I appreciate a mature discussion as I tend to loose control and start insulting people as well.
As well as who?
From the context, it should have been clear that I meant close to the camera, so how are "close" and "distant" not relative?
Whatever the relative distance, in a movie situation, it's going to be covered by a lens. You can have a person 2 metres from the lens, and have the background (at focal distance infinity) and them in crisp focus. It doesn't need tricks, and I can't see any reason why a movie producer would resort to tricks. Perhaps if you want to get a person on the side of the view in crisp focus so only their eyes fill the vertical frame, and have the rest of the scene populated with backdrop, all in focus, you'll be hard pushed (though a small enough aperture may still be able to resolve that). But how often does a movie do that?
Let's put it another way. You said
So when you see a movie with a clear guy standing in front of a sharp distant background... From that I imagine you can see more than just their head, but maybe I misunderstood. Give us some examples of scenes in films (or photographs) where in order to get the close-up with the background, they've actually
had to use 2D composites because it's not possible with a lens. Actually give an example to back up your idea - something to contrast with morlock's example which is a great example of what I thought you meant when you spoke of a guy standing in front of a distant background in a movie.
You can still experience it as a ghost observer there. You don't have to be the hero.
You said
"living a movie". There's a world of difference between living it, and being an isolated observer. Furthermore I'd still question if people would want to actually be there. Like in war games. On screen it's unrealistic. Do you think most people who play GRAW or one of the WWII shooters would prefer to walk around a real live battlefield with people bleeding and dying and wailing with pain? To do think people would like to really be in a battlefield with people getting ripped in half and burnt alive by dragons? trading through pools of blood, past limbs and innards, and over the half-dead screaming in agony?
Wait a second, you are saying since we don't see everything in focus in real life (which is obvious), games are matching a movie camera which always shows everything clearly??
No, and in part I've muddled arguments in that post, as it wasn't you saying DOF was misplaced in Lair. I've followed on from your talk of distance objects not being focusable alongside near objects, to a separate argument on the points off natural representation of images having blurring. This was more an issue that tha_con raised. the post wasn't 100% targetted at your opinions and yours alone, and in that it wasn't clear.
So I'm saying that a film camera can resolve all parts of the film in focus if the photographer wants to (conditions being suitable) in contrast to your view, and also I'm saying the eye has non-perfect image resolution (contrary to tha_con, rather than yourself who appreciates this), and finally that in a game, on the whole, developers are aiming for a cinematic experience.
Or let me ask a simpler question. Does an FPS game for which there is no localized center of attention (focus), still try to recreate a movie experience as opposed to human vision?
Isn't that exaplined in my above comment? 'On the whole' means most of the time, generally, and certainly not all the time. Added with 'Movie experience rather than first person experience' means that there'll be times when the developers are wanting to recreate the first-person view rather than the movie-camera view, and clearly one of those situations is going to be a
first-person shooter! In these cases it's clear trying to recreate the human viewing experience is impossible without eye-tracking, so the best solution, and the solution developers have opted for, is to render everything clearly so the player's eye can wander wherever it wants and have wherever they look in focus.
Just out of curiosity, if Lair is not matching human vision (whatever that means) why should it feature what eye would do?
It shouldn't. My statement covered both examples (as response to tha_con's argument against blurring), that whether it's a human eye viewing Lair, or a movie camera, background blurring will occur, and is generally beneficial to the player. The only time it isn't is if the player wants to stop looking at their dragon and the opponents and instead take in the scenery, where if it's blurred they can't do that.
