The infamous CGI PS3 Trailers - Possible to beat in real-time in 2023?

[milk]

Regarding physics, i think that's possible. AI is the harder problem. Scripting won't cut it, but robotic simulation of characters is possible. Working on self balancing locomotion is a hobby of mine, just sadly i don't have much time for that.
The AI becomes very difficult especially on interactions involving multiple characters. Melee combat for example. That's not in reach for me yet, but there is related ML research which really looks good. Not sure how practical this already is, but seems more a matter of research than a requirement on more powerful HW.

The best implementation of those ideas I've ever played was RainWorld. The game limited its problem space by sticking to somewhat low fidelity 2D world, but within those bounds it was incredibly ambitious with how much character movement was physics driven, and how simulation-based and uncontrolled its gameplay is. Its AI is equally complex and layered. The game can be an excellent experience, although often unfair and patience-testing. I think its survival aspects and souls-like-difficulty and punishment are at odds with the incentive for experimentation. Only after people have beat the game a vouple times do they feel confortable enough to be more daring and not care about dying.

After we have this, we would need something like a real time virtual director to come up with funny action for any situation. Basically a system analyzing the player and his current environment and actions, finding opportunities to counteract or assist in amusing ways. Something to fake emergent behavior, but overcoming current limited AI approaches.

We definetly need more work and research on that area too. Left4Dead had a system literally called director, to try and adjust enemy and item spawn to try to better mold that roller-coaster rithym of High-low-high-low intesity pacing. But that scope is pretty moderate in my opinion.

The nemessis system and the random encounters in open world games are other glimpses of that type of atempt which I see slowly becoming more robust and ambitious, but they have a lot of room to grow still. Its a shame that nemessis was patented. Pretty lame practice from the dev/publisher to cling to that.

 

[milk]

For gfx, the one thing where we still lack behind is those dirt clouds, which then ideally stick at the surfaces persistently.
Seems not too hard using something like material surface caches, but it's not clear where to draw the line between particles driven by global forces or real fluid sim where particles affect each other.
Full scene fluid simulations seem out of reach, but there might be some clever ways to fake it we have not yet .

Most impressive showings of that, to my knowledge, were the Little Big Planet games.

 

[techuse]

That RTX Racer will do it if it ever actually comes out and still looks like the trailer.

Not a real game though.

 

[JoeJ]

The best implementation of those ideas I've ever played was RainWorld.

This is on my list of 'games i should play' for that reason, but did not get at it yet. Saw YT videos and seems really interesting.
Never heard about the Nemesis system, because 'figure out why people love RPGs' is on that same list. : )

For now my inspiration is games like Impossible Mission, Flashback, Tomb Raider 1, Uncharted 4. That's all animation, but those games pushed it quite a lot, and they show which kinds of abilities a game character should have.
And for the start basic locomotion is hard enough. It took me years to figure out how balancing works. I got it to walk as well, but then switched focus entirely on that boring realtime GI and LOD stuff, sigh....

 

[Cyan]

I discovered this video the other day, and watching it makes me feel like a mother who sees her child playing a videogame and thinks they are playing a movie.

It's realtime Path Tracing and I when I watched it I felt awestruck. I honestly thought it was either real life or a Disney animation movie.

 

[Frenetic Pony]

Hellblade II, Fable, and Death Stranding 2 all look better than these in most every aspect, except maybe for image quality, particles, and animation.

Animation hasn't had the same level work put into it as other rendering aspects, and takes longer to come into production. Worse almost no one wants to be a physics programmer, you need that for contact without clipping, but it's just seen as boring.

Particles are doable, the pre-rendered stuff uses volumetrics, UE5 just got a realtime pre-computed (the animation part) volumetric render, Horizon Burning Shores showed you can do masses of volumetrics in realtime, TLOU II even had volumetrics replacing a handful of its vfx that would otherwise be splatted particles, we're almost there.

Image quality is the hardest, but if Fable manages to look like the realtime teaser then we're pretty close. Compute based variable rate shading and heavy concentration on image quality ftw! Playing Mass Effect Andromeda again with 20% oversampling makes me appreciate just how much image quality matters once your art assets get high quality enough.

 

[Jupiter]

I discovered this video the other day, and watching it makes me feel like a mother who sees her child playing a videogame and thinks they are playing a movie.

It's realtime Path Tracing and I when I watched it I felt awestruck. I honestly thought it was either real life or a Disney animation movie.

The video is very good overall, but I think the best part is between 3:37 and 3:39 where he shoots backwards. The reflections on the glass at 3:07 are also very nice to look at.

In many places Cberpunk 2077 is already better than a lot of older pre-rendered CGI content. You would never get anywhere near this quality with raster-only. Especially not in such a scenario with many reflections, many light sources, lots of area light, lots of indirect light etc.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I discovered this video the other day, and watching it makes me feel like a mother who sees her child playing a videogame and thinks they are playing a movie.

It's realtime Path Tracing and I when I watched it I felt awestruck. I honestly thought it was either real life or a Disney animation movie.

Although it lacks the terrain deformation which was one of the key aspects to the Motorstorm trailer.

 

[Karamazov]

sand dust clouds alone in the motorstorm trailer would make the PS5 melt.

there's like 1000 times less smoke particle here than in motorstorm and look at the framerate

 

[DavidGraham]

Hellblade II, Fable, and Death Stranding 2 all look better than these in most every aspect, except maybe for image quality, particles, and animation.

None of these games have shown enough gameplay clips yet, all we have seen are cut scenes, which look good artisitically, on contrary to Cyberpunk Path Tracing, which looks excellent during actual gameplay.

 

[Cyan]

Although it lacks the terrain deformation which was one of the key aspects to the Motorstorm trailer.

those trailers as old as they are still age well, they don't have many flaws. However the fire effects are quite lacklustre in the Killzone trailer.

None of these games have shown enough gameplay clips yet, all we have seen are cut scenes, which look good artisitically, on contrary to Cyberpunk Path Tracing, which looks excellent during actual gameplay.

can it look in real time like in the video I shared? Tbh I am not sure that video is "real". I mean it's real but it seems like a video filled with tricks to give a feeling of smoothness, like a tool-assisted speedrun, and TAS speedruns look apparently natural. I still can't believe the video is 100% real time on current hardware.

 

[Nesh]

We have reached the quality of static assets. But the quality of contextuality, sophisticated physics (including particles, liquids and smoke) and AI interactivity is not there. It is not just the asset detail that made these trailers impressive as supposed games.

It's the whole package of believability and immersion. Everything had properties beyond the models themselves.

Everything in Motorstorm had ultra realistic physics and interacted with each other in a manner you would expect in real life. Mud splattered on every surface, windshield would wipe realistically the mud, cars deformed the terrain, cars would receive damage in every possible manner, trees and wooden structures would contextually break in super detail, smoke would be affected by wind and cars passing through.....

In Killzone the battlefield appeared ultra dynamic with every NPC interacting naturally, affecting each other and the environment while the player's supposed interactions with enemies and weapons looked contextual and open to possibilities. Again the physics is beyond anything we ve seen unless it is scripted/baked/precalculated physics in current games. Particles and smoke are still too advanced, and even the soldier who got burned exhibits volumetric fire that I haven't seen yet in such quality in a game. Deepdown looked like a good candidate but it got canned for whatever reasons.

Of course nothing was real, everything was scripted CG, but these trailers communicated a hyper dynamic and contextual world in games that only when there will be a paradigm shift in technology/processing power would only allow this in an actual game. The hype for CELL gave hopes of such paradigm shift, which is why a lot of us were hyped up of something extraordinary, but we weren't even close in reality

 

[Mitchings]

I think pretty everything visual is better now, most of what makes those trailers feel so good is cinematic direction and animation providing a more organic feel (for the most part a lot of this can't be easily represented in normal gameplay while remaining practical).

The one exception is the mud/dirt/sand effects in Motorstorm and how it all interacts. I think this or a very close facsimile could be done now in a high budget Motorstorm-like game but we've simply chosen to allocate resources differently.

 

[Wardious]

Sparse volume texture could be the solution to generate nextgen effects.

 

[Karamazov]

somehow related to CGI trailers/movies