Question on game promotion shots

[timothySon]

Its a simple question: How many Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 developers show screenshots using more memory than the consumer system. We do know that the final development kits of PS3 use 512 MB XDRAm instead of the 256 Consumer product, I dont know if the Xbox 360 Development kits use 1 Gb RAM or not (confirmation anyone?)

But It is an issue I am concerned with just like Bungie alledgedly did at the X03 event when they showed Halo 2 which looked gameplay considerably better than what it turned out in the end. mostly because instead of the 64 Mb Ram in the consumer system, they fully utilised the 128 Mb in the development kits. How many Sony and Microsoft developers and 3rd Party still do it to promote videos and screenshots?

 

[A176]

I do not recently recall any example of this, aside from obvious CG renders, or extremely huge single frame captures (anyone remember those ultra-huge Halo2 multiplayer shots?).

 

[inefficient]

Here is your simple answer: Many

But then you already knew that...

 

[Guden Oden]

One big reason for oversized renders of game scenes is because PC monitors in the past used to run at much higher resolution than a console. Imagine a N64-era shot on today's 24" widescreen LCDs... Ugh, it'd be less than stamp sized.

These days with 720P resolutions, THAT problem at least is a thing of the past, so now they've invented the oversampled AA trick instead. It's really no different than snapping a supermodel coke-fiend wearing that latest fashion creation and then photoshopping away the gaunt sunken eyes and all the wrinkles and skin defects. It creates a fake image in both cases, but that's what the seller wants; show their product in the best possible light.

 

[London Geezer]

It's really no different than snapping a supermodel coke-fiend wearing that latest fashion creation and then photoshopping away the gaunt sunken eyes and all the wrinkles and skin defects. It creates a fake image in both cases, but that's what the seller wants; show their product in the best possible light.

HOW DARE you say that models take... drugs...? That is just close minded prejudice at best! What now, just because a couple of them have been found heavily medicated and/or pictures of them taking stuff that was obviously flour were seen around, doesn't mean that models take drugs!

ALL modelling shots are 100% natural. I have never heard of a photographer using Photoshop to ... cover flaws...!? That's preposterous!





Now, where was that crushed Ibuprofen again, need my morning fix...

 

[zed]

ild say 30-50%
heres a famous example about to come out
http://www.zedzeek.com/GOW_CON/gow.html

 

[Guden Oden]

heres a famous example about to come out

That page's total bogus.

While it might well be the case GOW doesn't look exactly the same as in the top pic overall (games do get downgraded sometimes to get them to run comfortably on the hardware in question; just look at xbox doom3 for an example of that), it's simply not possible to compare pictures in the way that guy is doing.

Just for starters, the pics aren't even showing the same scene, they're from different places in the game, depicting different kinds of aspects. They're certainly from different builds of the game too, and it's very common for programmers to turn on or off certain features while developing the engine or testing how it performs. One build might lack haze or DoF effects, another could lack muzzle flashes, shadows etc. There's no way of telling what's going on in these shots, and you can't compare them until the FINAL game is out.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If the latter pics had the same level of sampling as the promo pic, I expect they would look about as good (minus the photographic type enhancements that you won't get in game, like posed shot and rigged lighting). 64x supersampling makes a helluva lot of difference! All the technical features of the PR pic could be in the engine but without the AA and texture filtering, it looks rubbish by comparison.

 

[Graham]

A lot of press images are rendered at resolutions ideal for magazine publication, so ultra high DPI. Is it fair? well, no. But the magazines no doubt demand the best pictures they can get.

Test drive unlimited is pretty bad at this, but at least they release shots in the original insane resolution (most of the time). It does make it hard to judge a game though.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I can understand it for magazines (although in the old 8-bit days we got blocky pixelated screens without artificial representation, and no-one seemed upset...), but for internet presentation they certainly ought to distribute framebuffer grabs. Too often on sites like IGN we see unrealistic images. At the end of the day it only hurts the developers/publishers who constantly deliver below the unrealistic expectations they create. They should create an industry wide pact to just show images for what they are.

 

[Bad_Boy]

As long as we are talking about promotion shots I figured I would post this here...

Insomniac Dev blog on the process of taking PR screenshots for websites/magazines.

http://insomniacgames.com/community/blarg_full.php?bid=24
you might have to register an account but ill quote a little here..

Sep 01, 2006 : The Joys of Screenshots
James Stevenson

When working on a games story for a magazine, there are three main things you need to get access to in order to put a nice piece together. The first is information on the game -which can come from a demo, preview build or a trip to the developer’s studio to check it out. The second is quotes from the developers – generally the biggest challenge with that is scheduling. Finally, you have to have screenshots. This sometimes is the biggest challenge, especially if you are trying to get an exclusive screen or two.


For those of us who sometimes take a screen of something that happens on our PC by tapping “print screen,†this never really seems like it would be that big a deal. Play the game, press a button, and now you’ve got a screen. But in the words of ESPN college football analyst, Lee Corso, “Not so fast, my friend.†Of course, screenshots would need to be taken with the promotion of the game in mind, but how much of a challenge this actually is can’t truly be appreciated until you’ve tried it yourself.


A couple weeks ago, I went to what was affectionately titled “Screenshot boot camp.†First and foremost, we’ve got a few things we have to do in order to get the game in a screenshot-friendly state. For example, “gore†needs to be tuned down, health is set to “invincible,†and we equip ourselves with infinite ammo. We also switch our HUD off. In addition, stuff like the screen flashing red when the player takes damage also can render your screens useless. Just a few days ago the programmers were nice enough to code a custom solution on our debug menu to alleviate this problem. Anyway, as you can see there’s a nice list of things to do even before the first screenshot is ever taken, and failure to complete any one item on the checklist means you’ve wasted your time.

theres a lot more in the link, but its definately a good read if you are interested.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

That page's total bogus.

While it might well be the case GOW doesn't look exactly the same as in the top pic overall (games do get downgraded sometimes to get them to run comfortably on the hardware in question; just look at xbox doom3 for an example of that), it's simply not possible to compare pictures in the way that guy is doing.

Yes that page is a big joke and the guy who made it seems to be the guy you quoted, if I'm not mistaken.

 

[Colourless]

I'll never understand the reason why HUD off. It's a game, the screenshots should show the HUD. I can understand releasing some screenshots without a HUD for use as a Wallpaper but releasing all screenshots without a HUD is not very representative of the actual product.

 

[ERP]

I'll never understand the reason why HUD off. It's a game, the screenshots should show the HUD. I can understand releasing some screenshots without a HUD for use as a Wallpaper but releasing all screenshots without a HUD is not very representative of the actual product.

It's all about print magazines and what you want to portray.
Every designer I've ever worked with hates the HUD, so they prefer to show the game without it.

640x480 (or worse 320x240 shots in the old days) shots look like shit in print, so everyone has a mechanism to clean up shots for print. The last PS2 game I worked on could output a 10240x7680 screen shotand it could do it using no more memory than the conventional rende. Basically it rendered tiles to disk, and we composited them together to produce the final shot.