Next-gen graphical pet peeves

[spunkymunkey]

next gen shadows suck balls

Right now my top one is flickery shadows. A lot of really nice looking games coming out seem to suffer from this, like Mass Effect and Heavenly Sword. Probably an unavoidable side-effect of some popular fast shadow technique these days, but they are still distracting. Can HS guys elaborate?

After that it would probably have to go to bloom abuse, but that is an old sad tune which everyone has already heard.

What are the next-gen graphical fads have annoyed you guys of late?

This thread is probably long dead but i had to post it just to agree with Bohdy's original post.
Developers must be using some dodgy tool that does realtime shadows that look crap!
Sure, they appear in the righ place but the shimmer and crawl about and have a feathery texture. This really spoiled Gears of War for me on 360 and has slightly taken the shine out of Motorstorm on PS3(although its not as bad as Gears). Both are great games with top design, but i've bought into the next gen revolution bull and expect to see a polished product.
These days i view games as a real art form and to release these products like this is like painting the Mona Lisa and then finishing her off with a crude moustache.
Both developers should take a look at Elderscrolls Oblivions realtime shadows and hang their heads in shame.
But i find it strange that not many games journos or bloggers comment on this type of thing in next gen titles. They are probably too busy being fanboys! either that, or i am to picky and pay too much attention to minor details.... you're views would be appreciated.

 

[spunkymunkey]

next gen shadows suck balls

wow... i need to start spellchecking.

 

[nAo]

complaining is easy, rendering good shadows is hard, so hard that no one has found a solution to this problem yet (if we talk about realtime rendering..)

 

[archie4oz]

Next-gen graphical pet peeves

The term Next-gen... Seriously every time I hear it, I get hideously vivid images of overpriced business suits, big hair with lots of product, 3 and 5 series BMW ownership, and a sickening level of comprehension for marketing spaek...

 

[swaaye]

Personally, I think of STTNG. Which isn't exactly cutting edge anymore. Heh. "Next Gen" is popular shorthand for the show...

Do wish Data would have at the Windows source code tho.........

 

[Laa-Yosh]

complaining is easy, rendering good shadows is hard, so hard that no one has found a solution to this problem yet (if we talk about realtime rendering..)

There's no absolute solution in offline rendering either... Raytraced shadows are still slow, getting shadow maps to work takes a lot of fixing and tweaking, so it's man-hours vs. looks vs. computing capacity...

 

[spunkymunkey]

next gen shadows suck balls (mostly)

complaining is easy, rendering good shadows is hard, so hard that no one has found a solution to this problem yet (if we talk about realtime rendering..)

Its true that realtime rendered shadows are a problem but there are a few shining examples out there. Oblivion on 360, for example, has absolutely amazing shadow effects. This alone proves that it isn't beyond reach. If all games had shadows rendered as well as this i'd be chuffed. Although its true that Oblivion has other issues (framerate, crashing) but i guess all developers do somethings better than others.

If only developers would be more willing to share technologies for the greater good of gaming.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Oblivion on XB360 runs at a pretty pants framerate too! If all games were willing to drop even below 15 fps, good shadows wouldn't be uncommon

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Sure, they appear in the righ place but the shimmer and crawl about and have a feathery texture.

Not to bring VSMs back up again, but Mintmaster was very right in the other thread: using MSAA greatly decreases or eliminates crawling and shimmering much more even than blurring or PCF can do. When I post the new D3D10 demo (soon soon!), it will definitely have these options exposed and enabled for people to play around with. I'm also planning to throw in some parallel-split shadow maps to make magnification look better too.

 

[deltatux]

For me, it would be leaving artifacts behind. Apparently Gears of War does that on rare occasions. Halo 2 does it a lot on the XBOX 360.

deltatux

 

[ninzel]

Still not getting the animations and lip syncing too well.
I'm playing Resistance right now,and am seeing the choices the devs have made and am happy with them. For example the game isn't as detailed as a Gears of War,but has bigger smoother running levels with a lot more going on. I can live with that choice. What I can't live with is the poor animations in a game. Now I don't know what resource use great animation brings with it,or whether or not it's simply a case of to much work to do it right but animation need to get better. It's very immersion breaking when everything else is so top notch.

 

[fearsomepirate]

My biggest graphical pet-peeve is that these graphics are clearly designed for GPUs with a finite texl and pixel fillrate, a finite vertex throughput, only a half gig of RAM, and CPUs with finite clockspeed. Everyone knows that the X360 and PS3 are infinitely powerful and capable of perfect animation, models and environments so polygon-rich that you could never tell that things are made of polygons on an HD screen, textures so high-res that no matter how close you get, you'll never see a pixel, and fillrate and processing so high that the shadows look identical to real life. Come on, devs, get with the program!

 

[Squeak]

- Visible texels, we need better on-the-fly texture decompression.

- Flat surfaces, parallax mapping and offsetmapping should be on every surface (but not overused and only in amounts so it looks good).

 

[Davros]

fran did you work on the creature a.i in black and white ?
if i ever met you i would make you pay dearly for everytime that a.i drove me nuts

 

[JardeL]

Clothes...

 

[Fafalada]

There's no absolute solution in offline rendering either... Raytraced shadows are still slow, getting shadow maps to work takes a lot of fixing and tweaking, so it's man-hours vs. looks vs. computing capacity...

I find that kinda ironic, given how easy it should be to write Irregular-Z rasterizer for offline tools. I suppose the companies making the 3d packages aren't concerned about the issue you guys have to deal with?

 

[Ether_Snake]

Right now my top one is flickery shadows. A lot of really nice looking games coming out seem to suffer from this, like Mass Effect and Heavenly Sword. Probably an unavoidable side-effect of some popular fast shadow technique these days, but they are still distracting. Can HS guys elaborate?

After that it would probably have to go to bloom abuse, but that is an old sad tune which everyone has already heard.

What are the next-gen graphical fads have annoyed you guys of late?

I remember the original real-time trailer for MGS4 at the TGS05 had flawless shadows. The subsequent 15min trailer shown at E306 had flickering shadowmaps, a bit like in the GTA4 trailer, but much less noticeable (also it appears that they remodeled Solid Snake's head and his hair was not longer as realistic, but it's difficult to tell from the videos).

I don't know what changed with the PS3 architecture by then but I presume something did.

As for my biggest pet peeve with next gen graphics? I would definitely second "bad animations". I want all games to have Uncharted-like animations. I don't care what people say about the need for quick/jerky animations to keep the gameplay intact, I think it's bull. If all the characters in a fighting game or in an FPS move with the same level of realism then it doesn't affect the gameplay because no one is impaired.

Games that are supposed to have very high quality animations:

- White Knight Story (PS3 RPG by Level 5, see trailer on Gametrailers, altho it feels like it could be target footage, it could be real as well)
- Final Fantasy XIII (confirmed to use advanced animation blending for battle sequences which enables the player to mix a wide range of actions to produce one seamless action, again the trailer of the game supposedly showed that)
- Uncharted: Drake's Treasure (PS3 action game, if the original E3 trailer was not target footage, THAT is what I am expecting from animations. BTW why did you saturate the colors? It was great before!)
- Next-Gen Star Wars (no actual footage seen yet)
- Next-Gen Indiana Jones (saw some footage a while ago but I think things must be much better by now).

 

[Ether_Snake]

Blargh where is the edit button? Anyway for those who want better facial animations, I think the MGS4 TGS05 trailer had some of the best facial animations I ever saw, even outside of videogames.

 

[zed]

- Uncharted: Drake's Treasure (PS3 action game, if the original E3 trailer was not target footage, THAT is what I am expecting from animations. BTW why did you saturate the colors? It was great before!)

most likely cause ppl were complaining before about the dull colors (personally i think it looks better, in a jungle colors/light are much more vibrant than other areas in the world)

non-unified lighting is my biggest peeve (but ive prolly said that before)

 

[Snyder]

Like Ac...Joshua and others have said, bad animations - especially character animations.
Too bad this is a problem that isn't likely to be solved with a groundbreaking new algorithm, or so it seems to me at least.
My hope is that middlewares/engines will provide better and better character animation packages to take as much work from the animators as possible without restraining flexibility/power of expression too much. But still, many good animators (and thus a lot of money) will still be needed for a long time to come regarding animations, I'm afraid.