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[Hooker]

You reckon WoW uses normal mapping and/or looks bad?!

 

[Teknopathetic]

It doesn't look "good", or at least not good enough to be put in the same sentence as HL2.

 

[Hooker]

Yeah, I guess you're right. Still looks better than ES4 though



Substitute WoW for Battle for Middle Earth or UT2K4 even. But then again, no game can be mentioned in the same sentence as HL2 graphics wise.

 

[Teknopathetic]

BTW, I'm 99% sure that HL2 uses Normal Mapping.

 

[Hooker]

Only the Vortigaunts I think, and I think those look out of place too. But since they're aliens I guess it's okay (they need to look out of place). I still don't like them though.



My point being, is that not everything is normal mapped. Source is a good engine thus it doesn't need a cheap trick such as normal mapping to "bump" the overal graphical quality of the game. The only game so far doing normal mapping right is the demo of the new unreal engine, and even with that I was dissapointed that they used normal mapping instead of polygons.

Normal mapping looks good when it's done on a model with a healthy amount of polygons (no no blocky feet or heads like Halo2 and Doom3) and when the normal mapping texture is of a high quality. Best of they used vector's for those.

 

[Teknopathetic]

"Source is a good engine thus it doesn't need a cheap trick such as normal mapping to "bump" the overal graphical quality of the game"

By that logic, they might as well stop using cheap tricks such as shaders and stuff too.

 

[axxxj]

All the characters in HL2 have normal mapping on the face plus a lot of the textures around and about have them as well.

One of the best uses I've seen for it was on Dr Breens head, you can see they have the normal map linked to the morph targets of the face and when he raises his eyebrows rinkles appear on his forhead.

The one thing that can make normal mapping look aweful is the fact that the specularity is up so high so you can see the effect of the normal mapping all the time. But HL2 had the specularity set to a realistic level so it looked very subtle and worked a lot better.

 

[Hooker]

Some things done with pixel shaders are just not possible yet with normal geometry, HL2's water for instance.


Whatever Doom, Halo2, ES4 and every other game which relies heavily on it's normal mapping are trying to archieve would have looked much better with nice clean texturing and subtile bump mapping.

Less is more IMO, and the way this new trend is being used in all these new games goed directly in the opposite direction.

 

[solarplexus]

"Hello, kids! And welcome to Gladstone National Park!"

:lol :lol :lol

 

[Catapult Beetle]

The humans and the Daedroth in the older Oblivion pics looked very good, so I thought that Bestheda must've hired some better modelers.... but that minotaur...

 

[Ghost]

I hope they license out the engine to a company with character artists.

 

[Vark]

Some things done with pixel shaders are just not possible yet with normal geometry, HL2's water for instance.

Why would you want to do it with normal geometry though? Pixel shaders exist for a reason.

 

[Gattsu25]

Why would you want to do it with normal geometry though? Pixel shaders exist for a reason.

because with the sole exceptions of Half-Life 2's and Far Cry's water, flat surfaced but shader-filled water is ugly as all hell?

those two games alone use the those effects to good use...water or otherwise IMO

 

[Vark]

because with the sole exceptions of Half-Life 2's and Far Cry's water, flat surfaced but shader-filled water is ugly as all hell?

Even if there are waves on the water that would still be a pixel effect. The water in finding nemo is still just a 'flat plane'.

The problem with shaders right now is that shaders are a programmers thing, when they need to be an artist thing. There aren't exactly a glut of people that excel at both.

 

[Raven.]

Even if there are waves on the water that would still be a pixel effect. The water in finding nemo is still just a 'flat plane'.

The problem with shaders right now is that shaders are a programmers thing, when they need to be an artist thing. There aren't exactly a glut of people that excel at both.

Don't they use REYES? Isn't that a micropolygon based approach?

 

[Littleberu]

Nevermind.

 

[Vark]

Don't they use REYES? Isn't that a micropolygon based approach?

That's a rendering technique, Renderman code / syntax affects per pixel / vertex operations.

In fact Nvidia CG / HLSL was derived directly from renderman (Nvidia purchased a company working on a Renderman compliant renderer). Renderman code can be easily ported over to HLSL with just a few syntax changes.

 

[Raven.]

That's a rendering technique, Renderman code / syntax affects per pixel / vertex operations.

In fact Nvidia CG / HLSL was derived directly from renderman (Nvidia purchased a company working on a Renderman compliant renderer). Renderman code can be easily ported over to HLSL with just a few syntax changes.

Hmmm, must've misunderstood then(I've only heard a few things about it.). In any case, are you sure the water's got no geometry? There's plenty of interactions with it that look quite convincing, and PS water I've seen in games does not deform too convincingly, the deformations that occur when interacting with it appear to be done with polygons(from what I can tell...).

 

[Deku]

No offense to anyone but the Minotaur looks ugly no matter how many layers of texture filtering and lights they put on it.

The environments though look spiffy. But given how the last elder scroll game turned out, I don't have high expectations.

 

[Phoenix]

Even if there are waves on the water that would still be a pixel effect. The water in finding nemo is still just a 'flat plane'.

The problem with shaders right now is that shaders are a programmers thing, when they need to be an artist thing. There aren't exactly a glut of people that excel at both.

Do a pixel effect over the vertex shader/animated geometry set. The whole flat plane thing looks like swimming through a picture of water.

 

[koam]

that looks like a hairy gnome or a tall ewok.

Wait, i thought this was supposed to be on Xenon?

 

[Vark]

Do a pixel effect over the vertex shader/animated geometry set. The whole flat plane thing looks like swimming through a picture of water

A Pixel effect / vertex animation would still be a flat plane operation. The only difference is when you get vertex animation involved you have to raise the tesselation on the plane for more convincing effects.

The most effective way to get more lively water is still to do multiple operations. Larger sin waves to create the base water and successively smaller distortion from multiple origins to create the mini breaking waves over the water disturbance.

This is basically how pixar did it. And admittedly it's a mid ocean effect and more suitable for pre prendered operations.

You can easily apply the principal to realtime operations it just takes a lot of tweaking to get right. An animated wave pattern is going to loop and look way too predicable compared to what you can do in straight up pixel / vertex operations.

Again it comes down to too many shader writers being programmers first and artists second (not that there's anything wrong with programmer art

 

[Gattsu25]

A Pixel effect / vertex animation would still be a flat plane operation. The only difference is when you get vertex animation involved you have to raise the tesselation on the plane for more convincing effects.

The most effective way to get more lively water is still to do multiple operations. Larger sin waves to create the base water and successively smaller distortion from multiple origins to create the mini breaking waves over the water disturbance.

This is basically how pixar did it. And admittedly it's a mid ocean effect and more suitable for pre prendered operations.

You can easily apply the principal to realtime operations it just takes a lot of tweaking to get right. An animated wave pattern is going to loop and look way too predicable compared to what you can do in straight up pixel / vertex operations.

Again it comes down to too many shader writers being programmers first and artists second (not that there's anything wrong with programmer art

2 second idea:

a toned down version of Snowblind's water (the developers...not the game) with Half-Life's water shaders?

 

[Vark]

Hmmm, must've misunderstood then(I've only heard a few things about it.). In any case, are you sure the water's got no geometry? There's plenty of interactions with it that look quite convincing, and PS water I've seen in games does not deform too convincingly, the deformations that occur when interacting with it appear to be done with polygons(from what I can tell...).

It has geometry, but not a lot. So long as you're just apply per pixel operations it doesn't really matter how much geometry is there. You can have a single 2 poly plane and you just tell each pixel where to update on the screen. To that effect you can tell where the player boundries are and you can alter the pixels accordingly.

You can tesselate the plane and alter the positions of the vertices in the code but so long as your pixel operations are on par you don't need to waste your time.

 

[Vark]

2 second idea:

a toned down version of Snowblind's water (the developers...not the game) with Half-Life's water shaders?

Bleh, snowblinds water looked like walking through frickin' jello. Low precision calculations rock!

It'll get better. Shaders are new, people are still warming up to them. I mean early 3d and texturing wasn't exactly much to look at (when your grappling with technology, art takes a back seat).

 

[Ninja Scooter]

it looks like a bad college sports team mascot you'd see roaming the sidelines at a football game.

 

[Phoenix]

A Pixel effect / vertex animation would still be a flat plane operation. The only difference is when you get vertex animation involved you have to raise the tesselation on the plane for more convincing effects.

The most effective way to get more lively water is still to do multiple operations. Larger sin waves to create the base water and successively smaller distortion from multiple origins to create the mini breaking waves over the water disturbance.

If you are depending on just a sin/cos function to do water it will never look realistic no matter how many passes you do over it. It won't ever behave like a fluid. Fluid dynamics are best modelled using isosurfaces and similar to model the volume of the water itself and sampling that. Otherwise it will just act/behave like a piece of player 'splash water geometry' attached to 'ocean water geometry'.

This is basically how pixar did it. And admittedly it's a mid ocean effect and more suitable for pre prendered operations.

Yes, there is a big difference between watching a controlled water environment and having a player and the environment floating around in it.

You can easily apply the principal to realtime operations it just takes a lot of tweaking to get right. An animated wave pattern is going to loop and look way too predicable compared to what you can do in straight up pixel / vertex operations.

Actually they both look about as bad

Again it comes down to too many shader writers being programmers first and artists second (not that there's anything wrong with programmer art

heh...

 

[Gattsu25]

Bleh, snowblinds water looked like walking through frickin' jello. Low precision calculations rock!

to be fair, it only looks good when it's fairly transpearant...either way, I still prefered it to the tinfoil water that shaders were providing around that same time

 

[Brannon]

Hopefully they're animated well.

That's quite a lot to be asking of Bethesda...

 

[spliced]

Looks like he's scratching his back with an invisible back scratcher. :lol

 

[Do The Mario]

Screw the graphics how about they fix the broken difficulty curve which sees Morrowind Being a hard game when you start but being insanely easy when you are close to finishing it!

I have just moved onto the tribunal Expansion back after finishing bloodmoon and even with the difficulty MAXED on +100 the game is so easy!

I just can’t bring myself to finishing the game!!

 

[Brannon]

The leveling system is wacked. Normal leveling is something along the lines of...

1..1....1.....1.......1...........1......................1

where "1" is the gain in skill and the "..." is the time it takes to get the skill increase. Also as you explore different regions the enemies should be able to be adapted to harsher conditions, dodge some of your more powerful skills and it all balances out. But Morrowind has it going like...

1.................1..........1........1...1...1..1.1.111

Every time you get a skill increase, it gets easier to get the next skill increase because you're more skillful at it. Also the enemies are capped at somewhere around level 20 or so, so they can't adapt to you anymore than that. PLUS doing ANYTHING in the game will level up your basic stats to some degree, so no matter what you do, chances are you're going to end up a god amongst rats. The difficulty bar alone can't fix these inherent flaws.

Still can't wait for Oblivion though. I always hope there will be big hulking imposing dragons to slay. An RPG like this needs big dragons that fly and slash and burn with the fury's anger. C'mon Bethesda, give us DRAGONS.

 

[Vark]

If you are depending on just a sin/cos function to do water it will never look realistic no matter how many passes you do over it. It won't ever behave like a fluid. Fluid dynamics are best modelled using isosurfaces and similar to model the volume of the water itself and sampling that. Otherwise it will just act/behave like a piece of player 'splash water geometry' attached to 'ocean water geometry'.

Meh, i'm trying to keep to simple expressions so people can follow without getting into complex volumetric sets. I still stand by the point though that complex physical models have very little to do with visual outcome (in fact I tend to find a major flaw in the industry is the obsession with accurate physical models). Sure you can write a combination of algorithms that accurate model water down to the drop, but is that going to look anymore real than a simplified artistic interpretation that manages to accurately represent the 'idea' of the waters movement. It comes down to skill and available toolsets.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Meh, i'm trying to keep to simple expressions so people can follow without getting into complex volumetric sets. I still stand by the point though that complex physical models have very little to do with visual outcome (in fact I tend to find a major flaw in the industry is the obsession with accurate physical models). Sure you can write a combination of algorithms that accurate model water down to the drop, but is that going to look anymore real than a simplified artistic interpretation that manages to accurately represent the 'idea' of the waters movement. It comes down to skill and available toolsets.

Itmight not look that much more real, but if they had a real-time accurate physics model they would nto need the artist to tweak, tweak and tweak when something gets discovered in play-testing in a particular level that the artist had not thought of or a condition the level designer wants to change.

An accurate physics model has to be accurate to the set of reference given... it does not have to be physics on earth... it might be physics on Mars... on another planet... gravity would change for instance, temperature, air pressure, winds... lots of things would change and lead to a model describing the kind of reality YOU want it to be: it will stay consistent and the interaction of the objects in the world will be somewhat predictable even before the level and the characters start interacting in the level.

Artist cost a lot of mony nowadays (art content is becoming a bigger and bigger expense for high quality games): physics engine get shared and re-used and you generally license them only once. artist need to repeat a lot of the laborious tweaking process for each title they work on: if you can reduce the pressure or the artists side of things, you might hope to reduce the budget required for a series of games (big thing for a publisher ),

 

[kevm3]

Great graphics! I'd love to see Final Fantasy 6 remade in 3d with this level of graphics. Just an idle fantasy of mine...

 

[Vark]

Artist cost a lot of mony nowadays (art content is becoming a bigger and bigger expense for high quality games): physics engine get shared and re-used and you generally license them only once. artist need to repeat a lot of the laborious tweaking process for each title they work on: if you can reduce the pressure or the artists side of things, you might hope to reduce the budget required for a series of games (big thing for a publisher ),

Physics engines still need to be tweaked and aren't always as predicable as you'd think they'd be. Progammer salary + physic engine liscenses >>> Artist salary.

 

[sprsk]

the honeymoon is definitely over on this game.

 

[Vortac]

WTF is wrong with you people.

THIS is a stupid looking minotaur:

There is nothing wrong with the Oblivion minotaur..

Think for yourselves, this isn't North Korea

 

[Aizu_Itsuko]

Think for yourselves, this isn't North Korea

You say "think for yourselves" but you're telling us what to think.

This is not a western vs eastern art debate, and it's not related to how advanced the technology behind Elder Scrolls IV is either. That minotaur model looks bad to me, and that's all I'm going to consider when I'm stating MY OPINION.

If you think that it looks good just say it, but don't come with a "WTF is wrong with you people".

 

[Hitman]

WTF is wrong with you people.

THIS is a stupid looking minotaur:

There is nothing wrong with the Oblivion minotaur..

Think for yourselves, this isn't North Korea

That's actually freaky ass shit. I find characters with unusually large heads are freaky. Like that old witch later from that movie SPirited Away

 

[Arluss]

I like the Minotaur model...

 

[Raven.]

Sure you can write a combination of algorithms that accurate model water down to the drop, but is that going to look anymore real than a simplified artistic interpretation that manages to accurately represent the 'idea' of the waters movement.

If it's in a noninteractive environment, or maybe if the interactions are very limited. But otherwise I just don't get how you're going to get more varied interactions to look believable without at least some decent physics behind it.

 

[COCKLES]

I doubt all the moaners were ever going to buy a MS console product anyway. Minotaur in that pic looks fine....Minotaur's as a concept are frankly silly anyway, this is just an extension of this. I don't think the forest setting helps it...I guess when it actually appears in the game it's in some dungeons or something. Haters - go play your euro-blonde-homeerotica FF bollocks.

 

[Deku]

Well the graphics are quite good, but the Minotaur model is bad. That's just fact.

Has nothing to do with which console you support.

 

[teh_pwn]

Not sure what I'll get this for.

My PC has a 6800 Ultra/P4C@3.45GHz/1024MBPC3200+, which is going to be a generation behind Xbox2. On the other hand, the Xbox2 version may be plagued with technical issues that cannot be patched without Xboxlive.