% of that local radius.

Geometry extension

GTAO quality

Colour is the streamed MP4; shader depth is a synchronized, codec-free 16-bit R2 sidecar (0.46 mm/code over this capture). Release claims still use the canonical RGB24 + colour corpus and its manifest hash.