Why not? From what I understand from those technical presentations that were posted here, on the PS3, deferred shading and AA in Killzone meant no HDR, end of story. But deferred shading is precisely what allows KZ2 to have the dramatic dynamic lights and shadows that were so impressive when it came out.
Yep, it does...but so what? You could say the same thing every single game. For example, you could say it about Crysis 2's shadow aliasing, which is pretty severe on the PS3. Or you could say it about every single fluid effect in every game ever.
No, the issue is that different flaws cause different reactions in different people, which causes a different qualitative ranking from "good" to "bad." The thing that clearly causes you the most visual discomfort is the lack of 64-bit lighting computations and the divergences from photography and other artifacts it causes. By contrast, I don't even see that stuff until you point it out, and even then, I often have to look several times to be sure I'm seeing it. The thing that bothers me the most is, in general, discontinuity. I found Crysis' frame rate drops, "bilinear filtering" type look on the shadows, very weird LOD system on the shadow maps, pop-in, clearly low-res local distortion/filtering effects, and the general inconsistency between mob and environment lighting to be quite jarring. GG gets all that stuff right, and for me, it was a worthy trade-off.
Can't say I agree with you on that one. The restricted dynamic range adds a sense of murkiness and allows for brighter elements to have dramatic impact. I don't know if KZ does this, but by setting a lower standard for the viewer/listener to acclimatise to, that allows the full range to add dramatic impact, be that jumps in brightness or jumps in volume. I think that screenshot looks good, with the highlights nicely understated. I'm certianly not seeing anything negative; I'm much more offended by RGB HDR implementations with over saturated highlights. You're point about the sun is probably technically accurate, but it looks comfortable in the context.
that's true now I look more closely, but to me it appears as if this is done deliberately to draw the eye to the centre of the image. The highlights at the rear of the gun are very muted versus the same highlight on the front of the gun. This has to be deliberate.
Except it's not a technical limtation AFAICS. The engine doesn't clip at a brightness of 200/210. It can produce pixels at 255, but these are few and far between. That has to be artistic rather than a fault of the engine. Technical limits like banding or dithering or posterisation don't seem present in that screenshot at all. There might be other issues with the game I haven't witnessed (not played KZ3) but that screenshot is looking both clean and artistically moody IMHO. it's not showing a wealth of technical shotcomings such as chunky shadows, sub-HD, jaggies, and the usual culprits.
Laa-Yosh's points about the technical issues regards highlights are valid, irrespective of the conditions of the environment. The light-source in this scene is the sun, causing all the bright highlights we can see around the centre of the image. The sun in direct view is 1000x brighter than any (non-mirror) surface reflecting it, so should be the brightest object visible. If the sun is being surpressed to a muted grey by ash or weather conditions, than the rest of the environment could only be duller than the sun. Technically the lighting is wrong. However, to me it's obviously an artistic choice, a bit of photographic post-processing to create a style. The engine isn't incapable of rendering the sun over-exposed; they just chose not to.
). If you actually get it in the camera and away from the borders, it's much brighter (go to ~4:10):WTF. All the levels are filled with physical props to interact with
Who said that LDR rendering isn't a trade-off? Certainly not me. The whole thing has been Laa-Yosh insisting that HDR is so fundamental that just about any game without it looks like crap next to just about any game with it, regardless of what the former gained by not going with HDR, and regardless of what the latter had to sacrifice in order to have it. Basically, Laa-Yosh has stated that whether it's more important to have the sun glare look right or get rid of the edge crawl and have a good frame rate is a matter of objective fact, logic, and reason, not subjective, aesthetic judgment.
HDR is not about aesthetics, it's about mathematical precision when it comes to lighting calculations. LDR = BAD PRECISION. HDR is superior to LDR. There's nothing subjective about that. Just look at the CG intros of both KZ2 and KZ3. Both use the same aesthetics as the games and yet HDR doesn't hamper them in any way. On the contrary, they in fact look better than the realtime stuff.
No one is saying HDR isn't more accurate. The problem is that on the PS3, you can't take all the most mathematically accurate known methods for doing everything, program them all in the same game, and have something that will still run (for one thing, you could never have water in a game). Which methods you use and which you discard is indeed partially a matter of aesthetic judgment. But yes, you're right, HDR is more accurate. Unfortunately, the PS3 lacks infinite memory, infinite bandwidth, and infinite speed, so all the most mathematically accurate methods for everything cannot all be done simultaneously.
Does that include properly calculating the shadows cast by local light sources? Because KZ does that, and Crysis 2 doesn't. Almost like deciding whether or not HDR or dynamic light/shadows is more important is an aesthetic judgment.
No one's doing that. The problem is that he's taken an opinion, stated it as a fact, and insulted people who disagree with him.
Agh! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! I've been saying all along that this is impossible because that judgment is subjective, and Laa-Yosh has been the one insisting, no, his preferred trade-offs are matters of objective, logical fact.
Problem is in C2, world shadows are all there are. Local lights generate no shadows. The main thing you'll notice is that in C2, firing your weapon in a dark area doesn't light it up much, almost like a last-gen game. In KZ2, muzzle flashes result in some pretty impressive effects. KZ2/3 have far more local lights, which result in far more shadows reacting to far more of the action. As a matter of technical comparison, shadows that respond to all lights > shadows that respond only to area lights. Deal with it.
This. I agree with this. Now if you could L. Scofield and Laa-Yosh to agree instead of pretending Crysis makes zero meaningful trade-offs in order to have nice scene lighting. And you don't see me or anyone else claiming there are no technical sacrifices in KZ. There are technical sacrifices in every game ever made for a finite-state machine.kagemaru said:
