Exactly. I don't have much to do with realtime graphics nowadays, but I'd hate to look at all the texture stretching, breaks the immersion for me completely.
Range of graphics effects in console games *spawn
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Exactly. I don't have much to do with realtime graphics nowadays, but I'd hate to look at all the texture stretching, breaks the immersion for me completely.
L. Scofield
Veteran
Remember this?
Yes. I never understood why the final build seem a lot worsen of this
IIRC they used a system with Cell and 2x7800GTX before final PS3 devkit was out. 2x7800GTX has a lot more graphics perfomance.
Indeedy, they said they targeted a high level than what the PS3 provided, and apologised for getting carried away.
Hilarious...
Did they ?
It never really felt as if they are using any, looked like regular normal maps.
Here's that presentation:
http://www.drobot.org/pub/M_Drobot_Programming_Quadtree%20Displacement%20Mapping.pdf
Pretty nifty. I'm not too clear if they were able to afford it on the PS3 side though.
First of all, MJP: I've said my part. You have your opinion and I have mine. Instead of continually demanding explanations from developers, like I try to, about why they use misleading pics sometimes or discard some graphical techniques on consoles, perhaps you could explain why you're somehow automatically in the right?
Are you a developer? I genuinely wonder that, just to know. I don't hate developers and I understand what you mean when you say they can spend their cycles elsewhere. But in doing so, games should look better, which isn't always the case.
The bricks and the floor tiles in PDZ and Kameo are jaw dropping, but maybe it's just me. Also the textures of the road and the astronaut space suit are very high resolution, pretty uncommon nowadays.
MJP, I think you may need to accept that some people simply have different opinions on this issue. You see no problem with developers trying new ways to squeeze consoles dry, but there are other people who are uncomfortable with their choices. If in adding new effects they leave other techniques behind, I wonder what's the point. Why is your view the more enlightened one here?
On a side note: some developers are using new techniques or complementing them with other old ones, which is awesome. But this doesn't happen in all games nowadays.
p.s. I'm not meaning to be mean, by the way.
Blazcowicz -- I can't really discern and notice your point on my laptop as I can't calibrate it. But maybe the problem isn't in the post-process but in the colourgrading.... I liked the ON pic more because the rocks -especially the one by the left- and some trees kind of look better to me, despite the fact the difference isn't staggering in any way. ON and OFF is almost the same to me, a very subtle effect.
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Most of that just blew me into another dimension, but thanks I think at least I understand the basic concept now.
Yes he is.He runs also runs a blog (the Danger Zone).
Good for you , but for others it's the stomac.Mine for example really can't stand it.Honestly.
I think MJP and others already did a good job answering :It costs an arm do do it right, and it's not worth it except for the handfull of people that spend time crawling slowly in the levels to study pixels.
Ok, I understand. I am getting conscious, when it's about technical matters, my opinion doesn't hold a candle to his. Being a developer, he's a very well-educated person with a weighty opinion.
I am a console gamer with a subjective opinion.
Talking of which, those bricks look cool to me, just a bit too slimy, though the floor in particular is a real beauty--delightfully grisly yet delicious-looking at the same time.
But I am in a minority.
I get what you mean, thanks for explaining. In that Crysis pic I included in the thread the effect looks okay, not overdone in any way, though sadly it seems to absent in consoles.
It looks nice gives depth even though they have to much 'wet look'/plastic effect. It's nice in Crysis and well applied. And if disable POM (for AF) you still get parallax mapping on many surfaces.
Heres some shots of Crysis POM.
http://img11.abload.de/img/2j935.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/pom-crysis2i7ji.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/pom-crysis3j7lh.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/pom-crysis4x76l.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/pom-crysisd7q5.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/sp-pom-crysis3ii9q.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/sp-pom-crysis4ac1m.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/sp-pom-crysis5de2s.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/sp-pom-crysis1g6f.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/sp-pom-crysis2vdmb.jpg
Heres a shot from Stalker Clear Sky with different parallax methods shown.
http://media.bestofmicro.com/I/L/161373/original/Steep Parallax Mapping.jpg
Here is more from Stalker Clear Sky showing POM textures ingame.
http://i40.tinypic.com/14e51xt.jpg
http://i49.tinypic.com/2eanz1w.jpg
http://i49.tinypic.com/2cp99xd.jpg
http://i46.tinypic.com/207w4lc.jpg
For example look at this pic. Look at ground debris and see how horrible and flat it looks. POM would certainly have helped give depth to such kind of texture design and when getting closer to it.
http://www.gamereactor.se/media/27/uncharted2_192787b.jpg
Same with bricks here, POM would have made it actually look good upclose even though texture resolution is low.
http://www.gamereactor.se/media/27/uncharted2_192790b.jpg
Also parallax mapping gets good use for bullet hit decal marks. I am sure many fans raved about parallax mapping in KZ2 but it was mostly or only for bullet hit decals but still like FEAR and many other games makes for nice bullet hit marks with depth. Also for example GTAIV uses POM for tiremarks in sand to give depth to the tiremarks.
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They used it for other textures as well.
http://images.eurogamer.net/assets/articles//a/2/5/2/1/6/1/ss_preview_3.jpg.jpg?slideshow=true
Also I thought UC2 did use parallax mapping...what's going on in those shots ? :S
IIRC, there was that repeated floor texture on the train level - it's about as common a type of usage case as a brick wall. Industrial areas in Gears 2 and Halo Reach have similar textures for crates and side-panels.
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/274/49180062.jpg
KZ2 Train (SP): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRWA7shR-9c#t=1m43s
Gears 2 Tyro Station (MP): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwPNh0gEeks&hd=1#t=45s
The last level of Halo Reach has a bunch placed here and there given the environment.
Anyways, it can be used and still is used on console games. Just because the scale factor isn't lol-dumb doesn't mean it's not there. Gears 1 had it in a number of areas, but then you might want to have a closer look at say the worm level in Gears 2 or the collector ship in Mass Effect 2 for more obvious examples.
edit: there's also the window interiors for Crackdown, Halo 3: ODST... I think MW2 as well.
Thanks for sharing those pics with us -meaning me and fellow forumers-, it was definitely fun looking at those images to discern how it works.
Taking a look at those Stalker: Clear Sky bricks and their bump mapping technique reminds me of my PC gaming golden era. I remember buying a Matrox G400 Max graphics card with 32MB of RAM just because it was the first -at least known to me- card to feature bump mapping, adding to this it also featured 32-bit colour depth, when back then graphics cards only seemed to allow 16-bit colour depth.
I recall some graphics comparisons between the Voodoo 3 and the Matrox G400, and since the Voodoo 3 didn't feature 32 bit depth colour because of technical limitations, you could see colour banding in parts of the Quake 3 scenes, specially, for instance, in the orange sky of that map that had a big arch in the middle and two gargoyles, which name I don't remember now.
I also bought the Voodoo 3. Well, I must admit I remember the Matrox G400 fondly, 2D graphics -Window's desktop, for instance- looked great, a lot better than the Voodoo 3, and Direct3D performance was pretty decent. There was also the coolness factor of being my first AGP port card. But I must say that I used the Voodoo 3 a LOT more. My Voodoo 3 was PCI while the Matrox was AGP, so using both seemed feasible. I tried but there were a lot of memory conflicts between those two video adapters.
I switched both cards back and forth, back and forth. I opened my poor PC too many times back then, just to find out that the Matrox G400 wasn't a contest for the Voodoo 3. The difference was staggering, especially when games featured Glide support. Sometimes my Voodoo 3 3000 could run games at 5x the framerate of the Matrox.
Sorry for the essay, back on topic....
Watching the last two images you posted in your post, I realize that there isn't any AF applied to the walls. I always thought AF worked only horizontally, pararel to the ground, not vertically like in walls or anything similar. I think those two photos show quite well the limitations of current generation consoles, quite capable of decent graphics but game developers are challenged to choose the most convincing effects taking into account the level of performance they want to achieve, along with the overall look of the game. The debris in one of those pictures look really bad, and it's pretty common in console games to feature poor implementations of debris and rubble, even in top-notch games like Mass Effect 2 --plus many many others.
Some Parallax Mapping would do wonders for those games but still, it isn't applied -it's so bad to see a creepy, detestable rat, getting out of their lair (placed in a totally flat texture) when you approach the debris, that it misses the "disgusting thing" factor and then I feel repulsed but not only by the rat itself but how abominable bad it looks.
It would be fine with me having graphics settings to choose from, like on PCs, but I rather prefer developers tweaking the game to take the most advantage of the state of the art technology they want to show in a game. Sometimes thought this might go really wrong.... so it could be better if I tweaked them instead, maybe.
The rest of the games, I am okay with them and assume they are normal, and everything is hunky dory.
Yeah only 16bit color support but it did have quite effective dithering but it couldn't match true 24bit color. Though Voodoo cards uptil Voodoo 3 got a perfomance benefit from running in 16bit colormode and Glide API had less overhead than DirectX or OpenGL. Though note that G400 had extra features enabled in games Voodoo cards could not render. One example being Environment Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM). For example in Unreal Voodoo 2 could not render all effects PowerVR card could. For example lightsources did not lit fog and particle effects like PowerVR cards did.
There is some pics of EMBM in this link.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/matrox-g400max.html
AFAIK U2 doesn't use AF (if it is those shots you reffer to).
Yeah POM or tesselation or both would do good.
Could be a good idea for games that tend to drop below 30fps.
There is some pics of EMBM in this link.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/matrox-g400max.html
AFAIK U2 doesn't use AF (if it is those shots you reffer to).
Yeah POM or tesselation or both would do good.
It would be fine with me having graphics settings to choose from, like on PCs, but I rather prefer developers tweaking the game to take the most advantage of the state of the art technology they want to show in a game. Sometimes thought this might go really wrong.... so it could be better if I tweaked them instead, maybe.
Could be a good idea for games that tend to drop below 30fps.
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It has what looks like 2-4x AF
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