What's next-gen doing wrong.

If it's a misconception, why do I see it happen all the time? As a LCD user I'm constantly trying to use Vsync. In every single game out there, if you don't also use triple buffering, you will see 15 fps, 30 fps, or 60 fps typically. Not much in between. Triple buffering resolves the fractional framerate drops. The game will run 43 fps say, instead of 30 fps or 60 fps. Many games don't support triple buffering though so in those cases I'm stuck with crippled framerates or lots of tearing at the LCD 60 Hz refresh.

Triple buffering may not be practical on a console though, with the limited framebuffer size.

 

A wiser man than I listed my main three complaints earlier:

1. Overuse of Cloth Effects

2. Minimal Thonging

3. Overall lack of Bust Mapping

So FEW next-gen games get it right!

(Thank you, Aldo... I'm still laughing!)

 

its simple, nextgen consoles arent powerfull enough to implement all your wishes in these games

 

This depends on how you measure frames per second. If you count the number of different frames displayed on screen, e.g. 59 fps are completely possible using vsync. If you extrapolate the time between writing two frames to the backbuffer in an unbuffered rendering system, you'll end up with 15/30/60fps or (on a 60Hz refresh display).

 

i guess he meant 30fps for a short time locale, be it as short as 1 frame.

my take on what's wrong (in individual points, but they somehow come related)

• way too much sway for the marketing/fashionable element of the day. HDR and whatever-currently-rocks-the-marketing-boat does not magically turn a B-rated game into a good game. all this comes from the fact that often the title producers have no clue what constitutes a good game - as long as you have your marketing bullet-list sprayed over a fat amount of content it should be all good, right?
• having clueless producers usually leaves the most technically senior personnel to generally determine the directions and emphasi in the title (potentially after having wrestled with the lead artists) - naturally, those technocrats pull for the technicalities and the technical-demo aspect, leaving little of an actual game to play and enjoy. games should be made by people with clear game visions and game mechanics ideas, no from your engine developers/technical gurus! case at hand: id's games versus god of war. both sides are technologically-exquisite titles, but the former have been technology demos ever since doom1, the latter is a magnificent game built with a vision, using the right technology.
• the right technology - it should come to serve the requirements of the game, not satisfy some technical ambitions or anything else! i'm sick of racers that do not bother to draw the road well (but have obsene amounts of other stuff), FPS' that don't try to draw and/or animate targets well (but have parallax mapping on every wall of every corridor), or generally-framerate-critical genres where after everything said and done the framerate has sunk so deep that no v-sync-disable could save it.

and the next time somebody tries to sell me a game console as a means to sell more tv units i'll boycot that vendor for the rest of my life. there. over and out.

 

720p with 4xMSAA is going to remove significantly more edge aliasing than 1080p without MSAA. As for waiting to judge, we have already seen games at 2Gigapixels, and have done so for years (see: PC), so there is no real mystery between 720p with MSAA and 1080p without.

 

I guess we will have to wait till 2010-12 for these problems to get solved. j/k

 

Nevermind!

 

Too much LOD. What's the point of having more draw distance if they're going to blur the crap out of it so that I can't see the background anyway? It's neat for cinematics but please take that out of the actual game so I can enjoy the environments.

Too much specular bloom. It's a neat effect for the first ten seconds but it gets annoying.

More collision mapping please, especially for action adventure games, this is next-gen, we do not need invisible walls, and let the character jump and climb when it looks like it's possible instead of gimping the character's moveset just so you don't have to put in collision mapping, or have to lock the character in the environment, if it makes sense to be able to reach certainly places, it should be possible for the player to do so. GTASA really opened things up with climbing over walls and swimming, environments obviously don't have to be THAT open but the player shouldn't be limited in terms of the environment he is currently in.

 

AA is used mainly to reduce the alaising , caused by us seeing the pixels onscreen, higher resolutions reduce the size of the pixels thus also reduce the need for AA. i believe once an image is displayed at 600dpi u dont need AA at all (todays monitors only display int the range of ~80 -120dpi ), this figures going up though, some day in the future AA wont be needed.
*btw im ignoring viewer distance from the screen

 

I don't mind the LOD level, but it's the shitty transitions that really bother me.

RARE games stand out as an excellent example of LOD done right, Oblivion would be on the other end of the scale.

 

Yes!

Why is it that ground textures always seem to suck? Is there a technical limitation to it, or is it just that no one really cares?

 

Simple answer, they're the most prevalent, most common, so they're usually one of the largest performance hits (if it was increased that is to be top quality). Its also easier to hide the fact that you've re-used alot of the same texture when its detail is low. Personally i really cant blame the devs. Some day when they've introduced hardware with tons of performance to burn we'll see it cured.

 

Ground is incredibly difficult to get right. You usually have to cover a very large area, and you can't spend more than 3-4 texture layers on the ground. There are many tricks... use tiled textures, a large lightmap, a heavily tiled detail map, and vertex colors to add color and pattern variation, alpha blending to transition between different types of ground etc. etc. But there's still a limit on how much tiling you can have before it becomes too obvious, and how many different textures you can use and at what resolution.

So you can either resort to less acceptable tricks like limiting the visibility of the scenery through the level design, or limiting camera motion, especially zooming in/out - or you have to accept that the player can get into a position where the ground does not look good.

Also, good looking ground would require enourmous amounts of geometry, the surface should be bumpy, you'll need small rocks and big rocks, and so on... No current GPU has enough power to do this, and what's even more important, such fidelity takes a hideous amount of work.


We usually cheat in CG: our concept artists paint 2D projected textures for every major camera angle, sometimes using cameras with huge field of view for shots that have a lot of camera movement. This way a single texture will have a 1:1 or better texel to pixel mapping - but this method relies on knowing and optimizing every shot and is not adaptable for an interactive enviroment.
This is the same scene from two different camera angles, and the ground is a different painting basically in both shots:
One
Two

Pixar had to do detailed ground in Bug's life first and they've relied on procedurals, but they aren't bothered if the results are cartoon-like. They've made some nice progress in the past years and Cars is quite realistic, but I have no idea how many tools and how much processing time it took to build those enviroments. These methods will probably not be feasible for games for a long time either.

I think Carmack's MegaTexture may be a solution, but Quake Wars screenshots seemd to show that they've been aiming to make the ground look good from medium distances, and not from close-ups either. And it's terrain is quite low poly, too. I wonder how the next id game will look like.

And by the way, there have been games with good looking ground in close-ups, like the original Halo on Xbox. But it did not look that good from a distance, when you've been able to use the Banshee to fly around.

 

Animation. Although we have seen some great progression in graphics, the better the graphics, the more it shows many games lacking in animation.

Physics. Weight. Although this might take into account other variables again with graphics improving ragdoll physics are fun and great to watch but again it just "feels" fake when trying to tie it with the sometimes life like graphics.

Hair. Although I know its very complex and again full of variables my god please make it a little better. As much as Im looking forward to DOAXV2 the hair in the pics is (at this point anyway) disappointing.

 

Thanks for that Laa-Yosh.

Shame it's not likely to happen anytime soon.

 

Animation for sure.

 

Enimies that look the same but different color scheme...

 

You're the first one I've heard on this. I though it was pretty cool (even last gen) and it sure doesn't bother me in PGR3 (when did you play Forza 2 by the way? ).

I suggest you stay clear of Lost Planet too.

Curious: are there more people bothered by this?

 

Framerate. Framerate. Framerate.

Need I say more?