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Do Videogames Need More Graphical Grit?
Thanks to GamerDad for its editorial discussing whether some recent videogames, such as Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, look "too sterile and perfect" . The author explains: "The animation is fine but the world Snake runs through is too sharp edged. There's no dirt and grime in the graphics because they're perfect versions of what was seen in the original game. Somehow, these better graphics have detracted somewhat from my opinion of the newer game." He continues: "DOOM 3, for as great as it looks, suffers from a lack of grit in still shots. I'm hoping the final game will not have the plastic look of the current pictures. Even the highly polished Quake III Arena didn't come across as being plastic to me." Do other gamers share this perception of graphical sterility in some recent games?
This is true. Too often games are overpolished, and look sterile to me as well. Hell, once they come up with a "dirt" filter for textures, games will feel a good bit more immersive than they currently do.
i use linux and windows oh god how can i have an opinion
I belive that as the technology to have "perfect" animations continues, we will be hitting a celing soon. Through adding "grime" to those animations in proper areas, we will be able to further add to that realism by bringing "real world" effects into the games with realism. Even with more advanced engines we will be able to see this. Splashing muddy water on a character, anyone?
I'm one of the few people who didn't like the game, and it was largely because of the sterility of the levels. It felt like work.
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
But I really don't find myself noticing that much. Possibly I've become used to seeing the same texture repeated n times. I guess you could have every entity have a dirtiness attribute that determind how it was rendered.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
It's true, I think enviroments and characters do look a bit to "perfect". They should learn from Silent Hill, Manhunt and other games like that. They all look dirty and grity using various filters that make up a kind of "dated" look. Which I find extremly nice. The dirtyer the better. ;)
Simply retarded
If you play a sports game for example, dirt isn't the only thing that makes it feel "real".
1.) Inconsistent lighting
2.) Fog in the air
3.) Dirt everywhere
4.) Fans that look different in the seats
Damn I can go on forever
SS2 was an awesome game with an incredible spooky atmosphere, but there was the glaring problem of everything being pristine and clean... even broken stuff. Worse, there were no no bodies, debris and very little damage in the environment. And of course, killed enemies would disappear shortly after being dispatched. I realize this was a technological limitation (the game came out 5 years ago), but I think it's one of the biggest barriers to real immersion in an environment. If I'm walking in a derelict spaceship overrun with zombies and cyborgs, there should be bodies everywhere and lots and lots of busted stuff. Also, if I'm struting around with a plasma rifle, I want to be able to blow stuff up. Descent 3 provided black scorch marks on the walls if you shot at them, but I want to see chunks of metal or masonry flying around and if I spent enough time and ammo, I want to be able to blow my way through walls or doors or really abuse the environment in other ways. When this happens, it will seem like VR compared to today's games.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
BTW, if I'm responsible for getting the most GRIT into Doom 3, do I get some cool prizes?
Videogame worlds are staffed by really efficient janitors, who store all the dust and grime in boxes. Which is why you see those everywhere.
The Rogue Squadron games delt with this nicely. The Rebel ships all look beat up. If you walk around the hanger while selecting your ship, you'll see paint chips and other signs of wear with the ships. The Naboo Starfighter looks like it got pulled out of a junkyard.
Grit in a real image and fog in a game can become confused if you don't handle it just the right way. You have to worry about which zealots you're offending. Crisp graphics, smoothly rendered edges, and the use of fog/grit for style (not lazy rendering) are all a very delicate balance.
IANAGD (game developer), but I say lay the groundwork, focus on gameplay and come back to throw these details in with some market testing. Time and processor speed permitting.
Isn't half-life 2 supposed to fix all this?? Real environment.. real 'water', 'dirt'.. etc?
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
I have hope that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. might introduce some much needed dirt and grit! Check out this picture for instance, or the gallery in general.
How long before nVidia and ATI fanboys get into wars about which company's "dirt and grit engine" is better?
I predict that nVidia's next driver release actually adds back in some of artifacts that their old drivers used to leave all over the screen. They will claim that this is their new Enhanced Reality Engine and sic lawyers on any site that bitches about the artifacts.
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Im trying to recover from the awe here...
You didnt saw the trailer or the quakecon videos have you? Well just picture this? Zombie, shotgun, "clean background" behind, press trigger BAM, zombie with a large hole, red splattered wall and ceiling with little pieces of meat, get the idea? seriously some scenes from Doom 3 are more than enough to make certain people sick. The bathroom cut where "pinky" is eating a zombie is.. well disgusting, the scene is as gruel as can be I felt physically ill the first time I saw that.
However if grit is what you want, go and play any silent hill game, it has more than you bargained for and it also features a grain filter.
By the way a lot of people prefer to see quality in their images than "grit" not just as a visual preference, is also easier to spot a hidden area or an item that way, thats the reason why almost everyone turns the grainy filter from silent hill 2/3 off.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
I think way too much emphasis is put on graphics: Both by the developers and consumers. I buy games for the fun factor and the gameplay. I could care less what a game looks like. Maybe it's because I grew up in the early years of video games, and can remember when games were just games. If I want reality i'll go outside.
The ability to cheaply do reflection mapping means anything glossy now gets a perfectly focused reflection mapped on it, which looks cool for about 5 minutes, then starts to grate.
Reflections are rarely perfect. What a lot of these new games need to take the edge off is a blurred reflection.
Here's a test render I did a while back comparing hard & soft reflections: Chrome_Soft_test.jpg
Much like chrome was a craze back in the early days of pre-rendered CGI, these hard reflections in real-time graphics are about to jump the shark.
What were you expecting?
...something I said almost 4 years ago. In fact, that comment was about 3dfx technology that began to address this exact problem right before nVidia bought them and killed it. All most people care about is framerates, polygons per second, and fill rates. When is the blood going to run down the wall when you shoot somebody? when are we going to have soft edges? Texture and bump maps don't help when you get to the intersection of two surfaces, and it's the biggest thing standing in the way of a believable scene in a 3d engine.
It's all about the artistic style you are going after. Too often gamers assume that the ultimate goal is perfect realism, which would be amazing but limited. The real future of games is in applying artistic styles and sensibility to games. I loved Viewtiful Joe because of its extreame style. The Wind Waker too. These games have styles that were neither grity nor realistic, but thier unique feels did an excellent job creating worlds that was easy to get lost in.
I'm not saying every game should be cell shaded, but developers should more often utilize the limitless possiblities of style in modern games.
Grit is what made the Star Wars universe unique in its day. It seemed more realistic because the sets reflected some of the seedier elements that populated them. Personally, sterility or grit doesn't make too much difference for me. I've never seen a game that looked like the real world because 2d/3d graphics haven't replicated the way the human eye works. In a game, everything is always in clear focus no matter how far away or how far into your peripheral vision. In newer games, such as HL2, distant items appear with less detail, but still are in focus. I would be curious to see a graphics engine that can replicate the way a human eye views the world.
Games such as the Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Fatal Frame series take a good pan on creating a much more realistic--if ultra-realistic--tilt at the world they take place in. Everything is dirty, grimy, and smeared with a sense of being in the real world.
Perhaps it is because these games take a closer stab (pun intended) at getting into the gamer's sense of reality and trying to really get into their mind, versus the seperation between player and story in other games, in a visual sense anyway.
Well this is an interesting topic for 3D rendering in general. The world is 'imperfect'. The moment something is exposed to human interaction, it gets nicks, cuts, scratches, dents, fatigue, etc. The common way to communicate the 'used look' is to make things look beat up and dirty.
Yes, it does look better. Yes, it does look more lived in. Yes, it does take away from the 'perfection' that computers achieve and look more like we expect. Is it the right thing to do? Well, interestingly enough, I'm running into this problem right now. I'm working on a 3D rendering of a futuristic particle cannon. Right now, I'm building a room around the machine. While texturing this bad boy, I realized something. You see, when I originally built the machine, I used Lightwave's more advanced rendering features. This means more time to render, but it looks more realistic. There is radiosity rendering, and subtle blurred reflections (you'd be surprised how much rendering time that eats up..) area lighting, the works. And you know, by the time I've got all these on, it is startlingly good looking. However, it was taking FAR too long to render an animation of, so I had to find ways of dirtying it up. Well, that's what I've started doing. Instead of using reflective chrome like you'd see in the CERN laboratory for its machines, I grittied it up. No more expensive reflection blurring there. Some of the photos I'm using for textures have some of the effects of 'realistic light' baked into them anyway, so I can stop using area lights and go back down to spotlights. Radiosity? Well the dirt on the machine gets so dark that radiosity wouldn't make a huge difference, so bye bye lengthy render times.
Maybe the dirt etc helps reduce the need for fancier renderings? Maybe, though it helps sell the idea that something is used, it's really covering up something that'd be more expensive to render? I say maybe because this may not be true in every artist's experience. I just found it interesting that when it came down to getting the rendering done in time to get an animation done, the grit texturing has saved my rump.
"Derp de derp."
I've been saying this for years to my friends, it's really hard to imagine you're in a real world if you keep seeing the same panel in the wall, or (worse) the same panel representing a wall (think Doom). It does make it easier to spot that one panel that is slightly off, indicating you need to blast it with a rocket or, or find a switch somewhere, but in real life every panel would be slightly different than the next. Even look at your cube walls, there are subtle differences between each one that let you sort of find "cloud pictures" (or try your ceiling tile).
I don't really have a solution, as the advances in lighting and level design, not to mention the increased amount of art that can be packed into a CD nowadays have taken care of all my ideas, apart from having an artist draw every single wall uniquely to start out with (ridiculously time consuming). Well, maybe have something like Diablo's random level generator, where a key is stored that is used to generate consistent (within the game) dungeons, but basically uses the same elements. Use it to modify certain parts of the panel, like maybe a few pixel wide micro-scratches or discolorations that you really only notice on a subconcious level.
Oh, and I'm sure someone's mentioned this already, but stop making everything look like plastic! Even plastic doesn't gleam like that, as there's dirt that settles on it (and settles in an uneven way). Materials might actually have whatever index of refraction your physics engine is set to, but if there's 50% dust, or 25% wear, that part isn't going to gleam like it was just polished yesterday. And I don't think sewers get polished very often.
Now that I'm rolling, do game publishers only work in brand-new office buildings? For those of you who are in a building a few years old, look down at the ground next time you walk around (no, not just to avoid eye contact, but actually pay attention to the ground). Notice how the carpet/tile is more worn in high-traffic areas? How next to the water cooler it's a little bit darker, due to splatter over the years? How the edges of wide hallways look like they were installed yesterday? How there are always marks on the walls in stairwells? And how even door handles start to show wear after a few years? It's the little things that we see but don't process that really make things look real - the wrinkles in people's faces. We just need "wrinkles" in our textures.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
MGS Twin Snakes goals were basically 1.) the remake of the game with all the high res graphics and higher-poly count models, 2.) the MGS 2 game play and 3.) a complete and honest reproduction of the Metal Gear Solid (PSX) story line.
So yeah, it does look a bit sterile in the sense that things did look perfect. After the first Ninja fight, the room gets messed up bad. It looks fine when you walk in and during your fight, though some glass panes can be shattered. Snake now looks more alive than he did in the original, a Miyamoto signature which was also something found in Eternal Darkness.
All critics of the MGS series say the same things about level design, textures, etc... MGS 2 did a good job making environmental elements apparent, like getting your feet wet, and leaving tracks (there was really no water in Twin Snakes for this to be noticeable). Tracks in the snow was around since the original MGS. But these MGS games take place in bunkers and bases, which don't really allow for much dirt or very creative scenery. Alaska people, come on.
Something introduced into Twin Snakes is the available to shoot at panes of glass, and only pieces of the pane get shot out. You can continue to damage the glass in different spots, and sometimes if its already damaged, a critical shot will break it all up. Diving into a damaged glass pane will also shatter it too.
There's more too, but I can't recall everything. For instance, Snakes face sometimes looked dirty.
Twin Snakes was certainly more gory than MGS 2, and any other game I have on PS2 (I have both GTA's) or GameCube.
We'll definitely see more of what the original author of this thread is asking for, more realism. Look at the upcoming MGS 3 game, since this thread began talking about MGS: TTS. I think that this is pretty much an easy problem solve, but Nintendo and Konami are working on new models for gaming, and working out the kinks on those first and leaving the graphic fine tuning at the end.
It can be argued that this is the wrong approach. Many people have already said that Nintendo is wasting their time trying to continually innovate, and that they use what works, Mario64, Zelda64, GoldenEye, etc... I think this is the Japanese mindset in general when it comes to videogames, and Nintendo found an ally in regards to Konami, one of the biggest entertainment software companies out there.
In any case, MGS Twin Snakes is badass, and I played the original on PSX, its worth the 40 bucks, I've already played through it once, and I'm working on playing through it again this weekend.
: When is the blood going to run down
: the wall when you shoot somebody?
Blood running down a wall? Hey, I know a first-person shooter that had this effect - back in 1994! It is Technopop's Zero Tolerance for the Sega Genesis.
Shoot an enemy close to the wall: blood stain. Shoot the wall: damage texture. Animated wall textures. An animated, interactive landscape. Tons of weapons and various items like motion scanners, fire extinguishers, and bulletproof vests. Immense, multi-floor levels. That game - along with Ranger X, Alien Soldier, and Thunder Force 4 - pushed the good old Genny to its limits. If a first-person shooter ever really, REALLY deserved a sequel, Zero Tolerance is the one!
(actually they tried to make one, but it was never completed and Technopop no longer exists. The beta's ROM is out there, though)
Circumcision is child abuse.