Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2012]

[SteelOak]

I don't know what you want me to look at in those videos.

I want you to look on particles.I don't have Halo 4 but it's pretty clear in this video that plasma particles are casting lights just like in Reach.

 

[kots]

I want you to look on particles.I don't have Halo 4 but it's pretty clear in this video that plasma particles are casting lights just like in Reach.

A lot of people here don't have Halo 4 but they have an opinion on it's gfx ...

I must say that the rocks on the Forerunner level look amazing , great work - Reach have great rocks too , also God Of War 3 .

 

[kagemaru]

I admire your patience for answering to him when it's very obvious that the guy is on a mission ....

Yup. I offered to continue our discussion over PM on GAF since I didn't want to shit up the thread with his agenda and I never heard from him.

I think it's safe to say DF is not the be all and end all tech analysis detective since it's pretty obvious we can spot tons of things that they have missed, or

Spoiler

intentionally not to cover

? But I always give credit to where it's due, I still humbly appreciate their effort for the analysis and what not.

That said, I'm surprised people are acting rather sarcastically towards KKRT when he's the one who's actually trying to be objective here by pointing out the facts for discussion.
Yeah, the prebaked environment shadows are disappointing Especially the Jungle level looked very dated compared to today's standard, it should not be hard for DF to pick out the completely prebaked tree shadows or the non interactive vegetation when you walk pass them.
The way I see it, Halo 4 traded in a lot more tech features than Reach but gained more with superior art and design, thus "appears" to be better looking overall.

Really? You don't even try to hide it anymore, do you?

You seriously think the people at DF pick and choose what to write about when analyzing a game? I love reading conspiracy theories from people like you, it's right up there with them being biased with these consoles.

Why would he point out the baked in shadows when just about every game uses it? That's like pointing out a game has shaders or textures. <- completely pointless. Speaking of baked shadows, I hope to see you clinging to such trivial things when certain other games launch next year.

People are giving KKRT a hard time because he's being anything but objective.

As for how you see it in terms of tech, after your assumptions about next gen consoles over bf4, it's hard to take what you post serious. Especially when you say silly things like how Halo 4 "appears" to look better, when it very clearly does.

Yup majority of games go for prebaked environment shadows or a mix of prebaked and real time, games like Uncharted, Farcry and Crysis that use 100% or close to 100% realtime shadows are far and few.

Is UC close to 100% real time? I thought it was a mix of baked and real time like many other games. Makes no sense to use real time on static environments when cheaper baked shadows would do the job.

 

[kots]

Really? You don't even try to hide it anymore, do you?

When he was talking about Reach , he was always "Reach is sub-hd" .. now he admires it

Is UC close to 100% real time? I thought it was a mix of baked and real time like many other games. Makes no sense to use real time on static environments when cheaper baked shadows would do the job.

Ofcourse it's not always real time ,,, well if you wear specific goggles , it apears 100% real all the time .

 

[nightshade]

Is UC close to 100% real time? I thought it was a mix of baked and real time like many other games. Makes no sense to use real time on static environments when cheaper baked shadows would do the job.

I believe it is, I don't think I've noticed many (or if any?) prebaked shadowing in the game and you can see Nate's character model interact with all of them in that they get projected onto his model rather than just switching back from light to dark or vice versa as a lot of games have it. I believe the effect is most apparent in moving levels when you can see the shadows move as well.

Some games like Resident Evil 5 and RE6 (although not as much as RE5) are packed with baked environment shadows but they project a real time shadow on your player character as well, so it looks like the player is actually moving through them rather than just switching to light and dark. I don't remember what it did specifically because I only vaguely recall someone posting about this here but it is indeed something like this.

 

[kagemaru]

When he was talking about Reach , he was always "Reach is sub-hd" .. now he admires it

Ofcourse it's not always real time ,,, well if you wear specific goggles , it apears 100% real all the time .

I thought his issue with Reach was the low poly count. That and him constantly posting KZ3 pics are what remember.

I believe it is, I don't think I've noticed many (or if any?) prebaked shadowing in the game and you can see Nate's character model interact with all of them in that they get projected onto his model rather than just switching back from light to dark or vice versa as a lot of games have it. I believe the effect is most apparent in moving levels when you can see the shadows move as well.

Some games like Resident Evil 5 and RE6 (although not as much as RE5) are packed with baked environment shadows but they project a real time shadow on your player character as well, so it looks like the player is actually moving through them rather than just switching to light and dark. I don't remember what it did specifically because I only vaguely recall someone posting about this here but it is indeed something like this.

I'll have to play UC again since it's been a while. Any reason why you think UC isn't just doing the same thing as the RE games?

 

[nightshade]

AFAIK Uncharted uses cascade shadows for the global light source, the shadow LOD changes depending on distance. This is very easy to see especially in UC2 where the highest level of detail for shadows is achieved like only 10 meters away from you.

 

[function]

Why there isnt even mentioned how shadows disappear 5-10m from Your point of view?
Like here
http://i.imgur.com/wV9rt.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/T6edq.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/K8Y0i.jpg

In Reach your character's shadow loses its head if you jump. Dead enemies shadows disappear just as shown above, and NPCs have shadows that don't always update accurately or in real time and that also disappear while they are close to you.

Tradeoffs. How do they work?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Put a bullet in my head. Coming here was a huge mistake.

 

[Turok]

Accusations of bias and agendas be damned, it's obvious that for whatever reason, DF's Halo 4 analysis did not really touch on the trade-offs in comparison to Reach that had to be made to achieve this fidelity.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Yeah, but they also did not mention the game's greatest problem, which is the root of all its graphics problems:

Spoiler

it's not running on a PS3

 

[function]

The purpose of any engine is to enable the gameplay mechanics to operate correctly and to allow the art to be presented in the best possible light. Any analysis of a game's technology that doesn't take this into account is not really fit for purpose.

The removal of Reach's Horrific "Dark Aura" AO is an immediate improvement to the game's visuals and it's a shame that this isn't mentioned more. The fact that this technique took resources away from other aspects of the game is an example of how Halo 4 has made a better set of tradeoffs than Reach did.

 

[kagemaru]

Put a bullet in my head. Coming here was a huge mistake.

It's not so bad once you grab some popcorn to enjoy the show.

Accusations of bias and agendas be damned, it's obvious that for whatever reason, DF's Halo 4 analysis did not really touch on the trade-offs in comparison to Reach that had to be made to achieve this fidelity.

IIRC they covered the omission of motion blur, AO, and the reduced radius of the lighting (if that's performance related). What are they missing?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Honestly, without a bunch of white papers, presentations or interviews to go by, I'm not sure how DF could do much of a tech writeup. I imagine that next gen it will be nearly impossible to have a reasonable tech discussion about a game just by watching gameplay videos. It's bad enough now. Most of what is talked about scratches the surface of what's going on inside of a game engine.

 

[SedentaryJourney]

IIRC they covered the...reduced radius of the lighting (if that's performance related). What are they missing?

Reducing the radius so fewer surfaces are lit by deferred lights is definitely a performance trade-off. In fact it was mentioned by Bungie in the DF Halo Reach tech interview.

On top of that, we also built a system to determine when objects were not taking advantage of the deferred path (ie. they had no decals or complex deferred lights touching them) and switch those objects on the fly to the faster one-pass forward rendering. Yaohua Hu also spent a lot of time researching an improved light-map representation (it's better than spherical harmonics!) that gives us the same support for area light sources, improved contrast, fewer artifacts, a smaller memory footprint and much better performance. This helped to free up a lot of GPU time to use for the dynamic deferred lights and other graphical goodies.

 

[kagemaru]

Honestly, without a bunch of white papers, presentations or interviews to go by, I'm not sure how DF could do much of a tech writeup. I imagine that next gen it will be nearly impossible to have a reasonable tech discussion about a game just by watching gameplay videos. It's bad enough now. Most of what is talked about scratches the surface of what's going on inside of a game engine.

I agree 100%, though I think we all knew they weren't going to skip on one of the bigger titles of the year. :smile:

Reducing the radius so fewer surfaces are lit by deferred lights is definitely a performance trade-off. In fact it was mentioned by Bungie in the DF Halo Reach tech interview.

Hey thanks, I remember that now. Yeah I figured it was performance related, just wasn't sure. Thankfully the effect is not completely lost.

 

[Turok]

It's not so bad once you grab some popcorn to enjoy the show.



IIRC they covered the omission of motion blur, AO, and the reduced radius of the lighting (if that's performance related). What are they missing?

Harsh LOD bias, texture pop-in, much smaller levers, and vastly smaller 3D skyboxes.

 

[nightshade]

The removal of Reach's Horrific "Dark Aura" AO is an immediate improvement to the game's visuals and it's a shame that this isn't mentioned more. The fact that this technique took resources away from other aspects of the game is an example of how Halo 4 has made a better set of tradeoffs than Reach did.

Actually that was intentional. The SSAO aura didn't really change depending on distance, so from afar it used to give the appearance of shadows, once they realized that they thought it'd be better if they leave it that way and don't fix it. This was covered in on of the digitalfoundry's Bungie interviews.

 

[ultragpu]

Really? You don't even try to hide it anymore, do you?

You seriously think the people at DF pick and choose what to write about when analyzing a game? I love reading conspiracy theories from people like you, it's right up there with them being biased with these consoles.

Why would he point out the baked in shadows when just about every game uses it? That's like pointing out a game has shaders or textures. <- completely pointless. Speaking of baked shadows, I hope to see you clinging to such trivial things when certain other games launch next year.

People are giving KKRT a hard time because he's being anything but objective.

As for how you see it in terms of tech, after your assumptions about next gen consoles over bf4, it's hard to take what you post serious. Especially when you say silly things like how Halo 4 "appears" to look better, when it very clearly does.

OK to be fair I don't seriously think DF are being biased but their tech analysis could be more thorough compared to some of the previous ones.
As for the prebaked environment shadows, I've seen so many games these days using cascaded shadow maps such as the entire Uncarted series, the entire Far Cry series, killzone 2&3, Crysis series, gears of war3 and quite a few more. I guess I need to be more specific about the use of cascaded shadow maps for environment plus prebaked shadows. It just looks very ancient especially for a jungle level without tree shadows swaying.
And you need to get off my back and stop accusing me of any agenda here, I criticize any game I want, yes ps3 games included. If you don't wanna take my posts seriously then do yourself a favor, stop reply.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

By the way, am I imagining things or has 343 sort of broken the fourth wall near the end?

Spoiler

When the Didact says "Come Warrior, have your resolution"... can it refer to Halo 4 finally being 1280*720?