071112 / Critic

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I decided to take a break from my normal routine of talking about boring GPU programming stuff (and the progress on my game) to become game industry critic for just one blog post.

Great Art Direction from An Independent

What a great example of art polish, the golden hour color tones, soft backgrounds, the lighting, all very well done. Check out their gallery for a few more awesome screen shots. Also here is a link to a previous gamedev.net image of the day post showing progression of their graphics engine.

Non-Photo-Realistic-Rendering

Very impressed with Valve's Team Fortress 2 illustrative rendering engine.

Insomniac

I loved the Ratchet series on the PS2 (excluding Deadlocked). Haven't purchased a PS3 yet, I'm waiting simply because it forces me to work more on my game ... however Tools of Destruction will be the next game I purchase. Why, because the previous games were simply my kind of fun.

BTW, Insomniac has a great tech page.

Impression of the Crysis Demo

Today I got a chance to try the Crysis demo out on a 8800 with settings maxed out. First off, very impressive work, they have advanced quite far. However, I feel sorry that they are caught up in the DirectX 10 Vista BS (where Microsoft's marketing goal is to try and force people to upgrade by not releasing DirectX 10 for XP). Having the "High" setting disabled in XP was sure a sour move. IMO, the whole "no DirectX 10 for XP" sure screwed the game industry over, drastically slowing down the ability for developers to adapt DirectX 10 features. Forcing next-gen games to have a near identical DX9 fall back rendering path, which can clearly be seen in the DX9 hack to enable "High" on the Crysis demo. Not much difference there.

Nothing shatters the illusion of a virtual world for me more than aliasing. I just don't understand this push for ultra-high resolution rendering, where everything ends up looking like polygons and pixels, even with anti-aliasing on. The alpha test aliasing artifacts in Crysis are just too distracting for me.

Moving Beyond Surfaces

I think the guy at meshula.net is right on, especially his section on Moving Beyond Surfaces talking about painting the air between surfaces instead of the surfaces themselves. This is something which current raster graphics hardware is simply not designed to do well, because of the problems of needing to draw depth sorted objects for proper alpha blending. This is exactly the thing I am trying to do with my compositing engine.

For example here is a Atom in-engine (meaning not a fake off-line rendered shot with in-game assets) showing each pixel doubled without filtering (nearest up-sample). No aliasing, partly solved by rendering the "atmosphere between objects", and secondly solved by not having objects not built out of polygons (no hard edges). Compare this to the up-sampled image from Crysis. The illusion of a "real" virtual world is instantly killed by aliasing.

Just got another great idea, in game sharpening filter. Something which couldn't be done with an aliased image. Here is a non-upsampled crop with sharping applied.

Enough being critical, time to get back to work...