Polyphony are aliens...

[Li Mu Bai]

When I first fired up GT4rologue I was blown away by the opening movie, supposedly from the in-game, in-engine footage. I was then horrified to see what the game itself looked like..

Sorry, but

 

[marconelly!]

Sorry, but it's not. It's obvious..at least to me

I think you are probably underestimating the amount of blur some compression codecs can add. I was just watching some gameplay videos (guy playing the game, with a head up display and all) that had blur just like in these videos. Also, GT3 intro has much cleaner and higher quality looking blur compared to these.

It confuses me why certain individuals automatically assume that the presence of texture aliasing automatically equates to realtime...

All I'm saying is that aliasing in these videos looks exactly the same as aliasing in every video of GT4 released so far - many of which were gameplay videos. Also, GT3 intro had greatly reduced texture aliasing compared to these.

 

[zurich]

When I first fired up GT4rologue I was blown away by the opening movie, supposedly from the in-game, in-engine footage. I was then horrified to see what the game itself looked like..

Sorry, but

Shrug, I guess I was stupid to expect a big leap in graphics quality

 

[NeoSpaceFuture]

What's with no head lights? Do you think PD are going to do them right in GT4 because in GT3 they were weak.

My guess is that the PS-2 is too weak to do realtime lighting required by headlights...

 

[Li Mu Bai]

What's with no head lights? Do you think PD are going to do them right in GT4 because in GT3 they were weak.

My guess is that the PS-2 is too weak to do realtime lighting required by headlights...

Uh-oh! Marconelly, Phil, Pana, & the gang will be circling your wagon very shortly.

 

[Bohdy]

I still don't see what all the fuss is about...

 

[whipper snapper]

Well they can't do them properly

Take the Laguna Seca circuit in GT3 for example, drive it with an F1 car and look at the advertising hoardings at turn 2, it's got a light map if that's what you call it shining on them even though the F1 car hasn't got any head lights. And on the normal cars they don't emit enough light from them, it shines about 2 feet in front of the car

 

[marconelly!]

Uh-oh! Marconelly, Phil, Pana, & the gang will be circling your wagon very shortly.

Well, there's nothing to circle around really. It's a flawed argument considering that NFS:U has those headlights he's talking about. So, it's obviously possible, just probably was not the priority for guys at Polyphony.

 

[PC-Engine]

NFS:U engine didn't look too impressive to begin with relatively speaking so it probably had resources left over to do the lights. GT4 is definitely going to be maxing out the PS2 so the addition of lights was probably too expensive.

 

[Phil]

I got mentioned! 8) I was already in fear that I went back to lurking mode a bit too often lately... Anyway, Marconelly! already covered it. Perhaps if I can add something in reply to PC-Engine...

NFS:U engine didn't look too impressive to begin with relatively speaking so it probably had resources left over to do the lights. GT4 is definitely going to be maxing out the PS2 so the addition of lights was probably too expensive.

Unless Polyphony are aliens, I'm just going to assume that their engine is maxed out or they just have their attention some other place. Besides, the headlights were even successfully done in games like V-Rally or NFS on the PlayStation, so it surely couldn't be that hard to implement the effect in some primitive way... I'm actually more interested if we'll see wet-tracks in GT4...

---

Anyway, watched the movies and am left puzzled why these movies should not be in-game. First of all, there are two videos of each track, one being the replay and the other being the race itself. Perhaps they added some 'effects' like they did in the replays in GT3, but even then, the game would be closer to real-time footage rather than the GT3-Intro which was miles above anything done on PS2 so far in realtime.

**EDIT: (now that I actually remember the other parts of the GT3-Intro, not just the Supra 'intro')...

nAo: To what are you comparing these videos to? The race snapshots out of the GT3 intro? If I remember correctly, those video's were extracts out of real-time races, but with addition of those color effects that one could choose while watching the replay. If so, then perhaps these shots too include some extra effects as found in GT3-replay's.... but even they were done in realtime...

 

[nAo]

I really don't know how to describe it..maybe I'm wrong.
I just watched them another time and I feel the apparent motion blur is not produced by some movie encoder, but it's just, well..motion blur!
To me is the SAME effect one can see in GT3 intro movie.

 

[Fafalada]

I find it a little ironic that everyone is arguing about details of motion blur quality from highly compressed videos like these. Anyway, the HK replays I've seen running 'live' (not this web stuff), looked good. As far as city tracks go, a whole lot better then the rather nasty looking NY stage in Prologue.
I don't know whether it was realtime or not though as it was just replay

but personally I would call them motion trails rather than motion blur.

That's exactly what they are yeah We could say that motion trails = motion blur, if you drive your display framerate higher while keeping logic updates unchanged

NFS:U engine didn't look too impressive to begin with relatively speaking so it probably had resources left over to do the lights. GT4 is definitely going to be maxing out the PS2 so the addition of lights was probably too expensive.

Given NFS framerate problems, it's obviously maxing out some things. What exactly those are, and whether they could be done better in some manner is not something one could figure out just from looking at games.
Anyway, GT4 has to run at 60frames, without jumping up and down 90% of the time, NFS:U ran at 30 with jumping up and down 90% of the time.
That said, GT4 uses much lower resolution textures, and doesn't stream the course graphics data in realtime etc.
What we see is making different compromises, which can drastically affect the outcome (more so then just measuring if one game draws 5 polygons more then the other) - clearly you prefer the ones GT4 team made

 

[marconelly!]

better then the rather nasty looking NY stage in Prologue

Outside of popup (which was *really* too much) I thought that track looked pretty damn good. What you didn't like about it?

 

[wazoo]

.
That said, GT4 uses much lower resolution textures, and doesn't stream the course graphics data in realtime etc.

Last E", they said GT4 was doing texture streaming during the race, etc

 

[Guden Oden]

The Tokyo video looks nice, that's pretty much all I have to say. I only looked at that one. Didn't really see any evidence of motion blur either I might add, it just looks nice and smooth, sort of like a 60fps game would look like despite the movie being only half that framerate.

Not sure I'll go and buy the game though, it's just driving round and round a circular track, and then you go drive round and round ANOTHER circular track, and another and another and another...

If the cars had CHAINGUNS and MISSILES and sh!t, then I might have been more interested... (Rock'n'Roll Racing on SNES RULED! As did Pro-Am Racing too on the NES btw).

 

[PC-Engine]

Given NFS framerate problems, it's obviously maxing out some things. What exactly those are, and whether they could be done better in some manner is not something one could figure out just from looking at games.
Anyway, GT4 has to run at 60frames, without jumping up and down 90% of the time, NFS:U ran at 30 with jumping up and down 90% of the time.
That said, GT4 uses much lower resolution textures, and doesn't stream the course graphics data in realtime etc.

Maybe the inclusion of the lights was why NFS:U ran at 30 fps. Maybe this is why GT4 doesn't have them since it needs to run at 60 fps which is why it would be too expensive for GT4 because of different goals

 

[V3]

Frame rate is not determined by the camera shutter speed.
Given a sampling rate of the image, N samples fit in one frame.
How big is N? it depends on lot of parameters, like cel/ccd sensitivity, shutter opening end closing time, total amount of light in the scene, objects maximum speed, etc..
Making it simple you just sample N images and accumulate them in one image

Thanks.

So basically if say you're limited to 60 Hz display, you could run your game internally at say 6000 frame per second, giving you 100 frames of sample, where you can use them to create one high quality motion blur frame on your display ?

I suppose this is different compare to just blending with the previous frame for motion trail.

So what kind of hardware do you need to be able to do that ? Something with lots of filrate and memory ?

 

[Fafalada]

Outside of popup (which was *really* too much) I thought that track looked pretty damn good. What you didn't like about it?

Simply put I just didn't think it's up to par with the goodlooking citytracks from GT3/Concept.
The increased texture variety isn't enough to make up for the unfinished look to the other stuff - lighting, popup, texture glitches, backview mirror that only shows sky and road... Just not to your usual PD standard.
The somewhat unpolished feel to graphics is kinda prevalent throughout Prologue, but NY stage just seemed like the worst offender to me. It's more obvious when you actually play it though, videos on the web sometimes hide things

Last E", they said GT4 was doing texture streaming during the race, etc

I stand corrected if that will be the case in final game, but I only have Prologue to go by so far, and there I can take the disc out after the stage has loaded and play without any problems - so it doesn't seem to be streaming anything except music.

Maybe the inclusion of the lights was why NFS:U ran at 30 fps.

I have a hunch that NFS:U usually isn't rendering limited. But since I don't have a PA handy right now to verify that, there's not much point trying to argue about this.

V3,
doing things brute force, you'd probably limit motion blur to just certain objects, not the whole scene. TTT IIRC does exactly that - rendering characters at double framerate.
But also, there do exist alternatives for approximating motion blur that look nice enough, and aren't as expensive as brute force method. Look at photoshop MB for instance - applying the same idea, but rather then having one global velocity vector for the whole area, storing the vector on every rendered pixel, can give some pretty nice results.

 

[V3]

doing things brute force, you'd probably limit motion blur to just certain objects, not the whole scene. TTT IIRC does exactly that - rendering characters at double framerate.

Yeah, that make sense I guess, you only need the motion blur for things that move fast with respect to the camera. So I suppose you can do different N samples for different part of the scene ?

I never actually noticed that with TTT, so thats an interesting detail. It does looks smoother than the arcade version, but the animations are still as clumsy. Who would have tought its rendering the fighters at double frame rate. Do you know any other game doing similar approach ? Does PS2's GTs do motion blur of some sort ?

I remember one of the early PS2 demo was said to be doing some motion blur, its probably the particle demo not too sure.

But also, there do exist alternatives for approximating motion blur that look nice enough, and aren't as expensive as brute force method. Look at photoshop MB for instance - applying the same idea, but rather then having one global velocity vector for the whole area, storing the vector on every rendered pixel, can give some pretty nice results.

How do you generate the local vector efficiently ? I assumed these local vectors doesn't have to have accurate direction, since they're just going to blur anyway.

I still prefer the brute force method though, it just sounds neat. But I see how performance cost is very great.

I really wonder which one would be nicer to the eyes 30 fps with motion blur that sample internally from 60 fps, or just plain 60 fps games. Assuming progressive display on both.

 

[Quaz51]

I remember one of the early PS2 demo was said to be doing some motion blur, its probably the particle demo not too sure.

PS2 particle demo with motion blur (accumulation buffer probably)