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Graphic effects that annoy you.
- Thread starter sprsk
- Start date
deadhorse32
Bad Art
Bumpmapping for the sake of it is really ugly. There is a game on Xbox with a kid and a bumpmapped shirt WHOA that's ugly.
Bumpmapping when use correctly see SMS water or Halo2 MC looks good.
Bumpmapping when use correctly see SMS water or Halo2 MC looks good.
PlayStation Tree
Member
Im probably alone in this, but I think the blur effect in new racing games is distracting and overdone. I like the franticness that it creates, but I think its just too much, more than the actual amount of frenzy that driving fast would actually create in real life. Maybe if they just toned it down a bit, especially in games like GTA:SA.
And speaking of GTA:SA, I find that game to be way too blurry overall. I guess its just the limitations of the PS2 showing, but the whole game is dark and blurry as shit.
Add the regular amount of blur from that game to the blur effect when driving, and its difficult going anywhere fast, which is kind of a necessity in that game.
And speaking of GTA:SA, I find that game to be way too blurry overall. I guess its just the limitations of the PS2 showing, but the whole game is dark and blurry as shit.
Add the regular amount of blur from that game to the blur effect when driving, and its difficult going anywhere fast, which is kind of a necessity in that game.
JoshuaJSlone
Member
How about that fakey motion blur effect, which just keeps around part of the previous frame in faded form.
wobedraggled
Banned
Link316 said:
God...
Anyway, I hate bad weather effects, like the rain in Vice City.
I hate the Rare-style fur effect
I hate too blurry Depth-of-Field
I hate normal mapping done wrong (99.9%)
I hate flat water with texture effects (99.9%)
I hate bloom lighting on non-metal objects (100%)
I hate water drops on the screen
I hate volume shadows
I hate ragdoll physics in shooting games without a lot of velocity in the bullets
I hate lens flares (100%)
I hate poor AA
I hate overly shaky cameras trying to mimic the piece of shit camera work often seen in movies
I hate blurring in racing games (100%)
I hate motion blurs (80%)
I hate too blurry Depth-of-Field
I hate normal mapping done wrong (99.9%)
I hate flat water with texture effects (99.9%)
I hate bloom lighting on non-metal objects (100%)
I hate water drops on the screen
I hate volume shadows
I hate ragdoll physics in shooting games without a lot of velocity in the bullets
I hate lens flares (100%)
I hate poor AA
I hate overly shaky cameras trying to mimic the piece of shit camera work often seen in movies
I hate blurring in racing games (100%)
I hate motion blurs (80%)
dynamitejim
Member
RE4 uses bump-mapping for some of the bosses and I think Leon's jacket as well. It uses a lot of different effects throughout the game, it just uses them subtley.
I hate distance blur. That's an effect that is ok in a cutscene to focus you on something.
But when I play and want to check something in the background and all is blurry, I feel like an old man that needs new glasses
Worst examples: Super Mario Sunshine and Zelda Wind Waker:
OMG, Mario lost his eyes:
What's on the flag on the top of the castle?
And don't tell me, it's about heat waves... you still can see very far very clear in hot environments:
http://www.saudi-us-relations.org/photos/saudi-landscape.jpg
But when I play and want to check something in the background and all is blurry, I feel like an old man that needs new glasses
Worst examples: Super Mario Sunshine and Zelda Wind Waker:
OMG, Mario lost his eyes:
What's on the flag on the top of the castle?
And don't tell me, it's about heat waves... you still can see very far very clear in hot environments:
http://www.saudi-us-relations.org/photos/saudi-landscape.jpg
Drinky Crow
Banned
fun shading
Parallax Scroll
Banned
What effect is used to create the light reflections on characters here? Is this bloom lighting?
Parallax Scroll said:What effect is used to create the light reflections on characters here? Is this bloom lighting?
in def jam... its a faked lighting setup - i can't remember what they did or what its called but the effect is not real time
I can't really think of anything but yeah Bloom lighting can get annoying. Pikmin2 - my biggest quibble was the overt bloom in the piklomedia.
and no point hating on Normal mapping or bump mapping - they're the techniques in place to take a game next gen (once the machines are robust enough to handle them; unlike XBOX and Halo2)
not so much a graphical effect but YUNA/RIKKU/PAINE's articulated head model has me hating that pasted on eyes/mouth texture technic that so many games use. It NEEDS to be modelled.
and
last thing... it can be considered graphical but BAD ART is always bad - no matter the graphical effect
FriScho said:
It's called depth-of-field. It's a camera lense effect.
Parallax Scroll said:
Looks like rim-lighting. A fake way of creating a 3-point light setup to make the characters contrast with the background.
Well this is what normal mapping looks like in current games. Very low poly, plastic looking and too shiny. Normal mapping will only look good nex gen. Current consoles can only do low poly normal mapping, so it looks very bad.Inumaru said:Why the hate for normal mapping? I guess I haven't seen the really bad examples of it. To me normal mapping means making this:
Look like this:
gollumsluvslave
Member
I don't hate any particular "effect" per-se, what I dislike most is anything that destroys immersiveness in a game - the only thing that I know of that's consistent in that regards isn't even a graphical effect - Load Times are the worst thing in games IMO.
As for graphical effects, it's a case by case basis as far as I can see :-
Bloom Lighting - adds to immersiveness in POP Sands of Time, looks like it will be used to great effect in Wanda. Severely overused in Fable and Sudeki.
Bump-mapping - Great in Halo, not so prevalent in Halo 2, great in Riddick, great in Enclave (Starbreeze got it down), terrible in Deus Ex Invisible War - strangely fine in Thief Deadly Shadows??? WTF???
Normal Mapping - 2 edged sword in Halo2 (LOD glitches - not sure if this is because of normal mapping or the LOD system), good use in Half-Life 2. Riddick and Doom perpretrators of the "plastic" look, whether this ruins the immersiveness is down to subjective taste. Didn't bother me really.
Depth of Field / Motion Blur - needs to be appropriate to the scenario. The depth of field effect used in Halos sniper, and motion blur in Quantum Redshift (Redshift levels especially) are good uses IMO.
One thing that is important to note, is that more often than not, it is not the graphical effects that are at fault - it's the art assets/models/ textures that are used in conjunction with these effects. For instance, take Quantum Redshift vs F-Zero FX:- it's the superior track / vehicle and colour design of F-Zero that wins out over QR's bland and generic designs. Not really anything to do with the bump mapping stuff IMO.
Good devs with good design teams will do good things no matter what tech they use IMO.
As for graphical effects, it's a case by case basis as far as I can see :-
Bloom Lighting - adds to immersiveness in POP Sands of Time, looks like it will be used to great effect in Wanda. Severely overused in Fable and Sudeki.
Bump-mapping - Great in Halo, not so prevalent in Halo 2, great in Riddick, great in Enclave (Starbreeze got it down), terrible in Deus Ex Invisible War - strangely fine in Thief Deadly Shadows??? WTF???
Normal Mapping - 2 edged sword in Halo2 (LOD glitches - not sure if this is because of normal mapping or the LOD system), good use in Half-Life 2. Riddick and Doom perpretrators of the "plastic" look, whether this ruins the immersiveness is down to subjective taste. Didn't bother me really.
Depth of Field / Motion Blur - needs to be appropriate to the scenario. The depth of field effect used in Halos sniper, and motion blur in Quantum Redshift (Redshift levels especially) are good uses IMO.
One thing that is important to note, is that more often than not, it is not the graphical effects that are at fault - it's the art assets/models/ textures that are used in conjunction with these effects. For instance, take Quantum Redshift vs F-Zero FX:- it's the superior track / vehicle and colour design of F-Zero that wins out over QR's bland and generic designs. Not really anything to do with the bump mapping stuff IMO.
Good devs with good design teams will do good things no matter what tech they use IMO.
MrPing1000
Member
Doom3's homage to action man and alsorted plastic monsters
MomoPufflet
Member
FriScho said:I hate distance blur. That's an effect that is ok in a cutscene to focus you on something.
But when I play and want to check something in the background and all is blurry, I feel like an old man that needs new glasses
Worst examples: Super Mario Sunshine and Zelda Wind Waker:
OMG, Mario lost his eyes:
What's on the flag on the top of the castle?
And don't tell me, it's about heat waves... you still can see very far very clear in hot environments:
http://www.saudi-us-relations.org/photos/saudi-landscape.jpg
Oh god, I forgot how much I HATED that effect in Sunshine and WW.
Parallax Scroll
Banned
I liked how Wind Waker blurred stuff that was far away. Didn't play enough Mario Sunshine to know if I'd like it in that as well or not.
deadhorse32
Bad Art
The WW screen posted above is really crappy, even Link is blurry.
Milhouse31 said:
That is a terrible screenshot. But that fact remains a lot of people realize they need glasses when they begin getting headaches for no reason. This is exactly the symptons I got when playing the exterior scenes for extended periods with component cable. My eyes are my best sense, and having to stare at that blurry crap did a number on me and gave me headaches.
Gaia Theory
Member
Holy crap! Does Halo 2 ever have poor design and execution! That is fugly.
Honestly I wouldn't know if on the rendering side it makes a difference or not.arhra said:
But I was more talking about how they planned to do it. Riddick / Doom 3 / SCCT use normal mapping to add details to a low poly character model, based on a very high poly one. For halo 2 they modeled the characters as low/med poly directly, and added bump mapping if needed for the material.
Two very different ways to create a character, and if done right the Bungie way allows for more detailed bump maps, since you can have the same material repeated multiple times on the same model.
tahrikmili
Member
MomoPufflet said:
Please go ahead and read about antialiasing and texture filtering techniques. Current FSAA techiques only remove jaggies on the edges of polygons. I have no idea what you find so funny, but you really seem to be mixing texture filtering and antialiasing up.
FriScho said:I hate distance blur. That's an effect that is ok in a cutscene to focus you on something.
But when I play and want to check something in the background and all is blurry, I feel like an old man that needs new glasses
Worst examples: Super Mario Sunshine and Zelda Wind Waker:
OMG, Mario lost his eyes:
What's on the flag on the top of the castle?
And don't tell me, it's about heat waves... you still can see very far very clear in hot environments:
http://www.saudi-us-relations.org/photos/saudi-landscape.jpg
You nailed it...it's very hard on the eyes...and it looks SO good sharp.
Like watch the intro to the game (when the logo and PRESS START is on the screen) and everything is so clear. It looks AMAZING, and then you start playing and it looks like my cats penis.
Still amazing game, though...(Wind Waker, not SMS).
Warm Machine
Member
Parallax Scroll said:What effect is used to create the light reflections on characters here? Is this bloom lighting?
That is called irradiance lighting. Most likely generated with a spherical harmonics based gradient.
Almost all modern games (last year or two) use irradiance lighting as opposed to the old fashioned point light solution.
In racing games, such as RSC2, PGR2, and GT4 the light information is rendered in real time using the same technique as the real time reflections on the vehicles.
For the lighting, 6 textures are rendered from the objects' placement in the world. The textures are then mapped onto a sphere/hemisphere and from that the color and value of texture is sampled and fired back as vertex color information on what you want lit. Spherical harmonics works in a similar way except that there is no texture involved, instead the color and value information is pre-generated or generated on the fly using mathematics.
It is the best that can be done to simulate global illumination on current gen hardware.
Mercenaries uses it all over the place. Walk a character around one of the faction offices and you'll notice that where ever you go the light is always accurate to your character. If you were to see the old fashioned method and the new method side by side the difference would be night and day, especially in games such as racers, where the objects being lit are quite detailed.
OK, if some of you are including physics...
It still pisses me off that my arm can go through walls when turning round, or I can run on the spot if I hit a solid object. Can we please have proper inverse kinematics next gen to at least make the characters behave in their environments?
It still pisses me off that my arm can go through walls when turning round, or I can run on the spot if I hit a solid object. Can we please have proper inverse kinematics next gen to at least make the characters behave in their environments?
Gaia Theory said:
I think you need to look at the models in the actual context of the game. They looked pretty good to me while I was playing the game. I'm sure if you threw your average Doom 3 model against a white background, it'd look pretty simple and angular too. With time, poly count will increase to take even better advantage of the technology...
I hate that! Nothing breaks immersion more than watching your character's face, arms, and weapons go thru the wall. This is more art direction and programming than bad graphic effects.
Ratchet & Clank avoided this though by aiming the weapons straight up as you got close to the wall. Love that series
Kabuki Waq
Member
Distance blur is by far the most annoying...it is never a good thing.
tahrikmili
Member
Kabuki Waq said:
Distance blur doesn't work too well currently because games don't seem to understand too well what the player wants to focus on..
Particle Physicist
between a quark and a baryon
J2 Cool said:
sometimes whole characters would pop into a scene a bit too late.. it really brought me out of the game.. i hated it.
I hate the enemies in Halo 2, in-game. It's like there's SO MUCH BUMP-MAPPING squished into the model that any features you might want to look at while blasting away are just mashed up into some horrid mesh of alien.
UGH. Nothing was really *clear* (NPC-wise) in that game, anyone know what I mean? Cutscenes were really nice though. Maybe it's because I'm not used to what these aliens look like, I need more time to see where their mouths are and stuff.
UGH. Nothing was really *clear* (NPC-wise) in that game, anyone know what I mean? Cutscenes were really nice though. Maybe it's because I'm not used to what these aliens look like, I need more time to see where their mouths are and stuff.