Impact of Corrinne Yu for ND/PS4?

[function]

These comments about Halo 4 are, disturbing.

The art was solid but the tech didn't serve the art. It served itself. The contrast of light and dark - which the art played on - was lost in limited range and a tsunami of bloom.

The tech also took memory away from the sandbox, and from reserves which allowed gameplay and level design to be tweaked, balanced, changed or radically altered throughout testing. That's bad.

I have no idea how much of this - if any - if Ms Yu's fault. But it doesn't seem awful for the thread to be talking about her most recent and by far her biggest game.

 

[Grall]

I have no idea how much of this - if any - if Ms Yu's fault.

Probably nothing at all, since she wasn't an art/game director on the title, yes? She just creates the tech - it's not her responsibility how it is employed. (IE, the Robert Oppenheimer defense... )

 

[Cjail]

@function

They used the tech in the way they felt/thought it was most appropriate.
Whether tech should serve the art, the gameplay, the storytelling or itself it's a debate for another thread IMO.

 

[patsu]

Never thought I'd see the day when Halo 4 turns out to be bad looking.

Sure, there are some issues with stuff like disappearing shadows; but the overall presentation was very good and the art design exceptional. How this all became ugly is beyond my comprehension.

Love has changed.

Blah blah Dogdie blah

 

[Inuhanyou]

Yu isn't just a lightning programmer. She was one of the architects of CUDA if i recall correctly, and a funding member of the Direct 3D research board as well. She's been around for a while, even though she doesn't really look that old.

This is without taking into account her work at NASA as well as her awards due to her research into nuclear energy for the US D.O.E.

 

[SlimJim]

What a fucking mess.

You can't see the art for the mess.

Edit:

Oh, hang on! I think I just saw a graphi ....



... nope. I didn't just see a graphics. I didn't see anything.

The HDR is gone as well, right?

 

[RenegadeRocks]

No, that's what happens when the developer changes and has a different vision of what constitutes good graphics compared to the previous development team.

Each iteration of Halo just got better and better graphically under the hands of Bungie. I personally still think Halo: Reach was the pinnacle of graphics for the series.

Regards,
SB

I don't know what you guys are fighting over but...

^That I totally agree with !


Reach was the best visually. I so wanted it on the ps3 ...IN fact I was looking for similar lighting in Destiny, but apparently they have changed the method. It doesn't "look" the same at least.

 

[Billy Idol]

Never thought I'd see the day when Halo 4 turns out to be bad looking.

Sure, there are some issues with stuff like disappearing shadows; but the overall presentation was very good and the art design exceptional. How this all became ugly is beyond my comprehension.

Agreed!! I can only scratch my head...I was quite amazed by the looks of HALO 4?!? The only thing for me missing, was the spectacular plasma effects...in H4, they were a bit small and not that long lasting...but I can remember the section where you are using the robot thing and it sometimes hit me that the actual scene: robot+ its animation is almost CGI looking...

I liked the plasma effects in Reach, but I really think that H4 looks better overall...but imo, of course.


What I wonder: can a single person have such a big influence in the tec team? I mean...is it even possible to realize if Corinne is at ND or not?

 

[szymku]

Perhaps - she left the cult therefore her work is no good anymore??? Just like Insomniac games aren't good anymore for PS3 cultists?

Or maybe not. But it is the first time I read an opinion that Halo 4 visuals are anything but outstanding.

 

[BoardBonobo]

Never thought I'd see the day when Halo 4 turns out to be bad looking.

Sure, there are some issues with stuff like disappearing shadows; but the overall presentation was very good and the art design exceptional. How this all became ugly is beyond my comprehension.

It's a defence reaction. People feel threatened by change, especially when the change is perceived to give a distinct advantage to something they have a negative emotional attachment to.

It will be interesting to read an interview once she has settled down in ND and commenced work on her projects.

 

[JPT]

Perhaps - she left the cult therefore her work is no good anymore??? Just like Insomniac games aren't good anymore for PS3 cultists?

I think you got it there.

I am sure Corrinne Yu is brilliant, but its not like 343 or MS will go back to C64 gfx because she left. Nor that its guaranteed ND gfx will be noticeable better than with her not being there.

My understanding of the game development business, people move all the time.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

But it is the first time I read an opinion that Halo 4 visuals are anything but outstanding.

It shouldn't be, I and a few others have been saying it ever since Halo 4 launched and we had a chance to play it. Just go into the Halo 4 thread and start reading from when it launched.

Some things are definitely much better. Character models, facial animations, character animations, etc. Some things like lighting, not so much. And some are quite a bit worse like water rendering.

Halo 4 chose different trade-offs, and while I appreciated some of them (everything character related, especial facial animations), the overall impact was less impressive to me than Halo: Reach.

That, of course, has little to do with how brilliant Corrinne Yu is. You'll also note I was one of the first to congratulate ND on a fantastic hire. I've always been a fan of her and her work, and that certainly hasn't changed.

Regards,
SB

 

[TrungGap]

All these talk of Halo not being impressive is just hogwash...okay, so the art direction of Halo might not be everyone's cup of tea, but you can't deny it is technically impressive...especially considering it have support a crystal clear sci-fi look...

I'm sure she will bring technical excellence to ND...though it's not like they are in need of any help. IMO, it's loss for the MS camp.

 

[function]

Perhaps - she left the cult therefore her work is no good anymore??? Just like Insomniac games aren't good anymore for PS3 cultists?

Or maybe not. But it is the first time I read an opinion that Halo 4 visuals are anything but outstanding.

Read the Halo 4 thread. There has been lots of complaining since the game came out.

This is not new. This is not new in the slightest.

 

[Bagel seed]

She worked mostly on character animation and lighting for H4 iirc. I think at least in the former it edges out what I saw in TLoU. I'm sure she'll fit in at ND very well.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

ND is owned by Sony, not sure they really got that possibility

The company couldn't leave but the talent could. Not that there's any evidence to suggest there is anything amiss at Naughty Dog!

In terms of the thread title I think it'll be difficult to detect the impact of Yu joining Naughty Dog given all of their other stellar technology. If she'd joined Zynga, yeah maybe you'd notice.

 

[Kameradschaft]

Great animation system, even if I'm not a huge fan of the animations themselves.

Otherwise, it seems much more a technical sidegrade from Reach than any sort of upgrade.

It's got lots of foreground detail, and shading with respect to baked lightmaps looks really good (at least when conditions aren't changing rapidly).
However.
-Dynamic lighting arguably weakest in the entire series (no spotlights, no specularity, lights tend to be very small)
-Static water surface
-No AO
-No motion blur
-Very aggressive geometric LOD
-Some effects being used to fake detail are questionable, like the smudgy black contour shadows on the ground that fade when you come near
-HDR depth is nowhere near good enough to support what they're trying to do with the lighting. Seeing the bloom clamp left and right in some environments actually helped me to appreciate Halo 3's technical choices.
-Relatively little geometry allocated for far-off backgrounds
-Hardly any chromatic contrast, aside from tron lines

Combined with Halo 4's art style, you get a game which often looks muddy, blown-out, and sometimes excessively JJ Abrams'd.

And even if I did think the graphical decisions resulted in a consistantly amazing-looking (as opposed to occasionally amazing-looking but mostly just okay-looking) game, I wouldn't consider it worth the additional tradeoffs in level design, physics, garbage collection...

When all is said and done, Halo 4 is a really neat demo for some stuff, but overall I don't think it's as gorgeous or technically outstanding as it's made out to be. Bungie's frequent comments about designing the engine to serve the game and nothing else really do hit home with Halo 4.

Add heavily downgraded particle effects and skyboxes. Also is it just me or Halo 4 has less enemies on screen when compared to Halo 3 and Reach?

Meh, she certainly didn't do much for Halo 4, nor did any of the other high priced, over-hyped talent 343 brought in.

We don't know who was responsible for this...maybe it was the MS guys from above pushing 343i to make a better looking game no matter what, the game designers not bitching enough about the limitations that the engine brought to the table or the engineers having a little too much influence on the game the only sure thing is that the Halo 4 engine was one of the many bad decision that were taken by 343i/MS about Halo 4.

The game looked great but I think that Halo 4 is mostly praised because it impresses easily with it's very good (and arguably much better IQ than the previous games) IQ and of course the great art. I really wish that we could see the evolution of Reach's engine with Bungie behind the wheel on Halo 4.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Theoretically, they are lacking facial capture tech as every character's expressions in their games so far were hand animated. Also, there are still just a handful of possible solutions available on the market for modern facial capture and none of them are exceptionally good. Corinne Yu has tweeted before about stuff that seemed to be related to solving raw capture data, so maybe that's one field where they could need her. Especially if ND decided to go far more realistic in their art direction compared to the Uncharted games.

Or maybe it's lighting, lots of room there for innovation as raytraced bounce lighting and real area lights are impossible to do without significant computing power - so there's a lot to do with clever approximations and low level optimizations.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Many of the last generation games on PS3/x360 were about pushing the quality of the graphics and not the scale. For example Last of Us also had less going on compared to Uncharted 3, but at a much higher fidelity...

 

[RudeCurve]

So the big question I have is this. Who's taking over her duties for the next Halo game? Or is the next Halo game going to use a 3rd party engine?

Anyway since we're talking about female game engine programmers, I think Destiny's main engine programmer is also female. So far that game looks pretty sweet.