Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]
- Thread starter BRiT
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It may not be scam in the criminal sense, but it sure felt like I was being taken for a ride. I gave up defending this game (alpha access) years ago. I'm glad Bethesda's Starfield will fill in that space galavanting/exploration cowboy need.
Subtlesnake
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Given the reaction in this thread and in the community as a whole, your opinion does not seem to be shared. There was plenty of criticism for the 2022 demo, but almost none I can find for the 2023 demo (top story on reddit: "I still can't believe the massive graphical upgrade of the game. I'm stunned") . Given how fickle gamers are and how willing they are to find fault in the most minor of details, Bethesda seems to be doing a great job.
Of course this thread shows that you can never please everyone.
The problem with this statement is the word "they", because it refers to Bethesda. Bethesda has consistently made games that look like beefed up versions of "last gen" games. You can feel that they could have done better, but their history defies that. This might be the peak of their ability when taking account of the hardware (including Series S) and the scope of the project.
It's easy to fire up UnrealEd and make a nice looking subway station with off the shelf assets in a number of days. It's a lot harder when you are making a lot of the assets in house, have to build and take into account systems based gameplay elements, and have an entire world or galaxy to built with the goal of having a consistent level of quality. Part of this may be manpower. But part of it is hardware power. If you are spending processing power for simulation, it isn't available for graphics. A lot of elements of the simulation you may not be able to see. Hopefully when we get to play the game, we'll be able to feel it.
Flappy Pannus
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I'd say it's far more stupid levels of management at this point. Sure the 'journey is the destination' and all that, but it still presumes you're actually progressing and not on a treadmill.
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they say Starfield is the 1st truly Bethesda's beautiful game. Well, imho, it was Skyrim. The northern lights, and specially the volumetric fog in the mountains was something I had never ever seen in a videogame until Skyrim. Other than that, great video.
Some say that Oblivion for the time was also a sight to behold.
davis.anthony
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Seems like a good place..... Analysis of RE4 Remake is out complete with BVH images!!
I give you....RE4 Remakes BVH! (Looks like a wireframe of an early PS3 game)
An interesting bit..
Original Tweet...
I give you....RE4 Remakes BVH! (Looks like a wireframe of an early PS3 game)
An interesting bit..
Original Tweet...
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i was under impression that BVH structures are much bigger and more blocky. Kinda shocked how detailed they are.
BVH structures are blocky as each volume is a six sided box. That visualization seems to be showing more than just the bounding boxes though and includes the triangle geometry contained within them as well.
cheapchips
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Likewise, I think Skyrim and Oblivion had visual qualities that were fairly unique at the time. Both game's landscapes, Skyrim's dragons.
No escaping the potato people though.
I thought Oblivions landscapes where stunning backing the day, especially with a few mods to eliminate that tiling and add more detail to the distant mountains.
davis.anthony
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This is a good demonstration of one as you/we don't get to see in side of one very often.
I think Crysis remaster has an option to show what's in the BVH???
The screenshots also highlight a problem you can have - No LOD.
"Microsoft told us this back when we saw the Series X for the first time that the Series X is their mid gen refresh. They just decided to do it, ahead of time, I guess you could say. The Series S is what they consider the standard machine and then Series X is, you know, that's getting ahead of the cart there and this is what you might get from a mid gen console."
From the DF video. I see another site is already running with this one, but it's really just not correct. Series X isn't what MS thinks a 'mid gen refresh' would look like, Microsoft's point was that the Series S + X was their 'tiered' solution from the get-go since they didn't think building a far more powerful console later on in the generation was practical. It's obviously ridiculous to suggest that they couldn't do better than the Series X for a 2024/2025 console or whatever.
Equally, MS has never suggested or even hinted that the Series S was supposed to be the 'main' console. It's exactly the opposite. Instead of having a main console and a Pro console, Microsoft decided to go with a watered down console and a main console. Similar approach, but they reached to the opposite end for their tiered structure.
I feel folks at DF kind of dropped the ball with the discussion here and have misrepresented what MS actually said.
From the DF video. I see another site is already running with this one, but it's really just not correct. Series X isn't what MS thinks a 'mid gen refresh' would look like, Microsoft's point was that the Series S + X was their 'tiered' solution from the get-go since they didn't think building a far more powerful console later on in the generation was practical. It's obviously ridiculous to suggest that they couldn't do better than the Series X for a 2024/2025 console or whatever.
Equally, MS has never suggested or even hinted that the Series S was supposed to be the 'main' console. It's exactly the opposite. Instead of having a main console and a Pro console, Microsoft decided to go with a watered down console and a main console. Similar approach, but they reached to the opposite end for their tiered structure.
I feel folks at DF kind of dropped the ball with the discussion here and have misrepresented what MS actually said.
davis.anthony
Veteran
Unless you were actually there when DF spoke to Microsoft you can't dispute anything.
This is basically correct, but: A BVH is made of up nested boxes* that divide up the space in the previous box. Once you nest through a certain number of boxes, you test on the real thing -- in this case, triangles. This image is showing all of the "leaf" nodes I guess.
* Outside of realtime game hardware, not necessarily boxes -- any kind of volume which is cheap to calculate.
The tree structures serves the same purpose as LOD -- only testing against what's important for the ray. For any far away ray, it just tests against a very large bounding box (and ray box tests are very cheap) and stops there -- only a ray that hits or is a very near miss is tested against any triangles.
I suppose Oblivion looked like this after mods
Morrowind and Oblivion on PC. These 2 were on the absolute bleeding edge of game graphics. Oblivion in particular, the first images and the first gameplay presentation back in 05 looked unreal. You can even read random Morrowind reviews from 2002, the IGN one says in the authors opinion, Morrowind has the best graphics he has seen in pc gaming to that point.
I can only talk as a backer but I think the wheels went the rails when money didn't stop flowing in. The feature creep was insane with the game and because of that it is no where near done. I also think its a bit of Chris's ego here. When he was younger he pushed video games to be more cinematic experiences with real actors and what have you. Then he went to hollywood and found little if any success. So of course he came back to video games and now with the amount of money he raised I think he is trying to find a way to find the success he didn't find in hollywood. That is why we are seeing all these big television and movie stars.
So now we have an ever ballooning budget coupled with a ballooning scope of the project and its just not tenable. They should have really gone with episodic content that was designed around the systems they had ready at the time. We are over a decade into development and I don't see a way they can deliver on the promises of the pu and sq42 within the next half decade at the rate they have been building out content. It also hasn't helped that there are been previous comments about the status of the game being almost done and then announced released dates that have come and gone half a decade ago.
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