*renamed* Lighting and shadows in games

WRT doom3 shadows, i wouldnt even call them basic, as they're perfect. (which is part of the problem. theyre too perfect they show the geometry in all its flat-edgeness), actually i think quake3 had the same shadows (though this may be just mesh projected on the ground plane manner)
WRT stencil shadows apart from the pervertex work + fillrate etc personally i found the major problem with extruded geometry stencil shadows is that the geometry must obey the no open triangles.
the funny thing though doom3 (from 4 years ago) is still there leading the pack WRT unified lighting, ie its actually ahead of cod4,gears of war,resistance,halo3,unreal tournament 3 etc (ok it may not be in HDR but ultimately that is very minor compared to a nearly unified lighting model like in doom3),
(edit)4 years is a lifetime in computer graphics, finally killzone2 looks like its gonna advance from doom3 but that is what? gonna be >4years later, IMO thats an embarrassing large gap

 

Doom 3 and its expasion and variations (Quake 4) used lighting and shadows that were perfect for that game, however it does not mean that the shadows were perfect specially when we look at the polygon models that were supposed to be interacting and casting these shadows.

No matter how good the textures slapped on the monsters looked and no matter how much you change the resolution and add AA+AF you cannot escape the fact that there were so many square and blocky models, nor can you escape the lack of room distance and lack of numbers of enemies that chased you around in the corridor gameplay.

The game still looks good just like a 60s muscle car looks good with a still nice paint job, but once you start to get really technical is where you start to discern the sugar coating.

While Doom3/Quake4 were blamed for using too much brown, Gears of War was blamed for using just black, white and grey for the majority of the game, CoD4 is still simplistic CoD since the first game and Halo 3 was rightfully cruxified for its developer's apparent lack of intent in making a true next gen leap since out of all of them Bungie has the most experience in programing code for pixel shader based console dev tools since XBox was released in 2001.

If anyone should have made a leap over ID Soft/Doom3's simple lighting it should have been Bungie, yet they did not do that so its interesting if Insomniac Games or Guerrila Games manages to do so and thats without mention of Crytek who already released their Crysis game yet amazingly they lacked a shadow challenge to leap of D3 with their far more sophisticated shadow system, then again Doom3 and Id Software are not known for having realistic A.I., Physics, complex gameplay and complex polygon rendering yet so that 4 years is not really embarrasing as you believe.

Then when you do the math and add the following factor in that Id Software unlike Bungie, IG, and GG do not make platform specific titles and that Crytek and Valve have taken other major leaps over them while making their PC games the only crown or benchmark that Id can claim to is their Doom 3 engine lighting/shadow system so far until their Id Tech 5 aka RAGE is released and that can be considered embarrasing.

 

In the history of game consoles all high profile game devs have all claimed to be pushing the hardware they were tasked with.

They will never openly admit to lacking further experience and knowledge yet amazingly if another platform specific developer keeps making leaps in graphics, lighting and shadows, if anyone still remembers the old, proud statements they get to revive a four year old thread.

Its pretty obvious that the new consoles including PS3 offer more complexity and power leaps than the last time but I have been in this industry for over 20 years so I refuse to believe ANY game developer that makes bold claims or blames hardware, unless that game console was suffering meltdowns.

 

I doubt it to and they already said they maxed out the system and as that cant create what they where aiming for. Though the result now is no slouch either.

Well was the same last gen!

Well that is to be expected, I dont think Sony would be happy otherwise, nor the fans!

 

Well, Kotaku are known to blow stories way out of proportion (http://www.quartertothree.com/inhouse/news/436/). They're paid per page impression. So I don't think it's a stretch that they took what Kojima said on its worst possible meaning. I mean, this Kojima's the guy who's saying that BD doesn't have enough space for MGS4.

 

http://kotaku.com/381412/kojima-disappointed-with-metal-gear-solid-4

Yeah, that's what I don't get. There were a lot of things said by him in that interview and I find it hard to believe the whole thing was mistranslated. Maybe the word "disappointed" was mistranslated, but that doesn't account for the rest of it.

 

well alot of time the way different language work is also different, which could also lead to mistranslation. Like if you listen to some of the KJ podcast, Ryan Payton explain how some of the script has to change in MGS4 just because if you do a direct translation it makes absolutely no sense in English. No matter how good of a translation you do thing won't work the same.

 

To clarify, the reason he didn't hit what he was aiming for was because he was unrealistic in his aims as he openly admitted in response to misreporting...

Full Eurogamer article

As for maxed out hardware, using it completely and using it efficiently aren't the same thing. It would be unheard of for Kojima Productions to use the entire available potential in a new hardware in their first title. They didn't manage it with PS2 - no-one did. Nor has Naughty Dog, Insomniac etc. used all the available potential of PS3, nor any other developer on any other platform. It takes the experience of creating several game to learn the best methods that make the best use of the consoles.

 

But it is not that becosue they are on their first game for the current platform they cant harness near top efficiency from the machine. In that case a game developed for 10 years would still not harness all power even though they put as much time to make 3 separate games.

Time in development is IMO a better indicator than first/sec etc released title.

 

Okay, I can agree somewhat there, as long as that time to development includes learning about the system and improving. There have been some games years in development that have been released as a pile of brown, smelly stuff - time in development doesn't necessitate producing efficient code or system. But even then, it doesn't change the fact that Kojima Productions are not in a position to have mastered the PS3 hardware within 2/3 years of its release, when the system requires a whole new programming paradigm. I wouldn't put my faith in a throw-away comment when sense points to the contrary.

 

Well yes long development periods could degrade the devs motivation to improve the game more and more. Though I belive respectable devs will still push things despite time but one never knows really.

 

I'm sorry, this is off topic but I must say your mentality on the matter is very short sighted. I don't know your background so I wont make any judgements, but "knowing" a language is not the same as "using" it in the "native" location. I grew up with multiple languages and later picked up japanese in school.

Because of my chinese background, I was able to pick up the language and sentence structure quite quickly and I was totally thrilled during my whole learning experience in class. Little did I know... when I actually tried to put the language to use in Japan, my japanese was utterly useless. It wasn't the language itself that I had issues with. In terms of sentence structure, definitions, tense, grammar... I had it all down. The difference was... the literal meaning of the language itself was NOT the real meaning of the speaker due to cultural differences. A simple example would be the japanese' tendency to be polite, often saying "no" to your friendly gestures. They actually mean "sure, thanks". Kojima was not making an excuse when he said he was trying humble, it's polite japanese etiquette. Interestingly enough it even exacted the opposite effect in english to western readers: We all thought Kojima was cocky/crazy when he claimed current bd-roms aren't enough for mgs4.

Anyway... the point is there is a lot more to translating than literal word to word translations. Allegories are especially prone to misinterpretation.

 

Okay, let's wrap the OT language and MGS4 discussion up here. Kojima's exact POV is addressed in the Eurogamer article I linked to above. Anyone looking at Kojima's comments from the original interview should read his later comments to learn what happened straight from the horse's mouth. The exact nature of MGS4 using PS3 hardware is a tangent that should be tackled in a separate thread to this Lighting and Shadows technology discussion.

 

I have a question here about PGR games wich is why do PGR 2's building shadows are better than the ones in pgr 3 and 4? They seem dynamic even though they don't move why would the developers use worse shadows in a current gen game than in the last gen game since the game is essencially the same doing the same kind of scale and envoironments?

 

About the GTA4 shadows on PS3. GTA use a dithering pattern to smooth shadowmaps. The big issue is that upscaling a dithered image can do really uggly artefacts

 

Has anybody here played Blade, the edge of darkness, also known as Severance ?

It has almost ten years and run great in a TNT 2. Its shadow algorithm still would teach nowaday´s games two or three things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpqDuJ_nEPs&feature=related

By the way, its physics and animation system also would give havoc and euphoria a run for its money -taking into account it´s a ten years old game- without so much promotion and talking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUzmRO_R1RM&feature=related

 

Wow that's pretty impressive.

 

Very impressive for such an old game indeed.

 

http://insomniacgames.com/podcast/podcast.php
ok, so from the latest podcast we've heard that insomniac is injecting the "be all and end all" selfshadowing & HDR formula into the game readying for E3. now everyone is all happy right? either way we should be seeing some crazy footages soon bloom or not.

 

I don't remember hearing any of those in the podcast (just shadows), and it's doubtful they will have them either.
Maybe some other "fake" HDR, but not selfshadowing