Perhaps one of the greatest achievments by a publisher

[London Geezer]

Am I the only one that hates the HDR and DOF? I'm not trolling since I'll probably get it for 360 if I get it but it hurts my eyes following everything on screen.

You certainly can have your opinion, but for the sake of argument, they (and loads of other developers) have been trying to imitate typical optical effects or all those effects that basically mimick our limits as human beings due to the way our eyes are made. They also try to mimick some the "limits" (to me they're not limits...) of our photography technology at the same time.

HDR simulates how we react to different lighting conditions and contrast, and if done right, it looks VERY realistc especially compared to non-HDR computer graphics which looks "flat" by comparison.
Depth of Field effects also target another "limitation" our eyes have, which is basically our inability to focus on more than a certain depth in space at any one time, and to be honest it has become somewhat of a last-year-status-symbol in games, and therefore overused in the same way "lens flare" and "water effects" and lots of other effects have enjoyed throughout the years when they first were introduced to realtime (and also non-realtime) graphics.

The problem with DOF is that in real life, WE decide what's on focus and what isn't, and that's a decision that is made on what we are looking at and focusing on at any one time, whereas in games (and movies or pictures too!) that decision is not ours, it's the director's decision. In these cases it's the director's choice on what you should look at, taking away the naturality of it. That is why it can look a bit out of place, and coupled with the fact that it's vastly overused most times, then i can understand why some people don't like it.

In this case, if in real life you were reloading your gun, you'd have to look at it even for that one second, and in real life, when you look at your hands, everything else further than your hands looks blurred (heck, it actually looks blurred and doubled, so you're lucky that they stopped at the "blurry" part ). It's natural and the COD devs probably wanted to replicate that detail. I think it looks cool.

At the end of the day, if they're done right, not overused and not made "the cool thing" about a game, these effects (and lots more) can look amazing.

Remember, the culprit is not the effect, here who's guilty is the developer who abuses this effect to create a novelty WOW effect, without thinking that maybe that could affect gameplay, when he could just turn it down a notch or two and make things look easier on the gamer.


That's my take on this anyway...

 

[Danalys]

eventually they could use eye tracking to aply the depth of field correctly for where you are actually looking. the tech exists to do such at least. just needs to be made commercially viable. but in the now i'd think the best way to utilize the effect would be to take the point the gun is looking at's distance weighted against enemy position.

 

[Gubbi]

eventually they could use eye tracking to aply the depth of field correctly for where you are actually looking. the tech exists to do such at least. just needs to be made commercially viable. but in the now i'd think the best way to utilize the effect would be to take the point the gun is looking at's distance weighted against enemy position.

Or, in case of FPS they could sample depth in a disc around the cross hair, average those and adjust the focus plane accordingly (like auto-focus in all modern cameras).

Also, on DOF: I'd like to see HDR used to affect DOF, high luminance -> crisper image (simulates closing of the iris which would extend the depth of field around the focus plane).

Cheers

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I don't think you can use selective DOF effectively without eye tracking. If the game is focussing where the gun is pointing, you can only view the centre of the screen. If you as a player look to the left to check out some movement there but the gun is pointing to the centre, what you look at isn't in focus. Then you create a very robotic need to turn to face whatever you want to look at.

Considering the eye only notices what it's looking at, and the speed of focussing on average is fast enough not to be noticed, the world to the average person doesn't consist of noticeable blurry moments as they change what they're looking at. I can look at this monitor, then look outside at a tree, and back to this monitor, without being aware that either at any point wasn't in focus. Rather than go through the complexity to selectively blur and focus aspects of a game, I say just leave it all in focus and let the user look exactly where they want and have it clear and sharp.

That's for FPS or similar viewpoints. For other games you can treat the camera as a movie camera rather than a eye and selectively apply DOF to set mood. Things like ICO and SOTC could use DOF to focus at different parts of the game. Blue Dragon uses it effectively to add depth to the viewpoint. And in cutscenes it'll add cinematic flair. Creative uses like this make a big difference to the quality of imagery.

As for HDR, I think on the whole it needs to be seen in motion. I think there's a little too much overexposure on the whole with large expanses at white-out, and anyone with a fair bit of photography will know there isn't that much overexposure on average. Generally though, when you see the tone-mapping adjusting over time it can look pretty realistic. It's another occassion of a new effect being used to excess, because it needs the experience of a different field to manage it. Your computer artist is now needing to know and understand cinematography.

 

[AlNom]

I don't remember a publisher releasing a follow-up game title within the first 12 months and having it eclipse every other game shown.

I can't recall when a game IP ever had a follow-up game released this fast that has raised the bar on what to expect from a next-gen game.

Well, Treyarch is developing this instead of Infinity Ward, so that's how you can get the 1 year timeline, but yeah. Even Splinter Cell didn't have that sort of leap within a year (from the first game to Pandora Tomorrow, which was more of a rehash IMO).

It definitely looks like the frame-rate is solid, much more so than what I saw of CoD2.

As for DOF, it might be that it focuses on bad-guys only. *shrug*

 

[Hardknock]

Is this 360 footage? If it looks like that and runs as smooth, well, let's say that some peoples' misgivings about the power of that console just may have been a tad misguided! It surely shows a hefty performance improvement over most every other FPS out on the beige box, including Prey, which still stutters like crazy despite programmers having had tons more time to optimize that hopeless Doom3 engine for the extremely powerful 360 hardware. I dunno, if Prey is a show of things to come from Carmack/id, I am having some concerns if all the hype of his technical prowess can possibly be true.

This footage is from the 360. This footage first showed up on one of the 1up show's. And at the same time this game was also featured in EGM(with all the screenshots being labeled 360 screens except for one that was at the very end.)

 

[scooby_dooby]

If Treyarch could show they actually know how to develop a great SP experience I might be excited for this. I don't see any reason why this should be anymore than Big Red 1 w/ fancy GFX and some mini-games thrown in.

 

[AlNom]

Aye. I hear ya on that. I wasn't too impressed with their versions of CoD.

But honestly, for the love of .... Why don't these war games have co-op!?