Unreal Engine In Game Vs. Publicity Shots

you are all avoiding the issue.

The gears of war engine on xbox360 looks like shit. This is not opinion, please look at this:
http://ve3dmedia.ign.com/images/03/11/31111_GoW2-Screenshot-General-16.jpg
or this
http://www.gameskaos.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/gears-of-war-2-screenshot-6.jpg

When you look at the actual game, it's not even funny anymore:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3429/3233897122_68e9ab75bd_o.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3419/3242613194_bb4a75bee1_o.jpg

Also, i work for a game magazine (in holland) and in our review we were not allowed to post actual screenshots from gears of war 2, even though we have capable hardware to do so. We were only allowed to publish their supplied bullshit, er, bullshots. You will never see an official (game supplied by epic games, plus free press goodies) review which has actual screenshots from the game.
That was the issue here, the screenshots do not even remotely resemble the 'press screenshots'.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
That 3rd shot doesn't resemble the Gears of War 2 I played, that looks like a glitch. Btw, it is best to compare the same scenes. As you have the equipment it shouldn't be too tough to compare the first two shots with nearly identical in-game ones. That would be more relevant.
 
Yes, don't compare best- and worst-case situations. Can you grab a scene similar to the promo pics with the stone walls? That'd be a good comparison as to what areas have been improved for the promo pic.
 
There are some Gears 2 screenshots with similar setting here: http://imk.cx/screenshots/xbox_360/gears_of_war_2/

49.png

http://imk.cx/screenshots/xbox_360/gears_of_war_2/42.png
http://imk.cx/screenshots/xbox_360/gears_of_war_2/48.png
 
I said "engine".
The engine in the game compared to the bullshit shots lacks the depth of field, lightning, polygon detail, textures, texture filtering, (soft)shadows, anti-aliasing, hdr, and whatever aspect of an engine can be lied about as seen in the shots.
Gears does not have real shadows, ie they do not originate from a light source, and so on.
But because you never see this in reviews, and the game on your tv is filled with blur, people never realise this.
 
Of course a frame rendered by the game is never going to match the quality seen in those press shots, but the features you mention are present to some degree.
 
Dargakis said:
I said "engine".
The engine in the game compared to the bullshit shots lacks the depth of field, lightning, polygon detail, textures, texture filtering, (soft)shadows, anti-aliasing, hdr, and whatever aspect of an engine can be lied about as seen in the shots.
Gears does not have real shadows, ie they do not originate from a light source, and so on.
But because you never see this in reviews, and the game on your tv is filled with blur, people never realise this.
Click to expand...

Didn't the magazine do a review of gears 2? Didn't you analyze the graphics?

DoF, lightning (unless you meant lighting), soft shadows, some kind of ~AA is there in the game. Even the first Gears of War has it. About lighting I dunno if it is HDR or LDR like KZ2.
 
This was the quality of GFX I excepted this generation to have as an average. :) Looking at Killzone2 I think that picture quality is achieved when PS4 and/if billions-of-transistors-GPU is included.
 
Frankly I've always thought that GoW for 360 looked great considering the hardware that it runs on. The Epic Unreal Engine engine demo shots would have unlimited resources considering that are just shots and are PR. If a company was considering the engine to licensing, they sure as hell should ask for some realtime practical demos.

As for their bullshots of GoW/GoW2, well most of the gamers out there have zero concept of 3D engine/hardware realities and probably don't even notice that the game doesn't look like the bullshots. ;) There isn't exactly an outcry of maddened millions of GoW gamerfolk going on. They're probably lining up for the next sequel.

I say ignore the screens and watch video footage. I suppose they can fake that too though with offline rendering.
 
grandmaster said:
Yup, as I mentioned, the cinematics in UT3 are offline rendered.
Click to expand...
Well I was referring to watching game preview videos instead of looking at screens when you are judging a game's graphics. In-game footage. I'd think that faking that with offline rendering would be rather obvious unless they pre-recorded the player movements in realtime mode and then played them back in offline mode.
 
You're getting into 'should they?' territory here, and not 'how do they?' which is the question. Is there ib essence a switch in UE3 that enables super-dooper PR mode that applies not just oversized rendering for downsampling, but also a completely different lighting engine? Is this an advertised feature of the engine for developers who see it as an asset? Have we got a lot of comparable games doing this, as all I can think of are EPIC's own creations.
 
Your comparing Halo 3 the game, to a CGI trailer created by Digital Domain.

That's an increadibly silly example.
 
Well there are some very doctored Halo 3 shots out there that look nothing like the actual game with all of its various visual disappointments.
 
warb said:
Your comparing Halo 3 the game, to a CGI trailer created by Digital Domain.

That's an increadibly silly example.
Click to expand...

It is pretty clear he is trolling at this point. Look at the 3rd Gears pick he showed and the Halo CGI.

Fyi, when he posts the Gears shots that correspond to the exact game scene (and they are from the game) I will take that assessment back but he is obviously picking the best PR media and pitting it against the poorest media he can find. Ho. Hum.

No one is denying people PR up shots. Heck, Activision (CoD) and Sony, among others, tried passing CGI off as real gameplay. Are companies running uber high resolution textures, AA, AF, with Photoshop post processing to make gameshots look better? YES! Cranking up lighting samples and shadow map resolution/quality? Yeppers. Ticking on features they won't make it to the finish build due to performance issues? Absolutely.

Are some engines better than others at this? Of course. UE3 as a multiplatform engine running on the PC can surely crank up the resolution on about everything, even tick some PC only features, and make 'purty' screenshots. PGR had all sorts of nice ingame tools to make killer shots and FM and GT add extras as well.

Normal PR Gameshots
http://www.gamersyde.com/gallery_8755_en.html

Supersized PR Gameshots
http://www.gamersyde.com/gallery_8897_en.html
http://www.gamersyde.com/gallery_9476_en.html

Take the below shot, which should be very very easy to get in game from the exact same situation. Comparing such would be a more valid means of identifying what Epic is doing instead of the BS comparison before.

URL]


LOD, texture resolution, AA, AF are all cranked up. But I think you will find the same shot in game looks very good.
 
swaaye said:
Well there are some very doctored Halo 3 shots out there that look nothing like the actual game with all of its various visual disappointments.
Click to expand...

Halo 3 uses, if memory serves right, a 7x7 grid from the game. I don't even believe it adds MSAA or AF. There are some absolutely stunning "gameshots" from gamers, with no Photoshopping, through the selective use of camera angles and backdrops to maximize lighting and constrast and to isolate the pretties from the uglies (the game can be quite plain and in some areas quite last generation, e.g. Forerunner areas where the lack of AF and AA destroy the texturework and hard "clean" edges).

One thing that I think needs to made really clear in threads like this is the difference between a gamplay shot and in-game (in-engine) shot. Classic example is the Halo 3 E3 announcement. That was in-engine. The Vid-doc on it shows exactly what they did: selective backdrops and spot lights and flattering angles to minimize the uglies and to put the engine forth with its best light. In the vid doc you can see many non-selective camera angles and you can see it is the same engine but the camera angles and backdrops aren't as flattering. Gameshots focus on what gamers see in gameplay and are far more restrictive in terms of how pretty you can make them.
 
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