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Sorry for double post but I guess it deserves it:

 

While I cringe at this level of violence and meticulous animation that portrays it, I admit Naughty Dog have some of the best lighting artists out there. Especially since majority of lighting in the game is ambient.

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12 hours ago, peter_spy said:

Sorry for double post but I guess it deserves it:

...

While I cringe at this level of violence and meticulous animation that portrays it, I admit Naughty Dog have some of the best lighting artists out there. Especially since majority of lighting in the game is ambient.

I always found it really stupid how violence is extremely downplayed in games and movies but erotism/sex (not talking about porn here) is considered totally off limits. I've seen a video recently where people, including James Cameron, were discussing, that the scene in Ridley Scott Alien, where Ripley is in underwear was over the top.   

Edited by HMart
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Yeah, that was one of my thoughts as well, why do you perfect violence to such insane degree, while something as normal as two people making love looks like smashing plastic toys against each other? And I'm not buying a "serious adult story" bit that the game director is pitching.

Maybe companies like Naughty Dog or Rockstar have driven themselves into a corner, because all they ever did was perfecting graphics and animation techniques, while the only means of interactivity they know is shooting people in the face. At this point they just have nothing else.

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36 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

Yeah, that was one of my thoughts as well, why do you perfect violence to such insane degree, while something as normal as two people making love looks like smashing plastic toys against each other?

It's just politics. It's entirely outside the control of game developers.

Nobody cares about shooting and death in video games as long as the targets are all acceptable: enemy combatants, Nazis, zombies, degenerate criminals, mutant aliens. Only when the violence starts to affect unacceptable targets (e.g. women or protected minorities) does anyone have a problem with it.

On the other hand, introducing sex into video games is going to get your product slapped with the most restrictive adult rating, labelled a "porn simulator", possibly dropped by vendors or gaming stores, and attract criticism from across the political spectrum — the Right will declare that it is immoral and decadent, the Left will protest that it is sexist and degrading to women. You can hardly blame game developers for not wanting to bring that storm down on their own heads.

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But they will attract politicians again, because at this level of fidelity they're very close to snuff films and "murderer simulators". Games have been on that path several times already while looking way more "innocent" than they do in this example. Hell, we're at the point where Mortal Kombat animators got PTSD from YT research they had to do for all the breaking bones or people being hanged.

If you don't want to say anything political, you definitely don't do a game like that. You do a bland Ubisoft game like Far Cry whatevernumberitisnow.

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1 hour ago, peter_spy said:

If you don't want to say anything political, you definitely don't do a game like that. You do a bland Ubisoft game like Far Cry whatevernumberitisnow.

Far Cry is your example of something that is NOT a murder simulator?

 

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4 hours ago, peter_spy said:

Yeah, that was one of my thoughts as well, why do you perfect violence to such insane degree, while something as normal as two people making love looks like smashing plastic toys against each other? And I'm not buying a "serious adult story" bit that the game director is pitching.

Witcher 2 and 3 actually had quite convincing erotic / love scenes, but I agree that this is not very common.

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TBH, I don't care about love/erotic/whatever in a game at all. I'm rather into splitting heads than making love in a alternative reality. :D

Or picking pockets, to stay on topic of this forum, hehe.

I heard that there's quite convincing virtual reality stuff now, for people who are into that sort of thing. ;)

Edited by chakkman
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3 hours ago, Springheel said:

Far Cry is your example of something that is NOT a murder simulator?

I used this example mostly because Ubisoft tries so desperately not to make any political statements with their shooters. They were really defensive about that around when Division came out. They were also criticized for Far Cry 5 I believe, for having a sort of portrayal of modern South American gun nuts, but without doing anything specific about with it. I think there was even an article titled something like "Far Cry 5 and the desperate art of saying nothing" :D

And as far as "murder simulator" part goes, with all the HUD indicators, damage numbers, health bars, etc. and pretty "industry standard" character animation, this doesn't give me that queasy feeling The Last of Us 2 does.

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Might have lost a link I wanted to share, oh well.

Grubb: Third-Party Devs Are ‘Fawning’ Over PS5, Didn’t Hear Same Level of Praise for Xbox Series X

Lumen GI Uses Software RT for Indirect Lighting Only; Nanite Exploits Primitive Shaders on PS5

Scorn Dev Reassures Xbox Fans on Unreal Engine 5, Says Raytracing Will Be Used on Case-by-Case Basis

Epic CTO Believes Unreal Engine 5 and Next-Gen Can Create a ‘Continuum’ Between Games and Movies

12 hours ago, The Black Arrow said:

P.S. Doesn't anybody else feel like the character is out of place compared to the boring all-brown color environment? It's a bit uncanny valley.

The biggest immediate criticism I heard of the demo was that the character model was cartoon-y in relation to the environment, which is not a surprise given that they used real world "cinematic quality" scans to make the environment. And then the next day when more details were coming out, it was bashed for being 1440p 30 FPS on the PS5 rather than 4K 60 FPS, which has been the presumed next-gen target. Lack of ray tracing in the demo is probably not a big deal, it will get used wherever it needs to get used.

The most important aspect of the demo is at the end of it, when she rushes towards that portal. It's meant to show off the fast asset streaming capability of the PS5's SSD.

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Unreal Engine 5 Partially Rewritten Specifically for the PlayStation 5’s Super-Fast SSD

Quote

 

Last month Epic unveiled “Lumen in the Land of Nanite,” a breathtaking demo for their new Unreal Engine 5, running on PlayStation 5 hardware. Understandably, that raised a lot of questions – was Epic specifically designing Unreal Engine 5 to take advantage of the PlayStation 5? Would the Xbox Series X be able to run the same demo? Epic has been somewhat wishy-washy in their response, continuing to praise the PS5’s capabilities, while also hinting the Unreal Engine 5 demo could be done on other platforms.

Well, in a new interview with VG247, Epic’s VP of engineering Nick Penwarden confirmed they have specifically rewritten parts of UE5 to take advantage of the PS5’s super-speedy solid-state drive, implying the engine will be able to do things on Sony’s console it can’t do elsewhere…

Quote

The PlayStation 5 provides a huge leap in both computing and graphics performance, but its storage architecture is also truly special. The ability to stream in content at extreme speeds enables developers to create denser and more detailed environments, changing how we think about streaming content. It’s so impactful that we’ve rewritten our core I/O subsystems for Unreal Engine with the PlayStation 5 in mind.

 

 

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On 6/2/2020 at 3:44 PM, peter_spy said:

But they will attract politicians again, because at this level of fidelity they're very close to snuff films and "murderer simulators".

The most snuff experience i had, was Manhunt 2. That game had crappy graphics for todays standards. But the gameplay and visual effects where right on point. That beast was meant to be a serial killer simulator and it felt very real.

But this game here does not look like they are trying to get the player feel anything like being a killer. It looks like a (although exceptionally pretty) stealth shooter where you kill "the bad guys" so they don't kill you or conquer the world.
Would probably still try it - if it wouldn't be console only...

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  • 2 weeks later...

IIRC, and I only played first manhunt, the sound effects were terrifying in that game. But the most "spectacular" murders also required a lot of work from you, and the game's point was more on the role of violence in entertainment. But it sure was unpleasant as hell overall.

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1 hour ago, jaxa said:

The Digital Foundry Video linked in that article is pretty interesting. They highlighted pragmata pretty much, but the characters were once again not next-gen at all...

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  • 2 months later...

I recently saw a video of a GTA V graphics mod, that featured screen-space reflections (SSR). It was a night-scene, and it was raining, so the street was reflective. The car reflected all sorts of lights and surroundings, and the street reflected the car including those reflections on the car itself. I am pretty sure the reflections on the car were created by a cube map and the rest is SSR. But I kept wondering if multi-bounce reflections would be possible with SSR. Anybody ever heard of something like that?

At first I thought, a fairly cheap approach (that would yield similarily incorrect results to the cubemap reflection + SSR approach above) could be
Trace only a single reflective bounce (because these traces are expensive), but sample the framebuffer at that position in multiple sample-passes. 

In the above example, after the first pass, the street would reflect the car as if it was non-reflective, and the car would reflect its surroundings. The second pass would use the previously computed image as input, so that the street could now also reflect the reflections on the car.

However, as I wrote this post, I realized that the double reflections generated by this might look ok-ish, but are not actually correct. The problem is that all reflections would be calculated based on incident vectors from the camera to the current pixel, rather than from the 1st bounce reflected pixel to the 2nd bounce reflected pixel. So, in order to achieve correct multi-bounce reflections, one would definitely have to trace these multiple reflective bounces.

 

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  • 1 month later...

I figure this thread is a relevant place to ask...

Does anyone know a modern and up-to-date place to find stats and metrics on recent game releases, in terms of polycounts and drawcalls and performance?  There's a lot of yabber and vague info floating around everywhere, but extremely difficult to find hard solid numbers since around the early 8th gen consoles.  People these days simply don't seem to know.

I remember way back, looking through these engine features:-
https://www.iddevnet.com/quake4/LevelEditor_Performance.html
...and naively thinking that all game engines would provide these kind of tools, even those not necessarily moddable.  How wrong I was.  I have 'Wolfenstein Youngblood', that's the most recent title that has these kind of console commands for development.

That's great and all, but I'd like to find like a 'hub' dedicated to folks into dissecting modern games and seeing exactly how they tick.

 

 

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Quote

The answer is as usual, it depends.

Exactly, which is why I'm asking.

 

This is a good list, but it's from the 7th gen just into the 8th, so this info is quite outdated and is already showing a huge disparity, even though we could safely guess why some numbers are different to others (such as fighting games and games not using all the crazy rendering bells and whistles):-

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/yes-but-how-many-polygons-an-artist-blog-entry-with-interesting-numbers.39321/

 

What the internet needs is some Digital Foundry level of inspection into modern (9th gen) titles, that provide info like that Quake 4 page I provided in the last post.  I can barely even find a modern wireframe shot.

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IMO that comparison makes sense per game type mostly. E.g. open-world first person-shooters will have different character budget than strategy games, or even third person RPGs. 100k per character may work well with several enemies on screen, but RTS game with 30-men troops won't have 100k per each. I saw that list long ago, and it does give you some insight sure, but in general "as few polys as you need / can make time for" is the general rule. More polys per objects mean not only more power needed, but more man days needed to make an asset in the first place. Your engine may afford a lot in this regard, but your company not so ;)

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Tell that to folks who fart out characters from Daz3D like it's nothing.  Your advice is a bit cynical.  Higher polycounts doesn't necessarily correlate to more skill and effort, infact the opposite may be true.  But ultimately, the GPU doesn't care if it's artful or not, it's all about numbers, and that's what I was asking about - solid figures, not yet more vague philosophies.

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