L.A. Noire from Rockstar

Sigfried1977 said:
I think the writing in most R* games is actually not good at all. Drunken Irishmen? Hillbilly grave digger with bad teeth who is also a necrophiliac? Just about every single Mexican in RDR? Borderline idiotic and hypocritical main characters? There certainly are some shining moments, like Bonny Mcfarlane, but most R* characters are nothing more than walking cliches. Also, R* stories tend to not go anywhere. They start off well enough, but then they usually just wither and die.
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However the voice acting in R* games are usually good. I think that was the point. That good voice acting can make a big difference.
 
Sigfried1977 said:
I think the writing in most R* games is actually not good at all. Drunken Irishmen? Hillbilly grave digger with bad teeth who is also a necrophiliac? Just about every single Mexican in RDR? Borderline idiotic and hypocritical main characters? There certainly are some shining moments, like Bonny Mcfarlane, but most R* characters are nothing more than walking cliches. Also, R* stories tend to not go anywhere. They start off well enough, but then they usually just wither and die.
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Don't mix up R* San Diego with R* North as well as Team Bondi, the makers of LA Noire.
 
Sigfried1977 said:
I think the writing in most R* games is actually not good at all. Drunken Irishmen? Hillbilly grave digger with bad teeth who is also a necrophiliac? Just about every single Mexican in RDR? Borderline idiotic and hypocritical main characters? There certainly are some shining moments, like Bonny Mcfarlane, but most R* characters are nothing more than walking cliches. Also, R* stories tend to not go anywhere. They start off well enough, but then they usually just wither and die.
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Although I disagree with you on that one, it's not relevant. As Cheezdoodles pointed, the topic was the voice acting itself and not the quality of the writing.
 
I'm getting those "can't wait for" feelings about this. Not been reading much, just watching the official trailers. At this moment in time, May 20th can't come soon enough!
 
Is it just me or are all human characters in the game seem to lack any sort of detail normalmap on their faces? It's looking way too smooth and almost cell shaded don't you think?
 
They have normal maps, it's just that the textures are quite low resolution because they're animated and streamed in constantly. All the smaller details like eyes, wrinkles, folds, teeth or inside of the mouth, are only present in the normal maps. Low quality lighting doesn't help either.
 
I like the normalmap blend for facial animation but the rest just look sub par. And yeah the lighting is lacking for a Rock Star game even though it's developed from Team Bondi.
 
They obviously can't afford to stream 1K normal maps for each character, for every frame or so.
Lighting is probably lacking because the tech is resource intensive on its own.
 
If they're indeed streaming all face textures for the conversations (it's second hand info) then they need a robust and customized system to maintain 30fps, and it'd also look silly at any other (higher) frame rates, and at higher resolutions (the impostor approach would fail). I'm not sure if they could get acceptable performance on a PC and Rockstar already had a lot of backlash after the mediocre port of GTA4. I think they decided that it isn't worth the development effort.
 
Laa-Yosh said:
They have normal maps, it's just that the textures are quite low resolution because they're animated and streamed in constantly. All the smaller details like eyes, wrinkles, folds, teeth or inside of the mouth, are only present in the normal maps. Low quality lighting doesn't help either.
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Laa-Yosh said:
They obviously can't afford to stream 1K normal maps for each character, for every frame or so.
Lighting is probably lacking because the tech is resource intensive on its own.
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So much for the tech then ! What use is the tech if it can't be used to convey the exact things it was made to convey : the performance of a real actor ! :rolleyes: !
 
Maybe you misunderstood me... they're doing just that, there's the least amount of human involvement and the thinest possible layer in this tech. They're basically showing you a new, separate digitized head of the actor for every frame. Doesn't get any better or closer than that, except it requires more resources.

It's like skinning and blendshapes and static textures are a form of lossy compression, and this approach is the lossless compression, so it'll waste some memory, but it will have better quality.
Also, on a PS4/X3 level system they'll be able to increase the texture resolution and add specularity and a better skin shader as well, so it'll look even better and the deformations will remain as lifelike as they are in here. It's forward looking tech just as much as Frostbite2 or Cryengine3 are, good enough on current hardware with potential to utilize upcoming consoles even better.
 
I wonder how much 3Dc/ATI2N helps for the normal map compression. There's always DXT5A, but the quality suffers.
 
Laa-Yosh said:
Maybe you misunderstood me... they're doing just that, there's the least amount of human involvement and the thinest possible layer in this tech. They're basically showing you a new, separate digitized head of the actor for every frame. Doesn't get any better or closer than that, except it requires more resources.

It's like skinning and blendshapes and static textures are a form of lossy compression, and this approach is the lossless compression, so it'll waste some memory, but it will have better quality.
Also, on a PS4/X3 level system they'll be able to increase the texture resolution and add specularity and a better skin shader as well, so it'll look even better and the deformations will remain as lifelike as they are in here. It's forward looking tech just as much as Frostbite2 or Cryengine3 are, good enough on current hardware with potential to utilize upcoming consoles even better.
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Didn't misunderstand u there, just saying that the tech is too heavy for the current gen hardware. The whole point is believable faces, but the shaders are being downgraded, lighting being downgraded and texture resolutions dropped , just to get the movements of the face across. But the face , on the whole, looks more fake than other techs out there. Yes, tiny movements have been captured, but I think its more a case of they haven't been able to get the tech streamlined/optimised enough to get desirable effect in a game. Maybe, because their tech churns up gigs of data for each second of performance, is more suited for animated films than games. They can make Beowolf 2 with it.

I feel it is being forced onto games, more than being suited for games. Atleast for the consoles. Why don't they rather make the game for PC, and let the potential show. Also, are they expecting that next gen consoles will have such a huge bandwidth for data that they will be able to capture full body performances? I don't think so, at least as of now when Nintendo is expected to churn out another "last gen" HW for the new Wii and Sony and MS supposedly pushing back their plane for next gen to 2014.

But then, there's the other point of view that even cartoons can evoke real emotions if the facial movements are correct while the faces are unrealistic. Look at all the animated films we have !!! So......

also, Heavy Rain had believable faces but awkward facial animations, especially the upper lips made the teeth show in a strange way when talking. Other than that, the tech worked pretty well.

I am not saying that they should have realistic looking faces, but I thought the tech promised that first and foremost. Faces and performances that are a ditto of their real counterpart. I am not seeing that really.


The game , on the whole is very interesting though. But it still feels like an investigative GTA. I was expecting realistic humans.
 
Speaking of Heavy Rain, David Cage apparently believes that their next game has already exceeded what LA Noire is doing in motion capture tech. Also here's some interesting tidbbits from the director.
http://www.vg247.com/2011/04/01/david-cage-claims-new-quantic-dream-tech-is-ahead-of-la-noires/
The director added that Motion Scan doesn’t allow for real time lighting, limits shader use, and can’t reposition eyes to ensure characters are looking in the right direction – and that Motion Scan does not have the potential to overcome these issues.
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David Cage said:
“That’s exactly what I feel. Their technique is incredibly expensive and they will never be able to shoot body and face at the same time.”

Cage said Quantic Dream, which provides motion capture services to cinema alongside games development, is already able to do just that.

“We see a huge difference between shooting the face and body separately and shooting everything at the same time. Suddenly you’ve got a real sense of acting that is consistent. You can’t imagine how related what you say with your face is to what your body does,” he said.
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Now that he points it out, yeah, that's what struck me about L.A. Noire, that the body movements seemed unnatural at times. This does seem to explain that fairly well.

I didn't know Quantic Dream also provided motion capture services to cinema by the way.
 
Cage said his team had made “significant progress” since Heavy Rain, and expects to equal Avatar over the next few years.
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ROTFL

Avatar's quality is not based on tech, but on the sheer number of man-months poured into the CG characters and their animation. No video game can afford that amount of resources, especially for as much animation as a game has compared to a 2-hour movie.
 
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