<P> Half - Life 2: Lost Coast opens with the protagonist, Gordon Freeman, finding himself near a group of decaying piers, underneath a monastery set up on rocks and overlooking the small town of St. Olga . A fisherman recognizes Gordon and directs him to the monastery, which the enemy Combine are using as a platform to launch artillery shells filled with headcrabs into the town . The fisherman opens a gate, allowing the player to proceed, and awaits Gordon's return . </P> <P> As Gordon proceeds up the cliffside to the Byzantine Christian monastery, he encounters heavy resistance from Combine soldiers who rappel down the cliff to try to stop him . Gordon fights his way up, enters the church's nave, and disables the artillery launcher . This alerts nearby soldiers, who assault the sanctuary in force, while a Combine attack helicopter arrives to support the soldiers . After defeating the soldiers in the courtyard, Gordon moves to scaffolding over the side of the cliff and destroys the helicopter with RPGs . The helicopter crashes into the scaffolding, freeing up a path to a crude elevator which lowers Gordon back down to the pier . The fisherman congratulates Freeman on his success, invites him to a feast in St. Olga, and the screen fades out . As the level ends, the fisherman exclaims that Gordon is "getting all fuzzy' round the edges". </P> <P> Lost Coast was conceived as a part of the Highway 17 chapter in Half - Life 2 (Highway 17's development name was "Coast", hence the name "Lost Coast"), but was later discarded during development . As a result, Lost Coast features minor storyline details that were removed from Half - Life 2, such as the headcrab artillery launchers . Each area of the level was designed with a specific purpose . An Eastern Orthodox architectural style was deliberately chosen for the monastery, as buildings of this type "are very colorful and have a large variety of materials" and are "often lit naturally, with extremes of darkness and brightness," providing an ideal showcase for the HDR lighting effects . Valve also thought that the use of a monastery would help provide a starker contrast between old human architecture and futuristic Combine technology found within it . The cliffside that leads to the monastery had a gameplay - oriented purpose, and was meant to emulate a similar cliffside combat scene in Half - Life . The cliffside also forces the player to be observant of threats from above and below, breaking from normal horizontal combat . The monastery's courtyard was designed as an area where the player recovers from the cliffside combat, while also presenting a contained combat arena later in the level in which the player must hold their ground while they are attacked from multiple directions . </P> <P> The goal of Lost Coast was to demonstrate the new high - dynamic - range rendering implemented into the Source game engine . Valve first attempted to implement high - dynamic - range rendering in Source in late 2003 . The first method stored textures in RGBA color space, allowing for multisample anti-aliasing and pixel shaders to be used, but this prevented alpha mapping and fog effects from working properly, as well as making textures appear sharp and jagged . The second method involved saving two versions of a texture: one with regular data, and the other with overbrightening data . However, this technique did not allow for multisample anti-aliasing and consumed twice as much video card memory, making it infeasible . The third method, shown at the E3 convention in 2005, used floating point data to define the RGB color space, allowing for reasonably efficient storage of the high - dynamic - range data . However, this method also did not allow for multisample anti-aliasing, and was only compatible with Nvidia video cards, leaving ATI cards unable to run high dynamic range . The fourth and final method compromised between the second and third methods, using overbrightening textures sparingly and allowing ATI cards to render HDR in a different way to the Nvidia ones while nearly producing the same end result . </P>

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