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What visual/graphics challenge do you like developers to solve most?
- Thread starter RustyNails
- Start date
That looks nice but there isn't much grass there, when you get fields of long grass with a character walking through it just looks off.
SwordStruck
Member
Real time ray tracing.
ss_lemonade
Member
LOD changes? A good example of it getting worse between generations is Halo. The remake versions (both 360 and xbox one) feature LOD model swapping not found when switching to the og xbox visuals
nkarafo
Member
Grass looks bad because it's still a 2D or cardboard asset in all games.
But the lack of real time shadows and self-shadowing is the main reason they look so fake. In many good looking games you get real time shadows on everything except grass which makes it stand out. SSAO somewhat helps (especially in Witcher 3) but i's still not good enough.
That's why other types of foliage like bushes or big leafed plants and palm trees look good. Because the bigger leafs are proper 3D objects that cast shadows.
Witcher 3 and Dying Light have the best looking grass atm IMO.
But the lack of real time shadows and self-shadowing is the main reason they look so fake. In many good looking games you get real time shadows on everything except grass which makes it stand out. SSAO somewhat helps (especially in Witcher 3) but i's still not good enough.
That's why other types of foliage like bushes or big leafed plants and palm trees look good. Because the bigger leafs are proper 3D objects that cast shadows.
Witcher 3 and Dying Light have the best looking grass atm IMO.
thatJohann
Member
Bad hair graphics in video games still baffle me in 2016. Why does it look so bad compared to other elements?
Backfoggen
Banned
Jaggy shadow edges. Praying for someone to find a solution that does not wreck performance.
nkarafo
Member
Alice in Madness Returns still has the best looking hair and that's a 2011 game without using a special, GPU crippling hair physics option...
crack-king
Member
It's not only about costs. Some car manufacturers just don't want that their cars can be crashed so that someone could die. It would leave a bad impression on them. That's also why Ferrari sometimes prohibits journalists (like in The Grand Tour) to measure the time of one of their cars on a track. Because it could lose to some other car.
That's really sad, but well... We need more games like Burnout
I remember an interview once with Yamauchi about GT5 where he compared the crash physics to that of Burnout Hilarious, when you think about the end result.
abracadaver
Member
- Bullet casings need to fall to the ground in every game and need sounds
- more physics! Half-Life 2 is 12 years old but still ahead of many games in terms of physics
- more destruction
- better explosions
- better gore
- more gore
- more physics! Half-Life 2 is 12 years old but still ahead of many games in terms of physics
- more destruction
- better explosions
- better gore
- more gore
Equanimity
Member
Yeah you guys are right, folliage is abundant and looks really good but there's barely any grass in those screenshots.
However, floor textures do look pretty good in UC4:
I'll try and get some ground texture screenshots as well. I can pm them to you two if you want.
SumptuousLemur
Banned
Full destructability and explorability without a sacrifice to graphics.
We've been stuck since Red Faction Guerrilla at a stagnant space for destruction and physics. Immersion and believability is ruined when a grenade goes off and leaves some flat 2D sprite on the same geometry instead of causing damage.
As for explorability, seeing that same building have all its doors locked and windows with a weird reflection cube map kills it too. Being able to enter and explore just provided so much more.
This doesn't necessarily have to be an open world game thing, I am tired of static and sealed environments in any game.
We've been stuck since Red Faction Guerrilla at a stagnant space for destruction and physics. Immersion and believability is ruined when a grenade goes off and leaves some flat 2D sprite on the same geometry instead of causing damage.
As for explorability, seeing that same building have all its doors locked and windows with a weird reflection cube map kills it too. Being able to enter and explore just provided so much more.
This doesn't necessarily have to be an open world game thing, I am tired of static and sealed environments in any game.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
The performance hit from complex looking hair simulation is still too severe outside of a tech demo settings. The fact that we got one last gen game with hair that looks like this in real time:
is some technical wizardry. and this only applies to Lara's hair compared to other characters:
Great hair simulation in general like many other things takes years of painstaking work to get right, but in realtime, just like ray tracing the hardware can't support it in the context of a full game. The onmly Like, you know Elsa? Her hair has more than double the amount of individual strands than Rapunzel and Merida. This is why Moana is incredibly impressive because just look at this shit:
Nah, the grass in the witcher is fairly bad. It makes up for it by volume and density. You won't find any game with the same volume of ground foliage. The best grass in itself I'd say is that found in the Far Cry games. But those use the same properties you mentioned, they're taller grasses so they benefit from better shadowing despite being less dense.
TheAdmiester
Member
Sounds like 2017's Crackdown will be right up your alley.
- Low resolution shadow maps and self shadowing (the only real graphical flaw of Uncharted 4.)
- Non-existent anisotropic filtering (FFXV looks instantly so much better with AF enabled in HQ Pro mode.)
- Dithered/pixelated hair (ruins many current gen character models.)
- Poor LOD (Basically all open world games look atrocious in the far distance, especially on console, even though being able to gaze into the far distance is/should be one of the most important and impressive aspects of open world games.)
- Aliasing (Still often a big visual flaw of games. Nioh or Nier: Automata look way too jaggy on the standard PS4.)
- Non-existent anisotropic filtering (FFXV looks instantly so much better with AF enabled in HQ Pro mode.)
- Dithered/pixelated hair (ruins many current gen character models.)
- Poor LOD (Basically all open world games look atrocious in the far distance, especially on console, even though being able to gaze into the far distance is/should be one of the most important and impressive aspects of open world games.)
- Aliasing (Still often a big visual flaw of games. Nioh or Nier: Automata look way too jaggy on the standard PS4.)
So much stuff.
I think i dont like shadows the most. There is not a single game that does them in good precision right now.
The other things are LOD and shading precision, which is quite low sometimes.
I dont also like that transparencies are low quality or that fx lighting is not per pixel.
People that work on graphics and art do not work on stories, characters or gameplay.
I think i dont like shadows the most. There is not a single game that does them in good precision right now.
The other things are LOD and shading precision, which is quite low sometimes.
I dont also like that transparencies are low quality or that fx lighting is not per pixel.
People that work on graphics and art do not work on stories, characters or gameplay.
SumptuousLemur
Banned
Yeah I am definitely looking forward to it other than the fact the major cloud powered destruction is for online only MP
TheAdmiester
Member
Yeah I am definitely looking forward to it other than the fact the major cloud powered destruction is for online only MP
I'm hoping that you can have an online solo session and/or that MP still means you can do the campaign.
mhayze
Member
I think getting the face right is one of those key things, i.e.
- No 'dead eyes', i.e. eyes look right at you, follow you properly, etc. Half-life 2 got this right first, years ago, and it still bothers me when other games don't
- No hyper-white teeth / super dark mouth
- Skin. It's not plastic, render it properly
- Hair, should look and move realistically
- No 'dead eyes', i.e. eyes look right at you, follow you properly, etc. Half-life 2 got this right first, years ago, and it still bothers me when other games don't
- No hyper-white teeth / super dark mouth
- Skin. It's not plastic, render it properly
- Hair, should look and move realistically
Conciliator
Banned
i'd really like to see canned animations and auto lipsyncing get better. its obvious in games like mass effect or the witcher that they cant mocap or keyframe every single conversation, but the current limitations for those situations does bring me out of the story a lot.
potatohead
Member
I was really disappointed finding out Mafia 3 doesn't really have PhysX stuff when Mafia 2 has such good PhysX on PC.
Aside from what surely many people have already mentioned...
I want to see the end of concrete clothes. I'd like to see characters actually wearing accurate clothing on top of their bodies. An accurate clothing simulation.
And not just trickery like how UC4 (or MGS3 on a simpler scale) does it with the with the appearance of clothes flowing in the wind.
This might be impossible though. Do CG movies even do this?
I want to see the end of concrete clothes. I'd like to see characters actually wearing accurate clothing on top of their bodies. An accurate clothing simulation.
And not just trickery like how UC4 (or MGS3 on a simpler scale) does it with the with the appearance of clothes flowing in the wind.
This might be impossible though. Do CG movies even do this?
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Witcher 3 was pretty great with this actually, every scene in the game used auto lipsyncing as a base and then the devs went in and keyframed every conversation to make them flow better, that's really unheard of. That's some next level dedication.
Yes. Many CGI movies have clothes that accurately fold and deform depending on the movement. A lot of time and a team usually goes into just that aspect though. Even a game like Until Dawn likely couldn't fit that in without a massive performance hit despite the game really not having any complex AI.
Clipping is more of an art issue than anything involving tech. The brute force solution of running a ton of collision checks on everything in the game at all times isn't feasible, so you solve it by adding constraints to things that might clip.
One common form you see is disabling most/all of a character's hair when they wear certain forms of headgear. If you want to compromise and still show some parts of their hairstyle through it, you work that out on a case by case basis and increase your workload in the process.
If you want to make sure a character's shoulder armor never clips through their body, all the possible shoulder armor needs to fit within a certain envelope where it'll never go where it shouldn't during any animation it might get used with. Again, the number of scenarios that have to be tested grows wildly as you add more animations, more character models, etc. so you inevitably wind up with a few things that slip through the cracks.
CG movies do plenty of physics simulations for hair and clothes, but they have the luxury of taking hours to render each frame. They can also cheat and change the properties of those bodies or add a sudden change in airflow to make them look a certain way for a particular moment.
One common form you see is disabling most/all of a character's hair when they wear certain forms of headgear. If you want to compromise and still show some parts of their hairstyle through it, you work that out on a case by case basis and increase your workload in the process.
If you want to make sure a character's shoulder armor never clips through their body, all the possible shoulder armor needs to fit within a certain envelope where it'll never go where it shouldn't during any animation it might get used with. Again, the number of scenarios that have to be tested grows wildly as you add more animations, more character models, etc. so you inevitably wind up with a few things that slip through the cracks.
CG movies do plenty of physics simulations for hair and clothes, but they have the luxury of taking hours to render each frame. They can also cheat and change the properties of those bodies or add a sudden change in airflow to make them look a certain way for a particular moment.
FarFromAnyGame
Banned
Max Payne 3 is awesome.
SprachBrooks
Member
Why is clipping so hard to eradicate? I never understood it.
SprachBrooks
Member
Your comment is completely redundant. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Did you not play any games on 360/Wii/PS3?
capitalCORN
Member
Duke 3D had a weird way of doing things. Screen space real time reflections are one of the most expensive effects. Although even Quake had some cubemapped reflections on some cards.
Especially when it's been possible to get rid of it since DX10, it was one of my favourite additions to the PC version of the original Bioshock, fog and smoke that doesn't clip through geometry
RustyNails
Member
Why isn't it feasible? How powerful must the systems get before we can run collision check all time every time?
It's mind-boggling. Look at the kind of performance drops associated with doing better hair physics on a single character in games like Tomb Raider 2013 or The Witcher 3, then apply that to every possible onscreen object.
Hell, watch Car Boys and see how easy it is for Nick and Griffin to bring a (presumably) powerful PC to its knees with soft body physics on vehicles.
IcyRhythms
Member
Have we advanced to a point where clipping in no way, shape, or form has to exist? I don't know of many games where this doesn't happen. A lot of 2D platformers maybe?
KainXVIII
Member
Yeah, Duke has "fake" reflection, but still something, not like broken or dirty mirrors in most of the new games. Or in some extreme lazy occasions - mirrors just don't reflect because fuck you
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Because a game is based on more calculations than just colliders. These things add up and wreck performance because it has do all these things on the fly.