LAIR Thread - * Rules: post #469

[luke76]

I never said that Just that what they've shown so far, is completely unimpressive

Blown up picture showing a side of the dragon being direcly lit by the sun, washing out the normal map detail. There you go. It's not the first time that's happened in a video game

Maybe because it's a game that impress when is show in a video ? Take a look a e3 2006 video for understand what i mean

(and just for the report every forum that i've read in the last month think that uncharted is incredible so there's something wrong... )

 

[homy]

I think they were showing the game on a projector, which usually has the max resolution of 720p. So there was no way of showing the game in 1080p.

 

[djskribbles]

I never said that Just that what they've shown so far, is completely unimpressive

/opinion.

 

[RobertR1]

I think they were showing the game on a projector, which usually has the max resolution of 720p. So there was no way of showing the game in 1080p.

There are plenty of 1080P projectors out there.....

 

[Neb]

...

Gamespot quote.

"We saw the game running at 720p resolution, but Eggebrecht said the final game will also have a 1080p option, and both modes are targeted to run at 30 frames per second, since resolution apparently has little impact on overall frame rate in this particular game."

Sounds like upscaling becouse resolution shure has an impact in this game. The fire, the smoke to name some effects really affect framerate when going higher in resolution. And becouse this game has a lot of fire balls flying around both near and far away then it makes one wonder...

Edit: Otherwise they should set it to 1080p as default instead of having a 720p option if both runs at the same fps unless there still is scaler problems with the PS3...

 

[Titanio]

I don't know what the story is with Lair, but it's technically quite possible that a resolution increase would not affect framerate if your framerate is heavily bound in another part of your frame's processing (and not bound by pixel processing, for example). I don't know how likely that is in Lair's case, I believe the thread linked earlier provides an explanation of what might be going on in its case.

The fire, the smoke to name some effects really affect framerate when going higher in resolution. And becouse this game has a lot of fire balls flying around both near and far away then it makes one wonder..

We're talking about screen resolution here, not texture resolution or the like (which might be what you're talking about with the fireballs etc.). The screen resolution doesn't "go higher" or lower, it's a fixed thing.

 

[morlock]

1080p screenshot -> http://photos.digitalrave.net/images/6933lair2.jpg

And the same scenario from the developer walkthroughvideo -> http://photos.digitalrave.net/images/1700lair1.jpg

 

[phat]

Again explain that picture [of the three dragon heads] because it sure looks fishy.

Simple, really. From the intrinsic pixel sizes, it's clear that the three heads each needed a different level of zoom for them to appear to be all the same size in the 3-way comparison. However, a head that takes up just 10% of the screen is naturally going to have a different LOD than a head that takes up 25% of the screen, as the former would be farther from the camera than the latter.

The left-most head has the largest pixels and thus greatest zoom and lowest LOD. The middle head has the least zoom and highest LOD. The right head is in between the first two.

 

["Nerve-Damage"]

Riiiiiight. In the developer videos, the game is running in full quality at gameplay framerate and is being played as a game. But when they release the game, they'll crank down the LOD to make everything look very rough. Why? The game is obviously capable of running as it has been shown in the walkthrough vids, so why then gimp it? Unless you want to suggest the walkthrough vids were offline renders of low framerate gameplay and the showing was a sham, I can't see any sense to your argument.

Exactly.

I can’t wait until Lair and Heavenly Sword are released to stop all this obvious unwanted noise in these threads. And you know what obvious noise I mean.

 

[Acert93]

The fire, the smoke to name some effects really affect framerate when going higher in resolution. And becouse this game has a lot of fire balls flying around both near and far away then it makes one wonder...

We're talking about screen resolution here, not texture resolution or the like (which might be what you're talking about with the fireballs etc.). The screen resolution doesn't "go higher" or lower, it's a fixed thing.

I don't think he is talking about screen resolution but the impact of increasing resolution is going to have a direct impact on fillrate, especially for effects like semi-translucent flames, smoke, etc.

From what we have seen it does seem they are either going to internally scale or, if some theories are correct about some of the artifacting, 'stretching' the framebuffer (like 1920x540 => 1920x1080). A number of games this gen have tried this technique (or even the reverse in MotoGP which renders 1280x1024 pixels for the 720p framebuffer).

Personally I think they should have aimed for 720p and focused on exploiting that as much as possible instead of hitting the Sony check boxes. The game may have a lot of great technical stuff going on in the engine but the game looks rough and disconnected artistically at this point. Of course moving from simple Tie Fighter models to complex animating dragons is a big jump.

 

[Neb]

I don't think he is talking about screen resolution but the impact of increasing resolution is going to have a direct impact on fillrate, especially for effects like semi-translucent flames, smoke, etc.

Yes that is what I meant, overdraw it's called if I remember it correctly.

 

[L. Scofield]

Maybe because it's a game that impress when is show in a video ? Take a look a e3 2006 video for understand what i mean

(and just for the report every forum that i've read in the last month think that uncharted is incredible so there's something wrong... )

Small environments with very little stuff going in them. You want to keep repeating the circle?

 

[zed]

upscaling to 1080p shouldnt be called 1080p, any game that calls it that should only score half marks

The fire, the smoke to name some effects really affect framerate when going higher in resolution. And becouse this game has a lot of fire balls flying around both near and far away then it makes one wonder...

donno, sure they burn up fillrate (pun not intended), my gpu which is worse than a rsx can handle those effects @ 1080p close to the camera.
but to me i can see the major bottlenecks elsewhere, eg lots of stuff going onscreen with the large draw distances

 

[pakotlar]

A plane, made of a single or two triangles, is a 3D surface that exists in a 3D space.
Physics can apply to them like any other rigid body, if needed.

Anyway, there's no point in arguing the fact that they used cardboard surfaces to display their flames, because the other, impressive, method would be to have recourse to fluid simulation, or opt for high density particle emissions (like the fire in Crysis). The problem being that both are computational heavy, not to mention that the latter is a fillrate hog, but it's not even said they'll look good in the end.
There are a few real time fluid simulations, but I haven't seen any real time implemention to display fire, and concerning the high density particles, the result is far from looking good, if you ask me.

Umm what's so incredible about using a particle emissions system? What about the liquid oily fire they used in a part of that trailer? At some point that was the fire we were expecting. And please, please don't ever again say that the only recourse is fluid simulation (I'm guessing ur referring to fluid dynamics?). 2 points. The first is that fluid simulation is a completely useless term unless you specify the paramaters of what you are simulating, how finely, and what kind of simulation you are using (are you talking about a 100M molecule physics based sim?). Otherwise, any sort of particle system that tries to emulate water splashes, smoke, fire, etc is fluid simulation. As is that sprite based "fire" that is implemented in Lair . The 2nd is that fluid dynamics are certainly not at all necessary to implement decent looking fire. Volumetric effects like smoke are done in the same way as good fire is (good by our standards) in games like Crysis and many others. I somehow doubt that load the engine would have to bear from the added computation is the reason that they didn't implement something better. Clearly it is a design decision.

 

[V-G]

I have no need to overcome your challenge, as if I am wrong unless I can. Now, if you would like to contradict what I've said and prove I'm wrong, that's fine.

Empty words and I bet it really annoyes you that you got nothing better just like empty accusations get on my nerves.

I don't think it was necessary to start making comparisons about this game with others. The game looks fantastic but it obviously has kinks to be worked out (AI and LOD were ones I noticed as well). I'm still hoping it will be a solid title, though Factor 5 were never very strong in the gameplay department.

When you claim a game engine isn't the state of the art you better prowe that other games got better engines. What's the point in saying the LOD is sub-par if one can't mention a single game doing it better?

And how in the world can people see texture LOD on IGNs obviously poorly encoded videos? That's beyond me and such comments just shouldn't be made at this board. We should leave it for NeoGaf and various System Wars boards.

People call the AI bad but is it really? I mean in a flying game like lair with 20k ground troops, can one really expect the AI to be better than in Total War games? Doesn't sound fair to me.
Not looking away from the fact that armies used to move in such formations (Alexander, Napoleon and Ceasar your armies got bad AI ) and men armed with swords can't really do anything else than spread and stay clear of a faster than the wind dragon which the AI controlled soldiers actually do (maybe some "pray to God"/"pee the armor" animations would help).

Also to my knowledge the army's focus isn't ones dragons, there's many dragons and a huge opposing army. It's not the Heavenly Sword scenario with one chick.

What we haven't seen is where the two armies are fighting it out mano-a-mano style and that's where we really could debate the AI qualily.

Errr...it looks like different LOD, has nothing to do with capture techniques...

Then you should watch the other in-game videos taken at the exact same even't by Gamespot and Gametrailers.

So much better than using the video from an unlucky IGN camera guy (I bet there's difference in quality of bootlegged videos too).

IMO in the developer videos, the LOD was cranked up to "show off" the technology, while the IGN videos showed actual LOD during actual "gameplay".

Sorry but you make no sense because the other videos from gametrailers look like the walkthrough and they show the same gameplay as the IGN videos.

Yeah... the ripple is too fast. I wonder what will happen if > 1 boats explode at the same time (Will the ripples overlap ?).

Heh I found them a tad too slow considering they were created by an explosion (high amplitude sound waves in water), never played with explosions in a ripple tank though.

Would be interesting to see what happens if two ripples meet. I guess they'll just overlap (unless they are harmonic... too much needless programming).

Read some complaints at Neogaf about the gigantic worm's interactions with the water were bad because only the head hitting the water created big ripples. Almost registered to tell about surface tension.

Alan Wake?

Looks really good but the engine doesn't do things which the Lair engine doesn't do and lair does the things at a bigger scale (on screen action) with more drastic changes in pace (not comparing console performance just the engines).

I can't find a game engine for any of the consoles at the moment which outperformes the one made by Factor 5 for Lair or do things it can't (looking away from online and things which wouldn't make sense in the game) and to my knowled that what state of the art means. :smile:

So you've played the game and know this for a fact? I didn't see much "gameplay" in that developer video. All I saw was a dragon flying around an empty city firing on sail boats with some dragons in the air. I didn't see any soldiers on the ground shooting arrows at dragons probaby because adding them requires cranking down the LOD a couple notches like that "other" level to keep the framerate up. Why do you think that F5 guy said you couldn't land in that level?

Why do you feel an urge to cook up theories like this? Sounds like a person who actually wants the game to be bad... because you have some console brand preferences?

 

[Jesus2006]

They already confirmed many times tha it'll run in "full" 1080p.

 

[Neb]

And how in the world can people see texture LOD on IGNs obviously poorly encoded videos? That's beyond me and such comments just shouldn't be made at this board. We should leave it for NeoGaf and various System Wars boards.

It is detail LOD for objects (addons to buildings amongst other things), these are clearly visible in the dev videos linked in this thread. The LOD is quite aggresive and one can see objects change in detail very near the player FOV.

People call the AI bad but is it really? I mean in a flying game like lair with 20k ground troops, can one really expect the AI to be better than in Total War games? Doesn't sound fair to me.

Battles on the bridge dragon vs soldiers seems to show that the AI is lacking. Also ground soldiers dont start to fight/act until the player comes near with the dragon.

And men armed with swords can't really do anything else than spread and stay clear of a faster than the wind dragon which the AI controlled soldiers actually do (maybe some "pray to God"/"pee the armor" animations would help).

Flank the dragon, use the shields for protection and evade the dragons mouth/claws perhaps?

 

[mckmas8808]

Battles on the bridge dragon vs soldiers seems to show that the AI is lacking. Also ground soldiers dont start to fight/act until the player comes near with the dragon.

Perhaps the A.I. is toned down for the moment? Maybe it's on Easy mode. :|

 

[Acert93]

They already confirmed many times tha it'll run in "full" 1080p.

"Run" is ambiguous as is "full". PGR3 runs in full 720p. The question is will Lair resolve a complete (pixel unique) 1080p framebuffer or will there be some sort of pixel skewing, scaling, or other techniques that result in the game rendering less than 2 megapixels.

There are fine lines in there. e.g. Lost Planet's particle system is running at a quarter resolution I believe yet renders the game at full 720p. Is that a full 720p game? I would say absolutely yes. But the question is where does "full" begin and end and I don't put it past any PR departments to blur those lines, especially with the importance of check boxes and bulletpoints to the corporate PR and certain segments of fans.

 

[V-G]

It is detail LOD for objects (addons to buildings amongst other things), these are clearly visible in the dev videos linked in this thread. The LOD is quite aggresive and one can see objects change in detail very near the player FOV.

Not unless you got your mind focused on finding LOD issues and as said it's done worse than other games.

It's not a PC game where the GPU can be changed or more GPUs can be added, we need to be fair.

Watch the videos from other games of this type and you'll see that Lair doesn't have more issues (are you this unfair too all console titles? Must have done quite a lot of flaming in the GoW threads for the game not even being close to crysis and having 2D grass).

Oh and no need to put anything in bold as I got all the videos from the 3 gaming sites in HD.

Battles on the bridge dragon vs soldiers seems to show that the AI is lacking. Also ground soldiers dont start to fight/act until the player comes near with the dragon.

So you played the game? Let's stay with what actually can be seen in these videos.

Flank the dragon, use the shields for protection and evade the dragons mouth/claws perhaps?

Napoleon would love to have people thinking like you in his army to divert the enemy's fire.

Look at how fast the dragon moves, no way is that even possible especially because the dragon plows through the soldiers.