PleoMax said:
Well i don't really understand half of what you said, but let me just say that what Sega Rally does is effectively change the 3D, unlike Motorstorm. Since motorstorm is a paralax effect(textures effect), it's bound be seen differently depending on where you are.
I know that, but as you can see in the video and pics (where they show the geometry without textures: the wire-frame meshes)... ok, basically the ground has a certain level of detail in the close area around the car (when I say that the triangles density in the polygon mesh is high I mean that said mesh is subdivided/made of a lot of tiny triangles as opposed to a less detailed version of it in which the engine is using less triangles to represent the same object), but the road is not kept at the same level of detail further down the distance:
As you move with the car the road is progressively refined and the displacement applied and modified according to where the cars' tires are passing (the displacement can and is dynamic in SEGA Rally).
The problem though is that the road is progressively scaled down in detail depending on the distance from the camera and thus the car as it would be insane to render the entire road at the same level of detail you see near the car.
http://www.gamersyde.com/gallery_6029_en.html#
The steeper the angle between the road's surface and the camera then less you will be able to appreciate the subtle and less subtle bumps in the road and if to that you add the fact that the deformation is applied to a lower and lower resolution surface the farther you go from the car you might have a more similar result to what you see in Motorstorm. You can even see in the videos how the bumps look better and better as you get close to them. This is a favtor under SEGA's control though of course.
IMHO, it is not something gamers should be worried about: the beauty of the 3D Road deformation is its flexibility: they can give you a nice variety of deformation levels (not just a "either deformed or not deformed" scenario) and also the ability of the deformation caused by a car passing by adding to the deformation caused by other cars passing.
I do always prefer modifying geometry rather than approximate it by using normal/height maps when possible so I wish SEGA Racing Studios the best of luck: hopefully the compromises they have made (to achieve this solution) pay off.
In Motorstorm the problem is also there when you use the 3rd person view camera: similarly to what you do with geometry (but for an entirely different reason: you are trying to avoid texture aliasing/shimmering) you can basically contribute to the texture's (and thus the normal map) blurriness in the distance by not taking enough samples from the texture maps (in the proper direction) for each pixel of the textured object you are trying to draw on the screen (anisotropic filtering) and/or moving the view so that the terrain is almost perpendicular to the screen by mip-mapping (using lower resolution version of the same texture as you move away from the camera and blending between mip-map levels to avoid the clear presence of lines separating them) .