Graphical effects rarely seen this gen that you expect/hope become standard next-gen

DX10 mode of Bioshock had greatly improved water. However PhilB cant believe you put it ahead of Cryostasis PhySX HW water mass/drops and physics. That stuff beyond anything else.

 

If only it looked like water in Cryostasis

 

The first problem is that there's no 100% solution for cloth.
We do a lot of cloth simulation for our movies and there are lots of clipping issues every single time. But since it's a prerendered cinematic and we save out the cloth animation as per vertex data anyway, our tech guys can go in and manually correct all the small mistakes, frame by frame if they have to. It's usually a LOT faster to push those vertices around with a deformer, then running more and more simulations and wrestling with the parameters.
Obviously, a game can't do that.

On top of that, there are some other issues...

Calculation times are not necessarily the same depending on the movement.

Tight clothing and layered clothing are pretty complicated to do - big, flapping cloaks and such are a lot easier.

Our cloth stuff also needs a few frames of run-up time, where the character starts from a T-pose and the cloth just floats around it, then we activate gravity and move the character into it's starting position and pose. It takes about 10 frames before the actual shot starts. Good editing takes care of inconsistencies between shots, or we can always pack multiple shots together if it's necessary.

Games can't do this either, although I'm not sure if it's a must have thing for the simulation or it's just used to get better results.
Good looking clothing (folds etc) needs polygon counts in or preferably above the 10K range. For the cloth only. Otherwise it'll look blocky and ugly.

 

That's the biggest giveaway when I'm trying to tell realtime from CG cutscenes in the FFXIII screenshots.

 

So as I feared, it's both a computation/performance and a content generation problem. That likely means we'll not get it next-gen either, and certainly not as standard. (Unless one of the big middleware developers makes it a main focus perhaps)

 

We already have some smaller or less complicated pieces, like cloaks and whatever the clothing on the Heavenly Sword girl is called. Next gen will certainly add on top of that, just don't expect things like T-shirts or baggy pants.

 

Blue skies.

http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2005/11/blue-sky-in-games-campaign-launched.html

 

Games are bigger than ever because they moved away from the abstract crazyness of many of those blue skys games and when for subjects a tad bit closer to reality. I'm not saying that all I want is doom and gloom, I liked playing Tales of Vesperia as much as I liked playing Gears, but doom and gloom is sucessful...and Sonic hasn't been for a long time.

 

Effects that requires the current fragment's properties to affect the rendering of other fragments. Like the near blur of depth of field, or the bokeh effect for the far blur of DOF that has the shape of the lens, or star effect for every bright objects, or object based motion blur...etc. All these kind of effect runs very slow if you want to emulate in dx9 and below.

 

Those are some creepy trees. The ripples were cool but viscosity was wrong, and the reflection was absent. The video really showed how unpolished R2 was.

 

I have to admit, I never played Cryostasis I'll have to check it out now though.

Another game with excellent water interactivity is the first FEAR. Almost better than Bioshock in some ways. Getting in a small pool of water and wading around, watching the reflections/water thrash was awesome - it was pretty amazing considering it was the first time I'd seen something like that in a game. Sadly the sequel went completely backwards - it didn't even have basic reflections

 

I haven't played it either. Though i would like to play with with PhysX HW which I cant with my ATI card.

 

With the 'hacked drivers' you can if you get some GF as 2nd card
But like I said earlier, if only the water would actually look and act like water, it acts more like quicksilver or something and looks like something between that and water

 

Well the water masses acts like water but the drops and drop pools are more like mercury.

 

Though the water mass loses ripples awfully quick, and when in the benchmark the guy shoots a barrel which already is in the water, it doesn't create new ripples
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrBAPqMXH_U

 

I forgot about hearing about that, and I did have the game, but I never took notice of shadows created by the nuke mushroom cloud. Was it a DX10 only effect? I played the game in DX9 on XP. Even if it was there I probably didn't notice, and what about normal smoke, did it have shadows as well, or would you have an issue with creating a realistic shadow that blended into the light from the disappation of smoke into the "air"?

 

I would presume that it is a memory issue as well as needing to render this sort of shadowmap apart from the shadows being cast by opaque objects.

 

I am not understanding whats so impressive about this image. There are two light sources with the shadow casted in a direction thats not correct for either source. It doesn't seem realtime at all.

 

It is realtime. So are the shadows as the battelfield is dynamic and you can level forests and buildings. They touted some nice stuff for DX10, advanced particle effects and more.

 

a) Games are not "bigger than ever." Well, not unless we're talking about Wii, they're not...but you certainly can't attribute Wii's success to steroid-charged space marines mangling zombie aliens in a dystopian wasteland.

b) Comic book fantasies aren't any closer to reality than cartoon characters.

c) This thread is about what we personally would like; sales are irrelevant.

On that note, I wish developers would learn when not to use an effect. I'm playing Dead Space on PS3, and overall, it looks fantastic...except for the self-shadowing, which is glitchy and twitchy. They should have left the effect out IMO, because it's just distracting and doesn't look good at all.