Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2011]

[AlNom]

Yeah, the two spots where the jaggies are most obvious are next to his arm and a bit further to the right where the sunlight mixes up with the baked shadow. These are actually the top edges to the stairs, mind you, so we can thank the abrupt change in geometry positioning (bottom floor is under shadow, top of the step is in light) responsible for the more noticeable aliasing.

You can also see the disconnect between the parallax map beside his elbow and the concrete ledge. I guess there's not too much they can do there without even more work. I mean, it's obviously not connected right.

 

[tuna]

What's there to elaborate on freeing up an extra 17ms isn't exactly easy; you're either going to give up resolution or shaders. Art goes a long way to hiding technical deficiencies that would have made 60fps possible, but I don't get the impression the studio had a huge budget either. *shrug*

Well, do you want to make a racer that looks good in screenshots, or a racer that feels great and look good when playing? The Shift 2 developers obviously choose the former, but it would have been nice to know why. And if they give retarded answers like Incomniac for R&C: All 4 One, "It looks better!", then you know to stay away from the game.

 

[Nesh]

You may well get away with it in motion or during intense actions but in still shots the aliasing can be quite visible, of course not to take away from the otherwise beautiful look for the rest of the package.

My friend brought his 360 to try the beta on my 42'' TV and I must say I am quite surprised by the image quality.
Usually when I play games on a large TV the lack of AA stand out a lot, but in this one, I forgot all the time that there was no AA. The overal image quality is very smooth looking especially in motion. It manages to hide it well

 

[ultragpu]

Yeah, the two spots where the jaggies are most obvious are next to his arm and a bit further to the right where the sunlight mixes up with the baked shadow. These are actually the top edges to the stairs, mind you, so we can thank the abrupt change in geometry positioning (bottom floor is under shadow, top of the step is in light) responsible for the more noticeable aliasing.

You can also see the disconnect between the parallax map beside his elbow and the concrete ledge. I guess there's not too much they can do there without even more work. I mean, it's obviously not connected right.

So the more geometry on screen the more aliasing it'll show, it's a bit like a double edged sword isn't it? Well I'm not too fuss with AA to start with so as long as it's 1280 x 720 it's all good.

 

[Ruskie]

I've got to say,with or without AA,Gears 3 seems much cleaner than say L.A Noire on 360 even though later has 2xMSAA.

And I think Grandmasters comment about IQ is more than just resolution...Textures work is awesome,even though lots of games cut a bit on that part in MP.There is healthy amount of AF and smoke and particles are much cleaner than majority of other games.Account in the fact that artistically it hides aliasing very well and you get the game with great IQ.Sure it would be better with AA,but honestly,I would pick Gears 3 IQ over lots of 720p games with hardware AA.

 

[assurdum]

I don't understood why the conversations derails everytime in what is better from me than talking of tech...

 

[AlNom]

Well, yes, it'd be nice to just get back to discussing the tech mentioned in the DF articles rather than focusing on the additional opinionated comments that fill out the rest. The comments section of Eurogamer pretty much cover the article feedback and arguments over what one considers "best" or "excellent". Crying about why one piece of tech gets hammered more than another is irrelevant. This is supposed to simply be a tech discussion forum. The platform wars should be left in the diapers.

 

[Billy Idol]

So, can someone explain how art can help hide aliasing issues?

I understand that muted color schemes help a lot, due to the low contrast.

Is there something else that art people can do to surpress aliasing perception?

 

[betan]

Well, yes, it'd be nice to just get back to discussing the tech mentioned in the DF articles rather than focusing on the additional opinionated comments that fill out the rest. The comments section of Eurogamer pretty much cover the article feedback and arguments over what one considers "best" or "excellent". Crying about why one piece of tech gets hammered more than another is irrelevant. This is supposed to simply be a tech discussion forum. The platform wars should be left in the diapers.

Is this a thread for Gears 2/3 gameplay? :|

DF has been always opinionated and sometimes heavily biased. I also noticed they oversell some stuff if they have an interview coming up. But that's tough to complain, considering plain facts make a boring read. That said, why are you so defensive? I think as a mod you may want to try to be a little more objective, at least on tech threads.

The thing I'm curious about is besides gm, who contributes to DF articles? (And why it is often uncredited.)

 

[Scott_Arm]

Is this a thread for Gears 2/3 gameplay? :|

DF has been always opinionated and sometimes heavily biased. I also noticed they oversell some stuff if they have an interview coming up. But that's tough to complain, considering plain facts make a boring read. That said, why are you so defensive? I think as a mod you may want to try to be a little more objective, at least on tech threads.

The thing I'm curious about is besides gm, who contributes to DF articles? (And why it is often uncredited.)

Pretty sure if you asked die-hard fanboys of either "faith" you'd find they'd all say DF is biased towards the other "faith." Please, no more in this thread.

As for the talk of why aliasing might not be as perceptible in motion in a game like Gears 3, I'd say it has to do with different types of blurring and gradual shifts in colour. I wouldn't say the colours are muted, as it seems to be a much more colourful game than the previous titles in the series. There are effects like motion blur, depth of field, smoke, shadowing and lighting that all soften the image in some forms, or hide and smooth edges by their nature. You tend to not see a lot of very high contrast shifts in colour, or sharp definitive lines. Some of that is probably in the way they produced the artwork. There are a lot of rounded surfaces vs long straight lines. This is just a personal opinion, of course, and I've never tended to be a person that's particularly picky about aliasing. It's also a fast paced game, so the edges don't jump out at you the way they do in screenshots.

I'd say that all of those points could be true for a large number of games, to varying degrees, and none of those points are really valuable as a technical discussion, other than to state the obvious point that there is a lot more that goes into how we perceive an image than just the tech itself.

 

[Ruskie]

I think you guys should rest a bit with conspiracy theories and look at tech analysis of top line ps3 games and see there is not a single bit of bias.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Pretty sure if you asked die-hard fanboys of either "faith" you'd find they'd all say DF is biased towards the other "faith." Please, no more in this thread.

Absolutely. The articles that review games as superior on XB360 invariably attract comments that DF is MS biased, and vice versa. Few readers seem capable of understanding Richard's position of platform neutrality and that every observation is called as he sees it. That's not to say there won't be things like perceptual or writing bias. If he's been annoyed by a few games in a row with AA faults on one platform, that might creep into his writing for an analysis of a different game, for example. Such is human nature, but anyone who's followed DF will have seen zero platform bias. The fact that bias is raised so often for different articles just goes to show that some people's interests aren't the games and technology, but others socio-political inclinations.

 

[makattack]

Absolutely. The articles that review games as superior on XB360 invariably attract comments that DF is MS biased, and vice versa. Few readers seem capable of understanding Richard's position of platform neutrality and that every observation is called as he sees it. That's not to say there won't be things like perceptual or writing bias. If he's been annoyed by a few games in a row with AA faults on one platform, that might creep into his writing for an analysis of a different game, for example. Such is human nature, but anyone who's followed DF will have seen zero platform bias. The fact that bias is raised so often for different articles just goes to show that some people's interests aren't the games and technology, but others socio-political inclinations.

Exactly, I for one have stopped even looking at other analysis sites because I value the objectivity and focus on technical aspects in the DF and Richards articles. My mind is simply incapable of understanding where people see this bias. For pete's sake, can't you just see that he's truly an enthusiast of all the tech. that goes into the software he writes about?

As for having an opinion, yes, I certainly can appreciate his opinions are just that... his own.

 

[AlNom]

Is there something else that art people can do to surpress aliasing perception?

How the world is lit is pretty important - there are various means of implementing the indirect lighting contribution (or not) and how it works with the surface normals. Prior to Lightmass, Unreal Engine 3 maps were pretty much lit by manually placing a bunch of static lights and then baking that information into the map. It's made worse with artists controlling what objects receive light too...

Of course, that meant dynamic objects weren't lit properly at all, which can be very noticeable in Gears 1. They used some hackish means of doing character lighting with spherical harmonics in Gears 2 - an improvement, but it still had its fair share of issues.

 

[Prophecy2k]

Surely DOF effects are a good means of hiding aliasing, particularly on distance objects that would assumably be more prone to them nasty jaggies.

I haven't seen much of GeoW3 so i don't know what DOF implimentation it uses, however from the little i have seen it's clear that it's different to the previous DOF implimentation in GeoW1&2 (which i thought looked a bit off).

Again, i haven't seen much of Gears 3 so i don't know what it's doing.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Some notes after reading the LA Noire article.

Shadow sharpness. This isn't related to the intensity of the light, but the size of the light source and the distance between the object casting the shadow and the surface receiving it. This also results in shadows becoming gradually softer as the distance increases, so for example with a person standing on the ground, his feet will have very sharp shadows, but his head will be noticeably softer.
It's simple geometry, really

Also, I'd like to repeat that their facial tech isn't considered to be motion capture, it's not even animation in the strict sense. But it definitely is very effective.
Apparently the texture and voice data takes up 14/5.8 GB on the PS3/X360, would be interesting to learn more about the streaming and compression tech involved in this feature.

 

[AlNom]

btw, Brink's resolution on 360 was fixed. There is an edge filter of sorts on 360, but I'm not too clear on what it is exactly. Some of the screenshots I've seen had some really smooth edges, but it didn't seem to work all the time.

 

[jlippo]

Apparently the texture and voice data takes up 14/5.8 GB on the PS3/X360, would be interesting to learn more about the streaming and compression tech involved in this feature.

I would bet for something like geometry images.
Would seem like a perfect fit for geometry and textures.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Don't think so, it's more like this...

The head geometry is very rough and has very few details. Nostrils, eyelids, mouth and ear interiors aren't really "modeled", but represented only in the normal maps.

This means you can't close the eyes of the character using bones or morph animation, for example. But it doesn't matter, because you have a new color and normal map for each frame. So facial features actually appear, disappear and move all around the low-res geometry using only textures.

I wonder how we could check the normal map compression quality on the faces. Since they aren't using any complex shaders, no reflections or SSS or such, they can probably get away with a higher ratio on X360.

 

[scently]

btw, Brink's resolution on 360 was fixed. There is an edge filter of sorts on 360, but I'm not too clear on what it is exactly. Some of the screenshots I've seen had some really smooth edges, but it didn't seem to work all the time.

What do you mean by fixed?