Ninety-Nine Nights Interview - "In-game cinema is quality of pre-rendered"

I do hope they are putting more effort to the animation of characters, and especially their facial animation if they are to succeed in their claim of "In game cinema is quality of prerendered"
The video that was shown some months ago had awful animation, the lip syncing was robotic. just mouth open and mouth closed

Or is that bad engrish? "in game cinema is quality of prerendered" sounds weird, maybe they mean "in game cinema is type of prerendered"
 
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Either the jpg compresson is horrible or something is really wrong with the textures. (specifically on the clothes of the girl)
 
Yeah the quality of the shots is appalling (even worse than IGN shots, and that's quite something!), the game will look much better on a nice HDTV. Or even a nice normal TV really.
 
As nice as it is, this is clearly not CG quality.
Models look pretty good and detailed, but many things are only painted in the textures, instead of building them as geometry; and you can still see poly edges. And the object edges on stuff like the armor are far too sharp, which makes them look less realistic (sharp edged objects would cut up your hands all the time, so every man-made object is carefully smoothed out, just look at your desk for an example). It's obviously optimized for real-time .
Textures are a bigger problem... resolution is mediocre (you shouldn't see texels at all in good CGI) and the compression makes it look even worse.

Then there's the quality of the texture filtering, shading, AA... Just taking this model and rendering it with a 3D package would already look a lot better. So I guess these images would be a pretty good example for what will remain to be the main differences between CG and realtime graphics; and what to expect from the upcoming games, instead of the you-know-what trailers...
 
Compare?

Laa-Yosh said:
As nice as it is, this is clearly not CG quality.
Models look pretty good and detailed, but many things are only painted in the textures, instead of building them as geometry; and you can still see poly edges. And the object edges on stuff like the armor are far too sharp, which makes them look less realistic (sharp edged objects would cut up your hands all the time, so every man-made object is carefully smoothed out, just look at your desk for an example). It's obviously optimized for real-time .
Textures are a bigger problem... resolution is mediocre (you shouldn't see texels at all in good CGI) and the compression makes it look even worse.

Then there's the quality of the texture filtering, shading, AA... Just taking this model and rendering it with a 3D package would already look a lot better. So I guess these images would be a pretty good example for what will remain to be the main differences between CG and realtime graphics; and what to expect from the upcoming games, instead of the you-know-what trailers...
Click to expand...

Here is same-type picture from comparison of Heavenly Sword:

Close to face:
http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/614/614802/heavenly-sword-20050516074019074.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v333/hardknock/s01.jpg

Many fighters:
http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/614/614802/heavenly-sword-20050516074026605.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v333/hardknock/s04.jpg

What do you think?

Also, RabidRabbit, maybe they mean in-game cinema is real-time render by hardware and is very high quality like prerender CG film.
 
Well Heavenly Sword looks noticeably better, but as we all know, it wasn't "really" real-time...

We should wait till nAo and Deano can come out with some info on how the game is looking and running now and how they expect it to run in the future...
 
ihamoitc2005 said:
Here is same-type picture from comparison of Heavenly Sword:

Close to face:
http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/614/614802/heavenly-sword-20050516074019074.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v333/hardknock/s01.jpg

Many fighters:
http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/614/614802/heavenly-sword-20050516074026605.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v333/hardknock/s04.jpg

What do you think?

Also, RabidRabbit, maybe they mean in-game cinema is real-time render by hardware and is very high quality like prerender CG film.
Click to expand...


DeanoC has stated that the close ups of her face were the only pre-rendered things of the E3 trailer, so those were not real-time sorry. :???:
 
Unfair

Hardknock said:
DeanoC has stated that the close ups of her face were the only pre-rendered things of the E3 trailer, so those were not real-time sorry. :???:
Click to expand...

Thank you for this information my friend. The face comparison is not fair since Heavenly Sword face close-up is not real-time. We can only compare other screens like many fighters no?
 
ihamoitc2005 said:
Thank you for this information my friend. The face comparison is not fair since Heavenly Sword face close-up is not real-time. We can only compare other screens like many fighters no?
Click to expand...

Yeah, that one is more comparable and those pics are both from E3 builds. Heavenly Sword appears to have better lighting. But both games appear to have the same number of characters on screen. I'm pretty sure N3 is 60fps, I'm curious if Heavenly Sword will be 30 or 60fps or what changes they might have made since E3? I know they've changed the HDR lighting since then though...
 
Heavenly Sword history

Hardknock said:
Yeah, that one is more comparable and those pics are both from E3 builds. Heavenly Sword appears to have better lighting. But both games appear to have the same number of characters on screen. I'm pretty sure N3 is 60fps, I'm curious if Heavenly Sword will be 30 or 60fps or what changes they might have made since E3? I know they've changed the HDR lighting since then though...
Click to expand...

I think in-game section of Ninety Nine Nights is 60fps and real-time cutscene is 30fps but I am not sure.

Heavenly Sword is 30fps but limited by single-thread CPU code of trailer and maybe 1080P requirement by Sony for trailer. This also I am not sure because of my memory.
 
ihamoitc2005 said:
I think in-game section of Ninety Nine Nights is 60fps and real-time cutscene is 30fps but I am not sure.

Heavenly Sword is 30fps but limited by single-thread CPU code of trailer and maybe 1080P requirement by Sony for trailer. This also I am not sure because of my memory.
Click to expand...

No the trailer was 5fps and sped up to 60fps for E3 purposes... He's already stated they are shooting for 720p resolution, he hasn't made any word if it'll be 30 or 60 though... we'll see...
 
the flags and the way they move in the heavenly swords trailer was really impressive, i hope they will be in the final game.
 
Looking at these shots I prefer the art direction of NNN over HS... a lot. But I agree that the clothing/armor textures in the closeups are less than stellar. Those might work in-game, but they better use higher-res material for cutscenes.
 
CPU code not optimized

Karamazov said:
the flags and the way they move in the heavenly swords trailer was really impressive, i hope they will be in the final game.
Click to expand...

In "history of Heavenly Sword" it is said that graphics quality is no problem and "low hanging fruit" but CPU calculations for flags, AI, etc is not optimized because all CPU process on one thread only. But if calculations distributed to more hardware thread maybe all "procedural" effects are same in final version as well. This information is available here:

http://www.ps3forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=9723

We currently have complex pixel shaders, a full atmospheric model, full-scene dynamic shadowing, HDR lighting, tone mapping, parallax mapping, internal lens reflection and depth-of-field all in hi-def resolution running in real-time.

We are researching Cell-based procedural systems for hair, cloth, clouds, water, weather and vegetation to transform our gaming world into a vibrant living vision of gorgeousness.
Click to expand...

Graphics and frame rate are the low hanging fruit. Just threading up the animation system and procedural graphics (hair, cloth, flags etc.) will gives us a large amount of CPU time back for the game. The army need this the most.

Longer term, Physics and AI services are obvious candidates.

As for what improves?, that's a good question. The priority is to move the heavy weight stuff off the main game thread, hopefully doing this will provide lots more time for the game code. That should improve the gameplay in lots of ways.

Whether we will achieve all this and keep the code easy to develop with is the big question. Lots of designers and coders (especially the more junior members of the team) aren't used to dealing with threads, DMA and C like code. Keeping a balance between the high level and the harder stuff is the biggest challenge. I don't want a level designer having to worry about threads but at the same time don't want him/her coding in such a way that its totally serialized…
Click to expand...
 
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