Rendering of Watch_Dogs

 
Warchild said:
Here are my top 6 favorite 2012 shots. Anyone want to do the honors and say what got downgraded? Shame not even ultra on pc looks even close.
http://i.minus.com/i3sRK1NWETMsY.png
http://i.minus.com/iAnpgaOMbpqK3.png
http://i.minus.com/ibRQzMJ7gOFix.png
http://i.minus.com/iVv6l7SXnvMv6.png
http://i2.minus.com/inL2t1w6VjfOu.png
http://i.minus.com/ijSkPAZMJiGSM.png

I got 20+ more so i'll just link to them if i decide to upload them.
Click to expand...

Mainly, the fog. Also less rain particle effects and no more lens flares caused by car headlights.
 
No more lens flares is a win, and something I think many of us have asked for ourselves. :p

Other than that, I think the game never looked spectacular, even the original release. But when I see the game being played, I am fairly impressed by the fluidity, and the large draw distance and wide streets. This is not a city designed to minimise draw distance, but much more 'realistic' and open. And the world is quite well filled with activity.

The major downgrade, if anything, is probably because initially they probably did assets at a very high level, but subsequently when doing the whole city, they aimed for last-gen consoles, and the work done to make the game look better on current-gen and high-end PC is by necessity limited (target audience is much smaller). This is also borne out by the game size.
 
AlNets said:
Anyone got photoshop to blur out the background? :p

This one in particular seems most similar...to...
Click to expand...

L. Scofield said:
Mainly, the fog. Also less rain particle effects and no more lens flares caused by car headlights.
Click to expand...
Lack of direct shadows from the street lights in the final build, although that may be an LOD thing. We'd need to see someone up close to a light with scenery and see if it cast shadows (I'm betting it won't).
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Lack of direct shadows from the street lights in the final build, although that may be an LOD thing. We'd need to see someone up close to a light with scenery and see if it cast shadows (I'm betting it won't).
Click to expand...

Right, generally, lights don't cast shadows.
 
Watching DF's video clips, I think it's limited to a few (one or two) shadow casting lights per scene. There's clearly a sun light, although a few thin objects seem to not cast shadows, which may just be a matter of shadow resolution. Inside, some lights cast shadows while other don't. In the E3 demo, the shadows are clearly local to the light. The arms on the lamp don't cast shadows, for example, while the immediate surroundings do. However, the beams in the raised road aren't casting shadows on themselves. There's probably an LOD threshold where shadows aren't evaluated for objects above a certain distance. I'd be interested to see a front-on camera as the player walks past a lamp-post and see if hat shadowing is present or not. From the E3 demo, it could just be that the lighting features have been pared back, perhaps due to optimisation issues as much as a performance deficit. Estimates of what they could accomplish (within the release timeframe) may have been wide of the mark. Chances are work on the game began long before the next-gen specs were known, plus the engine is scaling for last-gen.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Lack of direct shadows from the street lights in the final build, although that may be an LOD thing. We'd need to see someone up close to a light with scenery and see if it cast shadows (I'm betting it won't).
Click to expand...

They do:
watch_dogs_2014_05_27_22_06_32_02_1080p_by_confidence_man-d7k0vqh.jpg


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Svuyvb1LzZI
 
They stated in that interview that Watch Dogs also is also using some kind of real-time GI implementation, is it still in the final game? From screenshots I can't tell much but it seems to be from the sun only (similarly to Crysis 2). If we ever get a mod that changes the time of day we might get the answer then.
 
Arwin said:
No more lens flares is a win, and something I think many of us have asked for ourselves. :p
Click to expand...
What are you looking at? Plenty of lens flare, especially if the sun's in shot. They didn't eliminate it entirely, they just didn't go overboard with it like some games do.
 
taisui said:
Or just CG rendering to fake it.
Click to expand...

It really doesn't look that much different. Road is still wet from the rain, and puddles (with the usual missing reflections) are everywhere. WD always looks good in circumstances like that..
Save for the missing dust layers that seem to be everywhere, the game really doesn't look much worse on the PS4.

Quite frankly, I never really got why people were losing their shit when the game was announced in the first place. It always looked really freaking good, but I never thought it looked particularly amazing.
 
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