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Should Kojima ditch MGS4 engine and use UE3 instead?
- Thread starter Doom_Bringer
- Start date
MickeyKnox
Member
That makes absolutely no sense to me.element said:
Crysis is exactly like Far Cry, a long interactive engine demonstration, granted that both of those engines were/are amazing on a technical level. Epic made an engine that looks "ok" and managed to sell it to a lot of people but it won't be wowing anyone once real next gen development has had time to settle in. (I personally can't suspend my disbelief when looking at the normal mapping used by that engine, sorry)
And yet you rag on Kojima's team because they can make a game whose engine is not nearly as complex as the big western ones but still manages to pack the same wow factor?
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
MickeyKnox said:
Seriously this is exactly what it comes down too. Westerners sometimes get envious when the Japanese make a better looking game (or great looking game) with less effects.
They always say oh it's the art. Just go to Final Fantasy threads on the internet. Lots of people say FF XII looks good because of the art. They say MGS2 or MGS3 look good because of the art, yet don't give credit to the technical side of things.
MickeyKnox
Member
I'm completely serious. It looks "ok." If by the mid life of this generation UE3 is still gets OMGHOLYSHIT!!!!111111 reactions this will be the worst turn around for visuals since the standardization of 3d gaming.Chris_C said:
A low poly model looks like shit regardless of how you try to normal map it, to me it's like having a glaring neon sign pointing out the shit that looks completely off.
I said suspension of disbelief and I meant it,
When I look a this:
I just see this:
mckmas8808 said:
Not taking sides here, but Kojima himself has come out to say he thinks Eastern devs are trailing in technical department.
My roommate and I would argue about this all the time, Eastern devs do have some great art design, and some amazing technical accomplishments (SOTC, Res 4, MGS, etc, etc) but more often than not they forget the most basic things that make the total package (not the games mentioned above necessarily) but how long did we have to live with the invisible handshake and the karate chop motion when a character in an Eastern RPG/Action game was talking?
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
I'll leave this good looking gif for you guys. I'm going to bed.
Moderation Unlimited
Banned
Element...I pose this question for you:
When will devs start putting more emphasis on the most important thing to make a visceral experience believable: animation, physics, simulation, ai, depth/detail of interaction....rather than just assets, textures, and lighting?
Focusing on assets, textures, and lighting is the recipe for the uncanny valley. We know this, so why isn't the recipe for making a game changing?
When will devs start putting more emphasis on the most important thing to make a visceral experience believable: animation, physics, simulation, ai, depth/detail of interaction....rather than just assets, textures, and lighting?
Focusing on assets, textures, and lighting is the recipe for the uncanny valley. We know this, so why isn't the recipe for making a game changing?
element
Member
I personally would love to see devs move into more things like that, but outside of physics and AI I don't see many publishers willing to fund projects that depend on those to sell. I think the closest thing I have seen so far that fall into what you are describing is Alan Wake, but we haven't seen any gameplay yet, so I might have to take that one back.
you will be highly disappointed because that is where every developer is going.
how did this turn into a western vs eastern debate?
If we wanted to go down that road we could talk about team size and the amount people are paid.
Gears of War development team size, about 45. MGS3 development team size, about 75. This is a last gen game, what will MGS4 team size be?
Moderation Unlimited
Banned
MickeyKnox said:A low poly model looks like shit regardless of how you try to normal map it, to me it's like having a glaring neon sign pointing out the shit that looks completely off.
The thing that I find most unappetizing about low-poly, highly normal-mapped characters is that they tend to not animate as well as high-fidelity character assets because the number of joints, the skinning, and the complexity of the skeletal frame are limited, relative to a higher poly model (even if the higher poly-model is normal-mapped, as well...but to a lesser degree).
To some degree for me, devs being heavily reliant on normal-mapping (and many other shallow graphical effects that add nothing to gameplay) means that they (companies publishing and funding the game) don't really care about the depth of interactivity in games. Really, what they care about is flashes, sparks, and explosions...b-grade action movie stuff. And, for me at least, that really sucks as a design perspective.
For example, if there was a detective game and you got a warrant to search someone's house in the game, I'd want the ability to pull out every drawer, open every cabinet, examine every object in each of those at different levels of detail, use every object in each of those in a multitude of ways, read all the papers in the persons filing cabinets, pull pieces of ripped up paper out of the trash and reassemble them to read a note that was thrown away, use a knife to cut open the mattress to see if there were drugs/contraband hidden inside, and generally just overturn, search, and examine every object in the house. Technically, this should be feasible (I believe)....why can't a game like this be made?
60,000 polygons in Snake's hair alone says absoluting f***ing not.
But hey who cares if a character's head looks like it's made out of two boxes squished together? It's got the normal map, the motion blur and TEH SPARKS!!!! NEXT GEN AM HERE UE3 for FTMFW
:/
Fortunately I have a bigger chance of winning the lottery than Kojima switching to UE3.
But hey who cares if a character's head looks like it's made out of two boxes squished together? It's got the normal map, the motion blur and TEH SPARKS!!!! NEXT GEN AM HERE UE3 for FTMFW
:/
Fortunately I have a bigger chance of winning the lottery than Kojima switching to UE3.
PjotrStroganov
Member
mckmas8808 said:I'll leave this good looking gif for you guys. I'm going to bed.
Lotsa bad texturing. This will no doubt be updated in later builds.
MickeyKnox
Member
**** that shit then. I wouldn't mind if UE3 was the minimum spec or even the default spec, but if it's the best looking thing out there in 5 years this will officially be the WORST gen ever.element said:
But thankfully I can still look forward to Kojima, Level5, the SOTC team among others to continue on the path they have been on to delvier games that look great.
And out of curiosity, is 45 people the number of people who worked on Gears alone or including the teams that built UE3 since its a propietary engine?
element
Member
verts not polys. big difference.
What is this style people keep talking about. When a dev team uses UE3 it doesn't automatically make their characters bald and have huge boots.
Teams will improve the process, or use it in a much more limited fashion. I find it funny that every team you listed is a PS3 developer.
Gears will not be the best looking game by next year. As I said in previous posts games like the Naughty Dog Jungle game will be amazing, and when more devs get used to what ever tools they are using, we will see improvement each quarter.
Moderation Unlimited
Banned
element said:
I think the multi-pass texturing/effects system UE3 utilizes is much too taxing on the system as a whole, especially ram utilization and fillrate. What about all the other elements of next-gen gameplay/visuals I keep referring to? Where do they fit in the scheme of what UE3 is optomized for/good at?
Confidence Man
Member
Moderation Unlimited said:
Oh god.
Moderation Unlimited
Banned
Confidence Man said:
Seriously, if you don't believe that then that means your happy with the current state of games right now. They really haven't evolved too much in a LONG TIME. Something needs to start...and if that means taking some emphasis off graphics, I'm all for it.
element
Member
it is all there. just depends on where the developer wants to go with it. UE3 is pretty open in allowing devs to explore the things you mentioned (they would probably have to do some heavy dev work on their own to get some of those things running on UE3, like the conversation system in Mass Effect), but many publishers see pushing games at an emotional level as too much of a risk.
add another 10 to 15 if you include the engine team.
Confidence Man
Member
Moderation Unlimited said:
No, I don't believe that, because it's utter nonsense. And yeah, I'm pretty happy with the current state of games right now and in the near future.
MickeyKnox
Member
Funny how? I listed Japanese developers that have delivered quality and are showing signs of more to come, so what if they are working on PS3, Capcom will surely be bringing some good shit as can be seen from LP and their track record and I *hope* namco will come up with the goods.element said:
I don't have a problem with normal mapping itself, only the way it's used in UE3. The in engine character models are just too low poly. The gap between the render mesh for the normal maps and the real time one is simply too large and ends up working against itself.
When I sit down to play a game on a console I care waaaaay less about engine specs and far more about art direction and the rest of the experince. When I sit down to play a PC game however, then I care about all the engine features so that I know what to look forward to from mods and custom work.
element said:
Agreed on both counts, I don't think it's a case of UE3 not matching MGS4's "style" whatever that may be.
I also don't think Gears will be the best looking game of this generation, personally I think the Naughty Dog game is more visually impressive even in its current state. Although as you've stated, we don't know that what we've seen is player controled animation, based on what ND has done in the past though, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Moderation Unlimited
Banned
element said:
And there it is my friends, stagnation of an industry.
Moderation Unlimited
Banned
Confidence Man said:
Looking at your post history, I see many of your posts have the flair of cynical disconnectedness from the varied state of others' opinions...in other words, you lack empathy and the ability to be constructively critical. Perhaps, you are socially inept...so I will try to avoid hanging on your words.
But it's certainly not utter nonsense. If you looked outside of your narrow point-of-view for a second, you'd realize that what I mentioned is the reason for why casual gamers can't see a difference between this gen and last.
Moderation Unlimited said:
I agree with that, every time I want to show some of my non-gaming friends that videogames can make you emote and tell a good story I think of showing them games like Metal Gear Solid and (recently) Gears of War. Then I remember that these are only "deep" relevant to the medium. They're much more happy to play Gears of War than Metal Gear Solid because the end result is the same for them, they have fun. There's very rarely much subtlety and variety to the depth of the emotions elicited by different videogames.
EDIT: Man... I better go to bed. Or at least look up some porn or something.
MickeyKnox
Member
Except for the whole thing with the being harder to make something look good on underpowered hardware and the much more similar nature of EE-->Cell, than Celeron--> 3 core Power PC.Yoboman said:
The biggest learning curve is in the fact that they actually get to have a real gpu to work with this time.
Yoboman
Member
Yeah, that was basically my point. Looking at the selection of PS3 games, the textures are generally alot weaker than they need to be. It seems to have just grown into an inherent design choice. Sooner or later the Japanese developers will take a grasp of better texturing, mapping and lighting techniques. There's also a plus in having worked with limitations though, thery are much stronger in animation and models in the vast majority of Japanese (and PS2 exclusive dev) games, I've noticed.MickeyKnox said:
CosmicGroinPull
Member
OverHeat said:we can do the same for gears lol
Wow, very nice. Give your environment artist a raise, Epic. And fire the character artist. Or make him stick to designing monsters.
MickeyKnox
Member
Or tell him he's not allowed to play Warhammer 40,000 while working on the next game.CosmicGroinPull said:
MickeyKnox
Member
I think it's a combination of that and a lot of place holder work being shown in the trailer, the team only got back from an on location shoot for textures and level design no long before the last trailer was shown.Yoboman said:
I'm also not expecting 2040x2040 textures on a system with 512 megs of total memory.
fortified_concept
Banned
No way. I prefer the models and backrounds with a ton of polygons instead of a ****ton of shader effects to hide the few polygons which is afterall the Unreal engine technick. I never liked to many shader effects that's why maybe I completelly hate what Rare has done with PDZ for example. Still I do want better textures since there are some really dissapointing ones in the gameplay trailer. Let's hope they were placeholders since other textures in the same trailer were very impressive. Anyway DB congrats for another great thread, I don't know what this forum would be without you man.
fortified_concept
Banned
Chris_C said:
...and too many shader effects thown in the game. Generally I'm very conscious of the shader efects in a game when they're used excessively. And since Unreal Engine is based on excessive use of shaders to hide the engine's flaws, I don't like it.
PuppetSlave
Member
This thread has really risen from the grave
Good read last pages
Good read last pagesDude, MGS4 will look better on its current engine. Nothing against UE3.Doom_Bringer said:This in not a troll thread and I am bashing the visuals of MGS4 and neither should you! I mean can you guys even imagine what MGS4 would look like running on UE3? Anyone else think UE3 is perfect for creating the best next gen atmosphere? I mean the lighting, the graphics are so pretty, it will be very hard to top this! I mean even Bungie admitted to saying "oh GoW focuses on tight areas etc"...
I bet Kojima is playing this game right now cause he liked it a lot at E3! I wonder what kind of influence it will have over him? I mean Konami already licensed the UE3 engine for Coded Arms... How hard will it be to switch engine right now? The game looked pretty early at TGS! *Crosses fingures
MickeyKnox
Member
We should have a DoomBringer thread salvage team, with PMs automaticaly sent out whenever he hits the New Thread button.PuppetSlave said:This thread has really risen from the grave
Confidence Man
Member
Moderation Unlimited said:
Um, what? Let's go back a second. Your statement:
Equating the use of certain graphical techniques and a lack of depth or interactivity is silly. Some games like Bioshock will be all about interactivity, others like Gears will be all about action. Whether or not they use normal mapping or other graphical effects has no bearing on the way the game will turn out from a design perspective.