Killzone 2 technology discussion thread (renamed)

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Laa-Yosh said:
I find this philosophy of 'limitations make better game art' quite a bit silly, personally.
If poly count X won't let me model five articulated fingers, then the resulting blocky hand won't look better, nor would an 8-sided wheel on a car, would it? If our texture artists can't use a specular map, then the metal surfaces won't look different enough from non-reflective surfaces either. Would Poliphony Digital's cars look better without HDR reflection maps? How about a Gears without normal maps?
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No one is asking artists to you use subpar polycout, to not use normal maps, etc.. that's not the sense of my post.
I simply use my experience and a bit of common sense to pre-cull all those new features requests that won't contribute to the final look of the game or won't jeopardize performance (according the vision a team has for a game) proportionally to the effort required to implement/debug/document and mantain such features (as example I'm not a big fan of shaders being in full artists control..)
And the one unable to use the higher potential properly is probably just someone not talented/experienced/disciplined enough...
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Or maybe is someone even more talented that can explain to you, no matter how good you are, how you can do more with less (btw, ofter are talented artists showing me how you can do more with less..god bless them :) )
Then again, I'm no coder, just an artist... (and I kinda hate the english language for not making the distinction between someone who makes stuff for a living and someone who's making fine art) It's just that I feel Fran's opinion is kinda oppressed here.
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Oppressed? by who or what?
 
nAo said:
No one is asking artists to you use subpar polycout, to not use normal maps, etc.. that's not the sense of my post.
I simply use my experience and a bit of common sense to pre-cull all those new features requests that won't contribute to the final look of the game or won't jeopardize performance (according the vision a team has for a game) proportionally to the effort required to implement/debug/document and mantain such features (as example I'm not a big fan of shaders being in full artists control..)
Click to expand...

It's the "pre-culling" I don't like, because it sounds so much like that Big Design Up Front. Especially in our field and working on such cutting edge hardware, I don't feel comfortable in making big decisions at the beginning of a project about a problem I can't fully know and appreciate since I haven't written a single line of code on that project yet. I don't know with any good degree of precision at the beginning of the project what the artists will need in two years time towards the end of the development cycle. I tell you more: I don't want to know it. I prefer to do the feture culling on a per case-basis when it happens and I have as many information as possible on the problem. Extreme 3D Programming, Embrace artists, I'll write a book :D
More seriously, I really don't feel comfortable in telling my artists at the beginning of the project "Listen guys, no matter what, you will not control the specular color and you won't have HDR for two years". I prefer to say now "Well, transparent shadows casted by translucent objects on the entire scene? Come on, you are asking too much mate, we'll hack it :)".

Oppressed? by who or what?
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I'm not feeling oppressed at all :)
It's a pretty interesting and healthy exchange of point of views on how to tame this beast called artist.
 
And the one unable to use the higher potential properly is probably just someone not talented/experienced/disciplined enough...
Click to expand...

Or maybe is someone even more talented that can explain to you, no matter how good you are, how you can do more with less (btw, ofter are talented artists showing me how you can do more with less..god bless them
Click to expand...

Sorry, but I fail to see the relationship between the above two statements...
 
Laa-Yosh said:
Do you have any experience with creating 3d game art? Or developing tools for creating game art?
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Not at this level. Perhaps you can educate me on real-world cases where the artists have required major changes from the original docs where inflexible engines have, or would have, messed the art up?
 
Hair rendering (alpha sorting or whatever troubles) in a game published by Sega (I don't know if I can tell any more) - I've only seen one of our characters with hair on ingame screenshots and it was a distant one. And mind you, we've only done contract work.

There were some other, sometimes quite annoying limitations too, which have caused the studio's art department to sort of rebuild our assets as the project proceeded.

Would that do?
 
Terarrim said:
While perusing the forums I found the following link:

Ninja-Matic on gamestrailers.com:
http://forums.gametrailers.com/showthread.php?t=134998

A huge forum topic dedicated to lighting with Killzone 2. Would this track with what you were being told Fran?
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This thread disgusted me. Not only was there barely a single grain of truth anywhere in the entire thing, people were actually taking it seriously. Add to that the pathetic flamewar and you have a barrel of sick. Ugh.
 
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dlm said:
This thread disgusted me. Not only was there barely a single grain of truth anywhere in the entire thing, people were actually taking it seriously. Add to that the pathetic flamewar and you have a barrel of sick. Ugh.
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motherH, a GG dev, stated that:

"Apart from some naming conventions and minor things it is a pretty decent breakdown. Once we can talk about the tech a bit more we will. "



http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=killzone2&thread.id=4265&page=3
 
cameltoe1009 said:
motherH, a GG dev, stated that:

"Apart from some naming conventions and minor things it is a pretty decent breakdown. Once we can talk about the tech a bit more we will. "



http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=killzone2&thread.id=4265&page=3
Click to expand...

motherH is not a dev, he's a test manager. I would expect someone in that position to have a much different perspective on the post than a dev. From a broad viewpoint (eg, if you stripped all the content and looked at it only as an outline), the article is correct in stating that there are multiple ways that light can be calculated, and that KZ implements more than one. If I were that manager, I doubt I'd crap all over the party.

From a technical standpoint, the article is crap. The idea that a vast amount of geometry doesn't tax the GPU is just silly. I wish that were the case, because I'd have about a billion polygons in every scene ;) It's also been brought up, but renaming lense flare to "muzzle flare" does not make it not lense flare. You can barely go a paragraph in that post without hitting winners like those.

The author clearly intended people to read this and have an idea of how lighting in games works. The problem is, the information presented does *not* give an accurate idea of how lighting works. Where's the description of how a point light works versus a directional light? Where's the discussion of how shadows fit in to all of this? The author had an opinion on how they thought things were working and then spouted it as fact.

And by what method? By watching the trailer. Yippee. I find it laughable that anyone could claim that by watching a trailer, that they can suddenly have insight into how the lighting model for an entire graphics engine works. Let alone someone with ZERO experience in development of any kind, let alone graphics.

I can't imagine anyone reading that post and coming out of it with a remotely accurate sense of what's actually going on unless they already have a pretty solid understanding of lighting. However, I can see a ton of wrong conclusions that one could easily draw. Teaching without knowing is simply irresponsible, and that's exactly what the person did.
 
 
Hey, the site's PSINext (or E-mpire), getz it right! ;)
 
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patsu said:
I found ShootMyMonkey's posts on this thread in ps3forum. They are rather insightful, so I'm linking them in:

http://forums.e-mpire.com/showpost.php?p=1635423&postcount=14

http://forums.e-mpire.com/showpost.php?p=1635463&postcount=21

http://forums.e-mpire.com/showpost.php?p=1635500&postcount=26

http://forums.e-mpire.com/showpost.php?p=1635625&postcount=28

http://forums.e-mpire.com/showpost.php?p=1635811&postcount=31

http://forums.e-mpire.com/showpost.php?p=1636360&postcount=43

http://forums.e-mpire.com/showpost.php?p=1636572&postcount=46

http://forums.e-mpire.com/showpost.php?p=1636992&postcount=48

NOTE: I have not read all of them. Still ploughing through :D
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Thanks for these links, good reading!

dlm said:
motherH is not a dev, he's a test manager. I would expect someone in that position to have a much different perspective on the post than a dev. From a broad viewpoint (eg, if you stripped all the content and looked at it only as an outline), the article is correct in stating that there are multiple ways that light can be calculated, and that KZ implements more than one. If I were that manager, I doubt I'd crap all over the party.

From a technical standpoint, the article is crap. The idea that a vast amount of geometry doesn't tax the GPU is just silly. I wish that were the case, because I'd have about a billion polygons in every scene ;) It's also been brought up, but renaming lense flare to "muzzle flare" does not make it not lense flare. You can barely go a paragraph in that post without hitting winners like those.

The author clearly intended people to read this and have an idea of how lighting in games works. The problem is, the information presented does *not* give an accurate idea of how lighting works. Where's the description of how a point light works versus a directional light? Where's the discussion of how shadows fit in to all of this? The author had an opinion on how they thought things were working and then spouted it as fact.

And by what method? By watching the trailer. Yippee. I find it laughable that anyone could claim that by watching a trailer, that they can suddenly have insight into how the lighting model for an entire graphics engine works. Let alone someone with ZERO experience in development of any kind, let alone graphics.

I can't imagine anyone reading that post and coming out of it with a remotely accurate sense of what's actually going on unless they already have a pretty solid understanding of lighting. However, I can see a ton of wrong conclusions that one could easily draw. Teaching without knowing is simply irresponsible, and that's exactly what the person did.
Click to expand...

Yeah there where several ~crazy thoughts presented as fact in that article, anyways good post.
 
dlm said:
motherH is not a dev, he's a test manager. I would expect someone in that position to have a much different perspective on the post than a dev. From a broad viewpoint (eg, if you stripped all the content and looked at it only as an outline), the article is correct in stating that there are multiple ways that light can be calculated, and that KZ implements more than one. If I were that manager, I doubt I'd crap all over the party.

From a technical standpoint, the article is crap. The idea that a vast amount of geometry doesn't tax the GPU is just silly. I wish that were the case, because I'd have about a billion polygons in every scene ;) It's also been brought up, but renaming lense flare to "muzzle flare" does not make it not lense flare. You can barely go a paragraph in that post without hitting winners like those.

The author clearly intended people to read this and have an idea of how lighting in games works. The problem is, the information presented does *not* give an accurate idea of how lighting works. Where's the description of how a point light works versus a directional light? Where's the discussion of how shadows fit in to all of this? The author had an opinion on how they thought things were working and then spouted it as fact.

And by what method? By watching the trailer. Yippee. I find it laughable that anyone could claim that by watching a trailer, that they can suddenly have insight into how the lighting model for an entire graphics engine works. Let alone someone with ZERO experience in development of any kind, let alone graphics.

I can't imagine anyone reading that post and coming out of it with a remotely accurate sense of what's actually going on unless they already have a pretty solid understanding of lighting. However, I can see a ton of wrong conclusions that one could easily draw. Teaching without knowing is simply irresponsible, and that's exactly what the person did.
Click to expand...
I agree the article isnt motherh's and he never went into technical details or commented on specific parts of the article.

motherh is trying to keep his distance because of strict nda and of lack of expertise in the field. He many times said in technical questions that he wasnt the appropriate person to go into detail. He also knows that the boards are infested with kids, fanboys and people without any knowledge. It doesnt fit to explain in technical language the article's mistakes as if it was presented to people that know about development. He made a general comment appropriate to the kind of "audience" that are in there. Everyday people that see the general idea and not how things really work. Simply they dont. Even if you explain it to them

It's simply someone's fan article. What is it doing in here in Beyond3d? Jesus its someone unimportant who decided to make a blog. His article only serves in showing examples of the lighting system through images than explaining how things work and what is really doing the work there.

I dont think we should take this seriously. The guy is probably an excited fanboy targeting other fanatic PS3 fans and to show the "OMG PS3 POWER" to 360 owners. Passable article.
 
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