Rage

[miffy495]

Jagged Alliance? Can't think of much else though.

[MrHoatzin]

Whereas Fallout's drab uniformity turned me off

This ain't fair.

[Jake]

I've always hated stencil shadows... looks too sharp and flat, and very expensive to make them softer. Plus I suspect today's games shy away from it because its cpu usage increases with geometric complexity (doing edge tracing and all).

CryEngine3 reportedly has real-time global illumination, which means

this quality of lighting in real time.

Whether they'll be able to deliver on that promise remains to be seen.

There are caustics going on in that too. Does that go hand in hand with GI? (Either in CryEngine3 or just in general?) ...My brain associates caustics and global illumination with each other because they're bundled together in the same tab in Mental Ray in Maya, but I don't know mathematically what they have to do with each other as I know zilch about graphics programming. Just curious.

1. the impact of unified lighting wasn't that impressive, because other games beat it to the punch (DE: Invisible War for example)

I thought the Ion Storm games of that era were using a Doom3-era Carmack-based licensed renderer. Like, the Doom 3 engine or a proto-Doom 3 engine. I might be misinformed, though.

[toblix]

There are caustics going on in that too. Does that go hand in hand with GI? (Either in CryEngine3 or just in general?)

I guess it depends on which algorithm(s) you're using to do the GI. I'm not an expert on this, but I think a plain radiosity solution will not give you caustics, while photon mapping will. Of course, I have no doubt that, in a couple of years, games will have awesomely quick fake caustics that will look almost real at 60fps.

[spindrift]

GI is an umbrella term for a whole bunch of lighting algorithms, and Caustics is one of the more advanced ones, i would be pretty shocked if crysis were able to render it in realtime. I assumed that when crytek said realtime GI, they were just talking about some basic radiosity with a couple of bounces, i can't imagine it being too much more than that (still pretty impressive though).

This ain't fair.

what does this mean?

[elmuerte]

I thought the Ion Storm games of that era were using a Doom3-era Carmack-based licensed renderer. Like, the Doom 3 engine or a proto-Doom 3 engine. I might be misinformed, though.

DS:IW used UnrealEngine2 with the addition of dynamic lighting.

[James]

On the other hand, not much really changed in the basic architecture of computers in the last 20 years (a braver man would argue that nothing really changed in 30 years, but that is not my fight)—quantum/biological computing would be a far more revolutionary a shift than anything that happened in the last 20-30 years...

Yeah, that's pretty much my thinking. I guess the components are being updated one by one, but I'm interested to see how such a revolutionary change will take place. It's one of those things that will obviously have to happen at some point, but I can't actually imagine that point.

[elmuerte]

That's not really true. The major changes are technologies that became stable and cheap enough to be used for consumer products.

Sure, the basic layout/operating model for a PC hasn't change much in all that time. That's because it's infrastructure. Just like it's very difficult to change how cars/trucks operate due to the roads. There is quite mature technology to create an automated road where you don't have control over the car, but a central system does (the movie i-Robot showed an example of this). This is a very good solution for traffic jams. But it requires massive changes to the infrastructure.

But just because the basic layout of PCs don't change much doesn't mean there have been no changes in the way PCs work. Back in the day a CPU did everything, after a while co-processors where introduced to handle memory management, floating points operations. At a point certain software parts where moved to their own co-processors, like sound and graphics. Then graphic chips received their co-processors for 3D handling. After a while the certain co-processors for CPUs became part of the CPU, same with the graphics co-processors. The working of processors has also changed for various reasons, but in general they remained more or less the same as being single thread processors (and they still are). But for various other things a different approach could be used so that a single processor could handle multiple threads, and these things were useful for various "simple" functional routines like shader or physics calculations. And now these stream processors are moving towards the "CPU" and the dedicated graphics chips are being reduced to the simple framebuffer chips of years ago.

So there are changes going on, they might just go unnoticed unless you take a broader view.

[James]

I don't think the point is that nothing changes; I think it's a matter of the more fundamental architecture change that something like quantum or biological computing would presumably require (or perhaps not). Of course there are developments in how things work, but I would have thought that biological and quantum computers would work in an entirely different way and have a completely different set of hardware and interfaces and standards and so on. Then again, I guess I have no real reason to think that. Perhaps it just affects the internal workings of the processor or something. Clearly I'm no expert on this stuff. I just assume that it'll be something where you have to kind of take the plunge and ditch all your old hardware and maybe software. Thinking about it, it'll probably be more mundane. People were suggesting a similar kind of watershed with 64-bit processors, and it turns out that there's plenty of backwards-compatability and inter-operability and the transition to actual fully 64-bit computing is taking ages. At least, that's how I understand it. Again, I'm very clearly not an expert. Or perhaps, if they do offer such spectacularly better performance, our existing infrastructure would be a horrendous bottleneck.

STILL, the reason for even mentioning any of that was that the comparison between the advances in technology over the past ten years and the prospect of shifting to either of those prospective technologies in the next ten years doesn't seem perfectly matched. Am I right in thinking that the essential components of processors have been largely the same throughout the whole of personal computing's history, albeit getting orders of magnitude smaller with time? And that the essential components of quantum computing or bio computing would be quite fundamentally different? I guess it all might just plug into a variation of an ATX board, but it's still something they're having to develop from scratch, isn't it?

OH I DON'T KNOW.

Also, and in more general terms, I think people have a tendency to get carried away with their visions of the future. It's amazing to think how far things have come in just a few short years, but in another sense things are still pretty much the same as they ever were. The year 2000 has been and gone and we're not living on the moon, but we are doing incredible things that we never would have guessed a few decades ago. I get very hesitant when people say "oh yeah, we'll have quantum computing in ten years, and we'll all have cybernetic implants by 2020" and so on. I can live with projecting estimates from existing trends, but when it involves something new emerging it seems to rely on too many variables to be accurately predictable. But, to be fair, DanJW did say "at least", so all these words are pretty much pointless.

So, that Rage, eh?

Edited August 27, 2009 by JamesM

[MrHoatzin]

what does this mean?

I am not going to argue that Fallout is not drab, because I can see how someone can see it thusly.

On one hand, there are conceptual reasons for making the whole world drab and dreary, on the other, there is so much subtle difference between areas that obviously took great effort and restraint to put together. Not every post-apocalyptic game needs to look like a Mad Max Doom Carnival for it to be compelling, cohesive, interesting.

Simply damning Fallout for the cardinal sin of drabness and uniformity doesn't take into account what good that relative drabness and uniformity brings to the experience. 2001: Space Odyssey is a very, very slow and boring movie. This is not an accident. Space travel is supposed to be slow and boring and Kubrick wanted the viewer to feel this. There are too many crazy extreme games out there, the subtler ones should not be penalized for subtlety.

[gdf]

I guess because they're both great looking post apocalyptic wasteland shooters people will imagine some connection beyond that. I always think of the Post Apocalyptic Wasteland setting as some tired old game cliché, but when I try to think of all the games set in such a world I fail to come up with more than the Fallout games. Oh, and also that game Quarantine.

EA's Wasteland as well.

You're right, though. There are a few things that the wider public assume games to be about that have wormed their way into my perception of the medium, that being one. The untapped trope.

And I think that LOPcagney's criticism is fair in terms of Fallout 3. It just ground me the fuck down with that green mist and blandness. I don't care if that's the intended effect, because there's no point turning people off completely. Fallout, which I've resumed playing recently, is far more tolerable. It struck the right balance in some weird intangible way that Bethesda's entry just didn't for me.

[LOPcagney]

This ain't fair.

Well, it was meant as a criticism, but one that reflected only my personal taste. I had a hard time with Morrowind too, even though from what I've heard it was a fantastic game. I'm easily turned off from games by little things (or big things, depending on how you look at it) like specific artistic choices and my impression was that Bethesda would build these incredible systems which allow you to play in an entirely open-ended world, which is commendable in it's own right, and then by spreading out the experience they would tend to lose the focused attention to detail of some other games. I can't quite articulate exactly what it is about Bethesda's Fallout that I find lacking, but even though Rage might not turn out to be a "better" game, per se, it looks like they're taking more creative liberties with the post-apocalypse cliche.

[LOPcagney]

2001: Space Odyssey is a very, very slow and boring movie. This is not an accident. Space travel is supposed to be slow and boring and Kubrick wanted the viewer to feel this.

Pacing is a different issue. I'll admit that it was a slow movie, but visually, it was beautifully stylized, with the pristine which cushioned corridors and Hal's single red "eye". The visuals allowed me to love the film despite it's turtle's pace.

[spindrift]

@Kingzjester: I don't feel like fallout 3 was particularly subtle in its drabness at all. I think it was too brash and overbearing.

Any art needs contrast to give it visual interest, if you are going for one extreme or another in your overall stylisation, then it is all the more important to give the viewer some contrast to maintain that interest. Fallout 3 did it one really notable time when you emerge from the cramped, relatively clean and well maintained vault into the wider world where everything is completely destroyed and dead. That first view of the world they made is spectacular, but after a few hours in the game it loses its novelty because after that moment it's all essentially the same. Brilliantly well made and realised, granted, but I still think it's a failure of the otherwise great art direction in that game that it disregards this basic artistic truism.

It doesn't even have to be a lot of contrast, or something completely at odds with the aesthetic, just minor touches here and there would have helped. A broken, polluted world gives you myriad opportunities for adding moments of colour and contrast. Rust isn't always just one shade of red. Polluted water can be spectacularly colourful in a sickly way. Rocks and the soils have a range of colours. Types of plastic don't degrade in colour, and scraps can have fleuro yellow or orange bits of colour poking through. etc, etc.

There are opportunities to give the world some contrast while still maintaining the overall stylisation they chose to go with. It would have emphasised the desolation, while giving some intermittent relief from it. Instead, this wonderful world they made just descends into drabness, like anything will if you are looking at the same thing without relief for 15+ hours.

[MrHoatzin]

Pacing is a different issue.

Not really. I am talking about the whole work. I am defending a seemingly ludicrous decisions that were made (visuals omg so fucking drab, retardedly slow and boring piece of entertainment), on the grounds that they benefit the whole (sense of utter desolation in a nihilist landscape, space flight is not supposed to feel exciting and instantaneous).

@Kingzjester: I don't feel like fallout 3 was particularly subtle in its drabness at all. I think it was too brash and overbearing.

Any art needs contrast to give it visual interest, blah blah blah.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Sorry. Truisms are retarded. Contrast is just a tool, like any other, not some sort of fundamental pillar without copious amounts of which art automatically crumbles into irrelevance.

Again, the visuals are just a part of the whole. Making them too uniform and contrastless (and really, I don't think they were all that uniform and without contrast; it is just that the contrast between areas was never like walking across a sharp line between a happy tropical island into a dark purple den of the necromancer) may not have been the right decision, it may not be the right decision for a shooter like Rage, but it is a decision that they did make and it is a decision that without a doubt affected the experience in a positive way.

They have provided plenty of meat in other aspects: little bits of history that pepper the world, varied locations (architectural aspects and varied landscape forms—whatever you want to say about the game, exploration was never boring and no two villages were ever the same, which is what it would be if they really did completely go overboard on the desolation, drabness and lack of contrast), and so on. So much effort went into the game that I refuse to recognize that the relatively monochromatic palette was anything other than choice on their part, made in the service of the dreariness that they wanted the player to experience—right on par with Valve's choice to delicately blue-tint and up the saturation of shadows in Source games (among other subtle things their engine does to colors).

I would argue that the flat stares and absence of body language of all the NPCs is a more important shortcoming of Fallout 3, but all Bethesda games are slightly broken. You just gotta love what they do awesomely and ignore the stuff they will more often than not fix in the next game. I found the monochromatic wasteland of Fallout 3 far, FAR less jarring than the inexplicably uniform phthalo-green foliage of Oblivion.

Although, now, that said, I guess I would concede that subtle color variation is not their art director's strongest suit, but I would insist that it is an asset for Fallout and a shortcoming for Oblivion; in the former it makes more conceptual sense than in the latter.

[spindrift]

Contrast is just a tool, like any other, not some sort of fundamental pillar without copious amounts of which art automatically crumbles into irrelevance.

Yes, i agree. And they sometimes used this tool poorly.

I don't understand why you linked to richter. I felt his use of contrast wonderfully subtle and varied in a way that fallout wasn't, and supported my point? Maybe you think his work is irrelevant and you are ridiculing it? I don't know why you linked there.

Again, the visuals are just a part of the whole. Making them too uniform and contrastless (and really, I don't think they were all that uniform and without contrast; it is just that the contrast between areas was never like walking across a sharp line between a happy tropical island into a dark purple den of the necromancer) may not have been the right decision, it may not be the right decision for a shooter like Rage, but it is a decision that they did make and it is a decision that without a doubt affected the experience in a positive way.

...

So much effort went into the game that I refuse to recognize that the relatively monochromatic palette was anything other than choice on their part, made in the service of the dreariness that they wanted the player to experience—right on par with Valve's choice to delicately blue-tint and up the saturation of shadows in Source games (among other subtle things their engine does to colors).

I feel you're conflating a few arguments here. I agree with pretty much everything you said except that if an overall aesthetic choice is good and appropriate, then it is now sacrosanct and that it's 'unfair' to criticise aspects of it that people think are poorly implemented.

Like i said, overall the fallout world was great, and the overly desaturated style they went with was an interesting and appropriate choice. I just think they implemented of it poorly for reasons i already stated. 15-30 hours is a long time to go without any variations within an aesthetic. You brought up valve, but they are masters at changing up the visuals while maintaining an overall style. They don't just pick a theme and go with it. Each visual style has variations that are thrown in at appropriate intervals.

I can see how you might disagree, but you said that to criticise f3 for being drab is unfair. Regardless of whether we think it is true or not, i still think it is still a fair point to make.

I would argue that the flat stares and absence of body language of all the NPCs is a more important shortcoming of Fallout 3

this is entirely true.

[Patters]

There are caustics going on in that too. Does that go hand in hand with GI? (Either in CryEngine3 or just in general?) ...My brain associates caustics and global illumination with each other because they're bundled together in the same tab in Mental Ray in Maya, but I don't know mathematically what they have to do with each other as I know zilch about graphics programming.

As a mathematician, I would see them being bundled together in a fairly complicated algorithm, which may be considered easier to be split into two for two materials and ease of Programming. Myself I haven't done any mathematical programming yet but I can and often get a decent feel for how stuff is done, so I may well be wrong.

[Jayel]

As a mathematician, I would see them being bundled together in a fairly complicated algorithm, which may be considered easier to be split into two for two materials and ease of Programming. Myself I haven't done any mathematical programming yet but I can and often get a decent feel for how stuff is done, so I may well be wrong.

I can sort of sense that you're thinking of the problem as a mathematician - ie an analytical solution in some closed form.

While there's research done in that area, it's when it comes to graphics, it helps to think like a statistician. Instead of trying to get "the answer", simply fire a whole bunch of random samples and get an average of some sort. It's not perfect but it's faster and a hell of a lot easier to implement. Virtually every commercial renderer operates under this principle.

edit: oh wait, i forgot to add the main point: using the sampling approach you can handle caustics, occlusion, colour bounces, etc etc etc with one unified algorithm that's incredibly simple. photon tracing, for example

[Patters]

I can sort of sense that you're thinking of the problem as a mathematician - ie an analytical solution in some closed form.

While there's research done in that area, it's when it comes to graphics, it helps to think like a statistician. Instead of trying to get "the answer", simply fire a whole bunch of random samples and get an average of some sort. It's not perfect but it's faster and a hell of a lot easier to implement. Virtually every commercial renderer operates under this principle.

edit: oh wait, i forgot to add the main point: using the sampling approach you can handle caustics, occlusion, colour bounces, etc etc etc with one unified algorithm that's incredibly simple. photon tracing, for example

Yeah that was what I was thinking overall, instead of modelling the system accurately you use some wizardry to get a similar result. I can see the next geneartion of computers and consoles focusing on modelling it as accurately possible. Because at this pint I can't see there being as big a leap forward in graphics , as with other generations, without this and other scenarios being physically modelled.

[MrHoatzin]

Yes, i agree. And they sometimes used this tool poorly.

Where you see poor craft, I see a conceptually sound decision. Sall I'm sayin!

I don't understand why you linked to richter. I felt his use of contrast wonderfully subtle and varied in a way that fallout wasn't, and supported my point? Maybe you think his work is irrelevant and you are ridiculing it? I don't know why you linked there.

I linked to Richter's Baader-Meinhof series because it is the first example that popped into my mind of extremely low contrast used to an extremely good end! As an example of why I think invoking contrast as a must have is a flawed truism.

I feel you're conflating a few arguments here. I agree with pretty much everything you said except that if an overall aesthetic choice is good and appropriate, then it is now sacrosanct and that it's 'unfair' to criticise aspects of it that people think are poorly implemented.

Like i said, overall the fallout world was great, and the overly desaturated style they went with was an interesting and appropriate choice. I just think they implemented of it poorly for reasons i already stated. 15-30 hours is a long time to go without any variations within an aesthetic. You brought up valve, but they are masters at changing up the visuals while maintaining an overall style. They don't just pick a theme and go with it. Each visual style has variations that are thrown in at appropriate intervals.

At no point did I say that you're not allowed to critique it. I was just trying to say that rather than automatically seeing it as the Fallout team dropping the ball on palette selection, it would be valid to see it as a conscious decision on their part—on par with Valve's decision to go for a far more nuanced, almost impressionistic handling of color in their post-apocalyptic world; on par with Kubrick consciously making the movie extremely slow. Common sense of the craft stipulates that if you want someone to be entertained, you do not consciously bore them, just as you don't consciously make them stare at asbestos green landscapes for sixty hours. And yet they did that. But not really.

I can see how you might disagree, but you said that to criticise f3 for being drab is unfair. Regardless of whether we think it is true or not, i still think it is still a fair point to make.

I thought it was unfair to be "turned off" by drabness. The drabness is an integral part of the experience, without which it would not be the same dreary game.

[LOPcagney]

I linked to Richter's Baader-Meinhof series because it is the first example that popped into my mind of extremely low contrast used to an extremely good end! As an example of why I think invoking contrast as a must have is a flawed truism.

If you've played The Path, that's the example that most readily comes to mind of another game that uses contrast subtly as a result of conscious artistic direction. It was fantastic. I'm not saying that contrast is a tool that needs to be turned up to 11 all the time. With Fallout 3, however, my personal opinion, and clearly I'm not alone in this, is that the decision to create such a bleak, desolate place was a little boring, especially when you think of how many time's we've seen bleak, desolate post-apocalyptic landscapes. We can argue about whether contrast was used "subtly" or not in the game, but either way, it's the artistic direction, whether or not it was well-executed, that turned me off from the game. I think that's perfectly valid.

[Erkki]

the decision to create such a bleak, desolate place was a little boring, especially when you think of how many time's we've seen bleak, desolate post-apocalyptic landscapes.

Do we really see that so often? I haven't noticed personally.

[spindrift]

I linked to Richter's Baader-Meinhof series because it is the first example that popped into my mind of extremely low contrast used to an extremely good end! As an example of why I think invoking contrast as a must have is a flawed truism.

So you invoked richter as a good implementation of contrast to show how you don't need to use contrast? ...what?

The filthy truism i mentioned is that 'contrast maintains visual interest'. This is a statement so obvious it hardly bears mentioning. A truism, in other words. Nobody said you need blatant bold contrast at all times in every piece of art. I'm truly baffled by your taking such exception to it.

Okay, so i'll assume you are using a painting as a whole as an analogy for fallout 3 as a whole. The game used low contrast. These paintings use low contrast.

A painting is a fleeting experience, you look at it and your eye travels around the painting, guided by the artists intent. Composition and contrast are used to do this. A hint of a face amid a dark blur at the focal point of the composition, then quickly to to the window panes popping out of the background, sharp amidst the fog, then the huge dark mass of curtain to the left contrasting the lighter area and balancing out the figure, then to the area where you expect to see legs, but don't, and then back up to the face. This is how you traverse a painting, not necessarily in that linear order, it is all intentional and considered, separate to the style as a whole. The gestalt of the painting is low contrast and drab, but within it are areas that are relatively high contrast to each other, they support each other and maintain the viewers interest as the eye travels across the landscape of the painting. I hope you see where i'm going with this.

Fallout 3 is ultimately the same in it being on the whole appropriately low key, but it fails in the composition. As you travel its landscape you do not run into areas that contrast each other effectively. Each single moment of each area is well made and aesthetically pleasing, but it does not use contrast appropriately across a span of time. A painting takes a few moments to traverse, fallout 3 takes many hours. You can see the potential problem here?

Where you see poor craft, I see a conceptually sound decision. Sall I'm sayin!

You're still conflating several different elements of artistic direction. There is a big difference between the conceptual decision and the implementation of that decision. One is sound, and the other is sometimes poor.

All your arguments are based on the conceptual decision being intentional and appropriate. Yes, obviously that's true, I've said a number of times now that conceptually the idea is sound. Although it would still be entirely fair for someone to not like that concept.

At no point did I say that you're not allowed to critique it.

At no point did I say that was what you said. I was calling you out for saying it was unfair to criticise it. Which you go on to do again in this post.

[gdf]

I think I can sum up here.

*Clears throat*

Fallout 3 looked fucking boring.

[Kolzig]

Couldn't find another thread so I'm using this.

id announced at Quakecon 2010 that Rage is coming out for the iPhone 4. Apparently first on this magical Apple platform later this year and then the actual game versions next year for PC and the consoles.

That's some wicked coding to get that game to work on iPhone, but I would think it's heavily downgraded and limited version from the main product that comes out next year.