I was playing the 360 today at Walmart, and though the lack of AA in Kameo and CoD didn't bother me, what did bother me was the lack of AF. CoD in particular looked quite bland because of the blurry textures. Is there a reason these games aren't using AF? It can't be that hard to implement it, can it?
AF and the 360.
- Thread starter Branduil
- Start date
Some programmers seem to turn into idiots as soon as they start writing for a console. Even though doing trilinear rather than bilinear is only a matter of a few keystrokes, they don't do it. Very frustrating.
Yes, keep in mind that right now all the games in the kiosks are unfinished Beta demos.
Wait until the game actually goes god, and you see a demo based on the final build before you pass judgement. I rather suspect the game demos at/after launch will be far better than right now.
Wait until the game actually goes god, and you see a demo based on the final build before you pass judgement. I rather suspect the game demos at/after launch will be far better than right now.
Why would you use bilinear in a beta build and not trilinear, if you're going to have trilinear in the final version? How much extra effort is it to use trilinear over bilinear? If I know my D3D right isn't it just a case of setting a certain filter type from to trilinear? And surely if there's a perforamnce hit for using trilinear, you'd want it active all the way through development to see impact on final graphics. After all, building a game that runs smoothly on bilinear and then switching to trilinear at the last moment only to see framerate impact would be a pretty frigthful experience.
Shifty Geezer said:
I agree but i think when youre putting stability at a higher premium than marginal eye candy (which i assume MS is doing with the early kiosks) youre more likely to run in what could be considered "safe mode". This would be the build and settings that have received a full integration/regression test. With game code (and all code really) you never know whats going to be the hitch that causes a crash so at this point, its probably better to be safe than sorry especially when 90% of the people seeing the thing wont even know the difference. I imagine the relative inexperience with the 360 hardware would cause all parties (MS and the COD 2 team) to be very cautious. Xenos is a unique platform at this point and god only knows how it will behave in various scenarios.
As far as the framerate hit for trilinear. I imagine they (the COD2 dev team) have 'flipped the switch' for trilinear and AAF and know what impact, if any, those features cause. Just becuase it hasnt made it into the demo build doesnt really mean that no one has taken the time to kick the tires on them.
Theres also the chance that bilinear is all we'll get in COD for whatever reason and unfortunately i think this is the most likely scenario, especially given what we've seen so far with the missing 'free aa' in this early gen. of games.
expletive said:
The AA is the same as the bilinear filtering, and the reason is really simple.
It's easier to work out the minor graphical glitches when you don't have filtering methods and AA that helps hide some of them.
Most of these games are still in development and it makes perfect sense to leave features that mask imperfections turned off while you are looking to fix imperfections. The AA and different filtering methods are really easy to enable and their performance hit is a know quantity, so most developers won't enable them until they have their release candidate code ready.
Powderkeg said:
So why not just flick these things on for the demo builds then? They can continue along using builds without it for development purposes, and still have these nice things in place for those who don't care about spotting faults that otherwise might be "masked" (beyond what these techniques should be masking).
I mean, there are lots of things devs will or won't have in code as development goes along, but with public demos and the like you take those things out or add them back in respectively, particularly if it's so easy to do so. Such things, in fact, you would usually have options to toggle them on and off.
I'm more inclined to subscribe to the "it's another variable to test" or "it'll mess up the framerate we've spent the last two months furiously fighting for" theories
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I do hope that more console games will start to use AF next gen. If they don't that is one thing that PC games will always have over them.
But knowing devs, they won't bother with anything since the casual public won't notice.
/me is not looking forward to next-gen games with no AF, and no vsync(!) ....
But knowing devs, they won't bother with anything since the casual public won't notice.
/me is not looking forward to next-gen games with no AF, and no vsync(!) ....
Titanio said:
They've already got a demo build that they've been showing to press and at various events ready to go. Why make an alteration if you don't need to spend the time or money on one?
Besides, these guys have been in crunch time, pulling 12+ hours of work a day 6-7 days a week, you don't want to pull someone off even for an hour to do something not related to releasing the game if you don't have to.
Powderkeg said:
dantruon said:
Precisely why they should spend that hour or whatever, making a new build that is "consumer friendly". I find it hard to swallow that they wouldn't "turn the nice things on", and make a new build for the demo kiosks. If they had the toggles in place when the demos were being built, they would have turned these things on - if you believe these things don't throw potentially unstabilising variables into the pot.
dantruon said:
Titanio said:
I'm sure the average consumer is not going to notice the difference between bilinear or trilienar or AAF filtering, so until we know what type of testing is involved in rolling out a new build of the game we really cant say.
Jawaed makes a good point that later builds of PGR3 had varying levels of eye candy turned on and off during alter builds/demos of the game so tis entirely possibly that, for whatever reason, this is the demo they went out with.
Keeping in mind in an earlier post that i think its possible, even likely, we wont see anything better in the final version. I have no idea why.
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!eVo!-X Ant UK
Banned
expletive said:
No they wont, but they will notice how uterrly crap and texture's look. Ands when your promoting a new console that is'nt the impression you want to leave in the customers heads.
