Vidya graphics

So, why are mirrors such a huge deal nowadays, and why can´t modern devs into them? I´ve heard some "it´d double the rendering requirements" claims from various sources, but equally many statements saying that´s bullshit. All I know that early 00s games had working mirrors left and right, but now we gotta deal with... this?

Similarly, what happened to the sharp, dynamic shadows? Feels like we´ve only gone backwards since say, Doom 3 and FEAR.

What are your other favorite visual tricks that may or may not be underused nowadays? And does anyone have the bigger picture of this room? I think I once saw some hilarious FEAR vs BSI comparison webms too.

Other urls found in this thread:

docs.unity3d.com/Manual/InverseKinematics.html
youtube.com/watch?v=29ZEvxwq_F8
engadget.com/2014/09/04/samsung-gear-vr-john-carmack/
youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1409&v=IyUgHPs86XM
developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/3D_Skybox
youtube.com/watch?v=Kb812LKdMgI
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

>water reflections are fine
>but mirrors somehow impossible

that´s one of the many things ticking me off in modern graphics too. HL2 proved already in 04 that you can have fully reflective water, multiple "monitors" showing real-time feedback from other location (said tech which CAN be used for mirrors too), etc, on very underwhelming tech by modern standards.

It seems like mirrors especially are sort of a PC exclusive bonus nowadays. MGS5 definitely made real-time reflections a PC only bonus. Meanwhile, more PC-oriented games, like Serious Sam 3 and Talos Principle, both from Croteam, have both reflective water AND actual mirrors in the world, that do not drop the framerate much at all, no matter how there can be dozens of enemies, explosions & destruction going on at the same time.

>meanwhile in 2001...
>...on consoles!

The PC port may have been a dumpsterfire a year ago but credit where it's due, Arkham Knight had a working mirror.

In a lot of situations when making a first person shooter, mirrors are avoided because they force the devs to make at least decent animations for the third person character, which is kind of pointless considering 99% of the game is from a first person perspective anyways.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution did this in a humorous way by explaining that Jensen broke the mirror, followed by emails regarding getting the mirror replaced.

If I recall correctly Jensen had no third person animations aside from the dialogue animations and the cover animations, so he would become a midget when crouching etc.

this is also why we see mirrors more in third person games like Silent Hill and Batman because they already have fully functional third person animations that don't look awkward.

All this talk about mirrors and not much talk about feet.

Because third person animating is hard.

How Can Mirrors Be Real If Our Feet Aren't Real?

sounds like pure laziness to me. Especially considering they animated all those fancy special skill / finisher animations.

And like mentioned earlier, FEAR from 2005 had fully modeled first-person character model, which cast shadows and was visible in mirrors. Nowadays, even fucking UNITY offers a pre-made asset for seamless FPS / TPS switch with such features.

Nice bridge there.
FEAR, Crysis,...

>it´d double the rendering requirements
It does. Just think about it for a moment. You have to render anything the mirror will reflect a second time. That's why you mostly see them in confined areas these days. You could also do it at a lower resolution or disable certain effects in the mirror if you want.

>look down in game with no feet
woah im floating
>look down while standing near a ledge in game with feet
>woah im floating

>It does. Just think about it for a moment. You have to render anything the mirror will reflect a second time
Wrong. I do not have the technical explanation saved up, but in short, you save the location of vertices in memory, duplicate those points and "mirror" them, and only THEN render the entire scene. One rendering call.

Not to mention the area the mirror covers on screen is off from the main camera´s rendering. you can also optimize the mirrors in numerous ways.

>sounds like pure laziness to me. Especially considering they animated all those fancy special skill / finisher animations.

From a AAA point of view where deadlines are tough and costs are massive, it's an unnecessary waste of time. Which is sad, because you'd think with all the resources they pool into these games they'd take the time to add them.

But more money would rather be spent going into the advertising.

...

>Caring about your reflection when you dont even have a body

It's not really lazy considering how unnecessary the work is. Making plausible animations in third person is a waste of time if it's only there so that we can have working mirrors in it.

Older games could get away with mirrors easier because animations were more stiff then in general and people wouldn't jump to criticize it.

This is my headcannon regarding feet in FPS

>Sweet ass mirror and tiles
>Everything else in the pic looks like 2002 shit
kek this game is such a meme

...

>From a AAA point of view where deadlines are tough and costs are massive, it's an unnecessary waste of time
Now, I´m a mere small scale amateur indie game maker myself, but again that starts to go to the laziness category. Modern game engines should all support automated IK animation generation algorithms, that is if the model is fully rigged and defined as a bipedal (or more) legged creature, it´s basic movements can be instantly animated in fairly realistic ways by an automated system. Unity 3D has had this tech available for over 3 years.

>and people wouldn't jump to criticize it.
I have literally never seen anyone criticize mirror animations in any FPS game, ever. The only real criticism towards animations in recent years I can think of have been about FO4´s laughable, HL1-tier facial animations, or total LACK of animation for some basic NPC / PC actions.

In fact, the few wonky FPS character animation examples I can think of have only gotten mild PRAISE, since it makes the experience funny.
In a 3rd person game, there´s zero reason to not have working mirrors of SOME sort.

Similarly, you can have all these borderline silly poses and movement styles fully visible on other people´s characters in multiplayer, but replicating even that basic form of animation for first-person character in SP is too much for some devs?

Water reflections are sreen-space most of the time (not an actual reflection, but the same image flipped vertically).

Camera monitors are ok as long as they are small, because you can render what the camera is recording at a very low resolution, so it's not so costly.

Actual reflections are either duplicated geometry behind the mirror (the old way), or a shader that multiplies the rendering info by a matrix, creating the mirrored image (which no matter what Cred Forums says, still needs to render twice as polygons, and twice as many object will have X shaders)

Also, first person games are animated in a first person view model (to make it easier to animate, and so that it looks better), so you don't have a body in most games.

However, pictures like OP's just show how incompetent devs can be.
If you can't jump in your game, you don't put in a platforming challenge. Same way. if you don't have reflections, you don't put a room full of mirrors (and if the mirrors are really important to the story, you put them in a small, empty room, so that the doubled rendering is still not that much)

>Modern game engines should all support automated IK animation generation algorithms, that is if the model is fully rigged and defined as a bipedal (or more) legged creature, it´s basic movements can be instantly animated in fairly realistic ways by an automated system

The fuck are you talking about nigger, there's no "automated system" to make animations for you using IK. Inverse Kinematics are used _together_ with pre-made animation to do shit like stepping on uneven surfaces/stairs (as you posted in the pic) or putting hands on walls, etc. No "basic movement" can be "instantly animated in a realistic way" using an "automated system".

GTA V on the ps3 and 360 had real time mirror reflections in some places.

>Hey marketing, we have to delay the game's release by about 2 weeks
>Why? Is the game fucked?
>We have to make mirrors be better.
Most developers have to answer to higher ups and stakeholders user.

>Water reflections are sreen-space most of the time
Maybe nowadays, but just few years ago, such tech didnt even exist. And many devs still use very basic, "raw" ways of creating ALL reflections (2nd cameras & projections to a surface), Croteam being one of the good examples.

Rendering polygons is piss easy this day and age, and can be greatly helped further with use of LOD and culling methods. It´s the extensive use of draw-calls and other visual effects that can end up draining your performance to a halt - which also can be easily remedied with some very basic tier optimization tricks / smart designing.

It also is not hard to have a "fake" 3rd person model following the FP-character in real time. The fact that MP modes already kinda do this is enough of a proof of concept.

>there's no "automated system" to make animations for you using IK
There is. On Unity at very least. Been for years.
I´m quite shocked if AAA devs and other engines do not have anything of the sort.

one rendering call, rendering twice the polygons as you would be otherwise.

At the end of the day, it's still twice the polygons user. It doesn't matter how you achieve it.

Ironically, the most inexpensive way to render real time reflections (relatively speaking) is via ray tracing. But hardware is nowhere near there yet.

a literal drag & drop feature of modern days should NOT take 2 week to implement, no matter how butterfinger you are. Even more so if you got 100+ people and fuck-a-million bucks to use on the project.

how is it possible to type a post this long without having a fucking clue what you are talking about.

>There is. On Unity at very least. Been for years.

show it to me. Give me a link to the asset store page or whatever the fuck. You have NO idea what IK is.

>save a shitton of processing power and extra work in the case of first person games
>pander to people with stage 4 advanced autism that will call the game shit anyway

Tough choice

>Automated system magically solves rigging and animation with IK

>There is. On Unity at very least. Been for years.

Nope, unless you mean combining some of the animations included in the standard asset bundle with some sort of IK logic.

docs.unity3d.com/Manual/InverseKinematics.html

All Unity's IK system does is allowing you to move the bones to some IK target (e.g. move a hand to some item, align a foot with the ground, etc).

>it's still twice the polygons user
No, as the "mirror´s" viewpoint only renders what is directly in "front" of its (usually limited) field of view. It does NOT take the whole visible scene and re-render it again.

Say if you have a large body of water, like this section in SS3, reflecting all that´s above it. This water pool´s roughly covering ½ of the screen, and thus roughly takes half of the rendering requirements off the main camera.

And before someone asks, Croengine handles all the reflections in same manner. You can adjust the amount of details in the reflections and resolution of them through the same settings, affecting both "actual" mirrors + water reflections at once.

I do believe he´s referring to the Locomotion system, that´s already quite old:
youtube.com/watch?v=29ZEvxwq_F8

You pretty much need at least two animations for it to work properly (idle + walk), but with those two alone it can automate tons of animations if needed.

Rigging needs to be done before hand obviously. And in case of games like Deus Ex, they obviously had fully rigged and semi-decently animated MC character model already done.

Remember when games used to be designed for PC and then ported to consoles, which actually made the games look better on all systems compared to if the games would have been designer for consoles and then ported to PC? I really miss those days.

Nice to see someone who knows what they're talking about on here

>You pretty much need at least two animations for it to work properly (idle + walk), but with those two alone it can automate tons of animations if needed.

Nigga... that's animation blending, and just like you said you still need several different animations already made.

Screen-space reflections, nigger

>Mirrors work
>It's a horror game

Id Tech engines had flawless mirror's since Quake 3

>BioShock 2 opens up with you seeing your own reflection in a puddle
>Cutscene ends
>Look down
>No body or reflection of it
>Nonexistant body still continues to have dynamic shadows

I remember those times, and miss them.

And it also happened the other way around at times. In general, the games used to be designed for a single system, in order to maximize the efficiency and end result´s quality. If any ports were later made, they were usually outsourced to a team that had more experience with the intended target platform. And more often than not, the ports could be VERY different from the original product, just so they would work and look the best on the new machine.

SS reflection are a very new thing.

Most of the consolitis vidya still use mere static cube-maps for things like water and glass reflections, sometimes even going to extremes of using Anisotropic cubemaps to get rid of that image-sliding-around effect.

Knowing that you could just drop some effects, LOD quality and even resolution on the mirrors - maybe use some post-proc. AA on their output to get rid of excessive jaggies as well, and still get convincing enough results... it´s very weird that working mirrors aren´t a thing nowadays.

The player character had the same rig as everyone else, so not too much work there.

I wish that game wasn't such a shitshow because it's beautiful

>Water reflections are sreen-space most of the time
stopped reading here

Hitman(tm) has working mirrors.

It is true that it doubles the rendering requirements unless you make compromises like reduced resolution, no dynamic lighting in the reflection, etc.

If you look at e.g. the new DOOM it is already coming in exactly under the time budget for a 60Hz refresh rate, and it spends a bunch of time before it even starts rendering just trying to figure out which parts of the screen are affected by which lights to reduce the amount of work the GPU has to do. If you then render from another perspective all that work has to be duplicated because other lights and objects are visible from the camera.

The reason stencil shadows aren't used any more is that they really don't look particularly realistic and they're more expensive on the GPU than shadow maps. The sharp shadows do look stylish but in reality most light sources are going to cast more diffuse and fuzzy shadows. Sure you can fuzz up the stencil shadows too but then you're adding even more cost to an already expensive solution.

Back then (before ~2008-2009) the big difference compared to games today is that deferred shading wasn't used so people were much more conservative with placing dynamic lights in scenes. In DOOM 3 it was considered expensive to have 8 lights affecting the screen at once. In the new one, you can have up to 255 lights on screen at once (though that doesn't happen in practice, it's probably closer to ~60-80 in intense scenes). With that many lights you have to do everything to keep costs down.

They were low res and sucked

Feet/legs not being visible in FPS games is a design decision 99% of the time. No idea where the perception that it has anything to do with graphics tech comes from.

>No one mentions portals
And no, I don´t mean the Valve games, though they do use portal technology too, alongside with Pray.

That tech can be used for accurate, realtime "reflections" too. And did prev-gen consoles or the old PC tech available at the time die out of infinite portal loops? Nope!

Nigger, the main character isn't even casting a shadow in that picture. Would you like modern games not to have shadows so you can have one room with a mirror in it?

Bought it on G2A for a few shekels yesterday, works great now. They fixed the shit out of it.

>one room with a mirror in it
You mean several rooms as a recurring mechanic? Even when the portals are outright invisible to fuck with you?

I thought we were talking about general purpose stuff ITT.

Well the comparison is terrible

>go to settings
>Mirrors: On/Off

Because each mirror is a seperate 'render to texture' target with all bells and whistles the gamer turned on in the game graphical options. This, if not done carefully, can be a performance killer, as you are, essentially. doing significantly more graphical work.

Especially since you need to render the reflection to texture, in order to use it as a texture of the mirror ittself.

There is a reason why mirrors, if present, are usually fairly small and limited to very small rooms, usually facing a wall.

There is a game called Train Fever, whose developers did not understand it and that. The game allowed to open several render to texture windows, and you could see the performance drop with each open window.

That being said, I still remember the jaw dropping awesomeness of a rotating mirror in a demo of Quake 3 Arena back in 1999

>go to settings
>Mirrors: Fucked up/Non existent

>Would you like modern games not to have shadows
They quite often do not. Fucking nu-Deus Ex mostly uses SSAO to hide its lack of real shadows.

DXMD does use shadow maps. Most scenes are just so flooded with lights that the shadows become hard to make out.

>Add this new fancy tech called SSAO
>Remove actual shadows from majority of things
Dope

I know right!
Look at all these sweet ""shadows"" !

>mirrors work in a horror game
>it's not actually your reflection

>acting like other games have a fuckton of light sources indoors
that's some nice cherrypicking there

>fuckton of light sources indoors
And yet it's still dark and the boots on the dude in front are dropping "shadows" in every direction despite the ground not being illuminated. Fuck off

STALKER series has tons of lightsources, with every single one of them casting detailed real-time shadows out of every single object in the world.

Also, those are mostly static lights and some basic cubemap reflections. Literally late 90s / early 00s tech. The aug-chick in the right doesn´t even appear in the reflection, and no object in the scene shows any cast drop- shadows whatsoever.

>why are mirrors such a huge deal nowadays, and why can´t modern devs into them
>early 00s games had working mirrors left and right
This is a bullshit exaggeration. Some old games had them, some didn't.

>what happened to the sharp, dynamic shadows?
Shadow volumes are an outdated method that doesn't scale well with higher polygon counts and multiple light sources. Yes, they're nice and crisp, but razor-sharp shadow edges are less realistic anyway.

i can see only 1 light source there

But it isn't drag & drop. That's the whole point.

>So, why are mirrors such a huge deal nowadays, and why can´t modern devs into them?
They really do increase the cost a lot, since texture technology has advanced so far that having a truly reflective texture would be all the costs of a normal texture, plus rendering stuff twice.

Additionally, mirrors were usually done in one of two ways in games of old -- with "puppet" characters that would just mirror your and local objects' movements (which can fail if you bring new stuff in or w/e), with a camera that would publish what is seen from teh center of the mirror onto the mirror (which is unrealistic and can look very strange). The first way is unsuitable because games are so complex (in terms of the environments and what players can do) that you'd only be able to get away with mirrors in scripted sequences, and the latter just never looks good. Again, go play SWAT4 and tell me you like those mirrors.

That said, I think devs are just lazy. A lot of modern engines just don't have it as an inbuilt feature for some reason, so I guess they're unwilling to spend money to implement it.

Some games do support limited dynamic reflections, though. For example, Source does it. It won't reflect NPCs or the player for whatever reason, but it will reflect objects being tossed about. It's used exclusively to make pretty-looking water.

>Literally late 90s / early 00s tech
>it's old so it's bad
realtime lighting sucks because it's expensive and messy. It's necessarily going to have to cut corners compared to pre-baked lighting, and pre-baked lighting DOES NOT MEAN IT ONLY APPLIES TO TEXTURES ON THE GROUND. Lighting is usually done in a voxel-like way so, for example, pre-baked lighting can still allow for things like a ray of light through a window only lighting up things that pass the window in the beam.

STALKER uses dynamic lighting because it has a day/night cycle. For most games, this isn't necessary due to the settings not allowing a day/night cycle.

that's how AO works bruv, and it's everywhere these days. why do you only give MD shit for it?
stalker and metro are the only exceptions, i'll give you that. stalker looks like ass aside from lighting though, and runs like shit.

>laziness
Is it really "lazy" compared to old games that didn't give a shit about the third- and first-person animations matching up at all? If anything I would say it's the broad playerbase being more nitpicky today. If it looks goofy at all, someone's going to make a 30 second youtube clip with a snarky title that gets spammed whenever the game is mentioned.

>However, pictures like OP's just show how incompetent devs can be.
>If you can't jump in your game, you don't put in a platforming challenge. Same way. if you don't have reflections, you don't put a room full of mirrors
this

Deus Ex HR got around it pretty nicely by having jensen's own mirror smashed, and all the bathrooms having weird news displays instead of mirrors.

I don't know why devs feel the need to put stuff into their games that they KNOW people will make fun of like that.

>STALKER series has tons of lightsources,
no it didnt. there's basically only the sun and moon. fires tank the framerate a shitload as well, and "glowing" objects only illuminate themselves by having minimum light levels.

STALKER only looks nice with mods.

and unmodded, the game looks like total shit.

I think you mean shareholder.
Consumers are also a stakeholder.

AO is a fucking meme, i want god damn shadows

I do not have any screenshots on this craptop of mine, but at best there can be more than a dozen characters, are wielding a flashlight, firing automatic weapons, circling around campfires and bright anomalies, all working as dynamic lightsources. Sun and moon are merely one of the many natural lightsources

>stalker looks like ass aside from lighting though, and runs like shit.
I disagree. The texture work is great, style very cohesive and solid. The dynamic lights are only the cream on top, but even on the DX8 mode (static lighting) the good texture work shines through.

Also, I first played SoC in 2007 on my 2004 bought P4 + 1.5GB DDR1 + Geforce 6600GT 128mb machine, and it ran just fine on DX9 FDL, 1024x768 res, ~medium settings.

The most demanding aspect in STALKER games is the A-Life and bullet physics, which require plenty of CPU power.

No one says you can't have both. Just look at BF 4 for example.
AO can add a ton of realism and the only thing that will top it would be real time GI which won't happen for a while.

Well you can go fuck yourself for losing your shit over AO in games before.

The flashlights in STALKER are projected textures and gunfire doesn't create dynamic lights unless you mod the game.

There are many ways of using flaws to your advantage (to make a joke, or whatever). But most devs seem to not understand that a game is meant to be fun, rather than realistic

>The flashlights in STALKER are projected textures
They are dynamic lightsources WITH a texture, and they cast shadows out of all objects though.

I still remember being impressed by that when playing it for the first time in 2007, as even games like HL2 and FEAR did not do this with their flashlights.

>gunfire doesn't create dynamic lights unless you mod the game.
gunfire does. The campfires are static in vanilla SoC.

>real time GI
I hope this won't happen because it's only going to end in incredibly unrealistic lighting. Only very large light sources (that are probably going to be static) would meaningfully brighten up whole rooms like that.

But I bet it'll make it so when you use a shitty flashlight, the entire fucking world brightens up all of a sudden. No interior with a window will ever have a shadow again.

>No one says you can't have both
Developers convince me otherwise

pic related
don't even talk about static lighting, makes it look like a game from 2002
>Geforce 6600GT 128mb machine, and it ran just fine on DX9 FDL
absolute fucking horseshit, you're fooling no one.

>cant have both
it's probably that they look bad together or something.

A lot of modern rendering isn't driven by realism, but by artistic/aesthetic choices.

>don't even talk about static lighting,
static lighting is still just as good as dynamic lighting, in general. It is in fact BETTER than dynamic lighting if used correctly.

look at it this way -- if a light isn't going to be moving around, why does it need to be dynamic? making it static means you can do the lighting "offline" and pre-bake it, which will always necessarily allow higher fidelity and more complex lighting than doing it at runtime (since you have only one frame to do it at runtime but can take all the time and processing power you want for baking)

stalker did look pretty shit without mods though, even before "XR3DA.exe has stopped responding"

I´m not fooling anyone. That´s literally how I played it for the first time, and got 30-35fps average even in the more populated areas (Bar, Freedom base...). Notably more outdoors.

Hell, I first played CRYSIS on that same machine, and got whooping 20-24fps average, most settings on low, and it still impressed me back then.

People seriously are underestimating the old components, or overestimating the system requirements of these old games.

I think you exaggerate. If I go into my bathroom which is pitch black with a flashlight it's not just the immediate area that gets lit up, the whole room does get noticeably brighter. So yes, GI is meaningful even for small light sources.

On top of that even if it was just for the sun that'd significantly change things. E.g. in AC Unity there is day and night, but time doesn't pass in real time, you need to reload the map if you want to change time of day. With real time GI such things wouldn't be a problem.

Really? Light bounces in real life. Maybe you've seen a shitty tech demo or something, but raytraced GI is beautiful.
Right now, unless you have AO, you can only have direct light and constant ambient, and constant ambient light doesn't look good at all compared to true GI.

>SimpleWebbedCooter

>it's probably that they look bad together or something.
They don't in Battlefield.

>use UDK
>can easily make mirrors with a Cubemap scene capture actor
>can set refresh rate and resolution of cube map for optimizing

>use Unreal Engine 4
>reflections hardcoded at 128x128
>"We'll change it later goys" - dev two years ago

That's a PC game, user.

user we're talking about dynamic shadows and light sources here, static lighting isn't gonna cut it

it is a PC port of a PS2 game, user.

>the whole room does get noticeably brighter.
Except if you didn't paint it eggshell white, or are using a flashlight with a tight beam.

I also fear that materials would end up reflecting way more than they should, or light would have obscene amounts of energy. Your bathroom might go from black to very dark blue, but I'd figure in a game they'd either make it not work at all for atmosphere (which isn't an evil thing) or make it brighten up the whole fucking room (at which point why not just have a light switch)

It's a typical thing, something gets invented and gets overused forever. See also: Bloom, DoF, Film Grain

>doing night/day stuff
That could easily be fixed by adding ambient light, since sunlight is so powerful and so widely distributed that it's not really worth it to do GI rather than adding an ambient term to the world, since the final image will basically be the same.

The problem is that many "static lights" in games really should be able to be moved. There is that webm going around with FEAR and Bioshock Infinite and while obviously because Bioshock's light is static it does GI and all that good shit, but then it doesn't react when the player throws a grenade at it which looks ridiculous. Fortunately dynamic lights are pretty cheap nowadays.

To be fair, the reason the first Mirror's Edge looked so good was because of it's pre baked lighting with full on global illumination. It might be one of very few examples when it works better though.

I'm gonna get myself some MDK now, thanks.

BioShock Infinite in general feels like it was outsourced extensively

They could do mirrors in older generation games simply by re-rendering the polygons of you character and using a static backdrop for the background. Everything in those days was essentially low-level, there weren't high level APIs for the gamecube and PS2 that had to be rapidly decompiled, you essentially wrote code for fixed function graphics chips and they ran what your threw at them and it was very fast.

Because everything goes through a pixel shading pipeline nowadays, graphics devs have gotten lazier. They would rather get everything done with some pre-made shader rather than figure out how to do effects through a limited pipeline.

>I´m a mere small scale amateur indie game maker myself
Thank you for not wasting my time. Opinion disregarded.

You can have dynamic shadows with static light sources.

>inb4 60000000 reaction images and an ebin screencap

If you know where a light source is, you can project a shadow from it. keeping track of light sources around an object will give you the rays to/from those lights which can be used to orient shadows cast.

The only key difference between static lighting and dynamic lighting is that dynamic lighting is moveable. If a light source can't be moved (like, say, a wall fixture, a heavy floodlight, the sun or moon, etc) then there is no reason it should be dynamic.

I don't know what webm you're talking about.
> it doesn't react when the player throws a grenade at it
When I say "lights that can move", I don't mean NPC spotlights or whatever, I mean lights that are literally fixed to the literal world. Like, with literal anchoring bolts. literally.

errata, I meant "lights that CAN'T move", as in lights that are anchored down in some way. those should be static.

also of note is that static lights can (or at least should) be able to be turned on and off. It increases the size of the lightmap exponentially to save the various states lights can be in (even with two lights, you need one for both lights off, both lights on, and two more for one on and the other off) but it's still an alternative to dynamic lighting. That sort of lightmap switching is useful for lights that can be switched on or off (or destroyed) but are still not moving, e.g. a ceiling fixture that can be toggled from a switch, or simply shot.

A lot of early games with lights did this, like Perfect Dark or earlier Splinter Cell games.

>I´ve never even attempted to make a game, so I must know better than one who HAS made them
FTFY

Why would you assume developers would make the GI brighter than it should be? Also, GI takes the materials and energy conservation into consideration so you don't need to worry about black walls bouncing light like white ones.

>That could easily be fixed by adding ambient light, since sunlight is so powerful and so widely distributed that it's not really worth it to do GI rather than adding an ambient term to the world, since the final image will basically be the same.
Maybe for big outdoor areas, but indirect lighting through a window looks amazing with GI and completely flat without it.

>In a 3rd person game, there´s zero reason to not have working mirrors of SOME sort.
Art direction and rendering budgets (both in money and time as well as user processing power)

if your game is set in a place that doesnt have a lot of mirrors in it, theres no sense wasting time rigging up mirrors just for yuks. likewise, if the way you wanna do it involves rendering an already complex scene twice, you might want to decide against it if it'll tank the framerate of people with toasters who would otherwise enjoy your game.

>On Unity at very least.
fuck you retard those things are basically just automated QUOP, they don't hold a candle to actual hand-done (let alone mo-capped) animation

That's kinda what Unreal Engine 4 does. You've got

Dynamic Lights:
>fully dynamic
>can be moved
>can be toggled on/off
>can change intensity/colour

Stationary lights:
>can't be moved
>can be toggled on/off
>can change intensity/colour

Static lights:
>can't be moved
>can't be toggled on/off
>can't change intensity/colour

>theres no sense wasting time rigging up mirrors just for yuks
THEN WHY ADD MIRRORS IN THE FIRST PLACE

>Why would you assume developers would make the GI brighter than it should be?
Because developers also assumed that looking at a white painted wall should make it glow when Bloom became a thing.

Becuase developers also assumed that people spontaneously get glaucoma when running or aiming guns when DoF became a thing.

Becuase developers also assumed that games should look like they were made with 90 year old silver film when Film Grain became a thing.

Even back in the day, look at colored lighting. People figured out how to make lights anything other than white on the cheap, and every Quake map looks like a pride parade after party held in a sewer.

im literally saying "don't add mirrors"

mirrors are pretty rare in human environments anyway, they basically only exist in bathrooms. there's reflective surfaces, but few are really usable as mirrors so cubemapping is generally enough (since most players won't notice dynamic objects that have moved around in the reflection of a square foot of granite countertop unless they're actively looking for things to complain about)

>Experienced game devs retire without passing on knowledge
>new SJW game devs take their place with literally none of the skills the old devs had

This is what is happening to gaming

With regards to graphics you literally couldn't be more wrong.

I'm sure there's an allegory to the middle east in here somewhere

Nah, the technical knowledge is there but the artistic applications are being lost

just look at all these retards who use dynamic lights for literally everything becuase "lol dynamic = better rite???"

>Except if you didn't paint it eggshell white

moving through an eggshell-white bathroom in darkness isn't exactly a rarity in videogames

That's not actually what's happening. It's a lot easier nowadays to get information and even help from professionals than ever before. It's more like:

>new SJW game devs don't actually care about making good games and just want to make quick buck
>large companies care only about profits and cut corners/rush development whenever they can

None of the old well-known game devs have done ANYTHING recently in regards to game engines. Carmack, in all his autistic glory, hasn't done shit in forever and whatever techniques he invented/perfected are utterly pointless by now for anyone but indies and modders

Yeah, but when GI has been baked in to the textures, it's never looked weird.
This is lighting, not a post effect you add like a lens flare, DoF or bloom. You have bloom, shallow depth of field and film grain in CG animated films with varying intensity, but the GI has always been calculated correctly since it was implemented.

more like exclusively

Actually Carmack has done a lot for VR development, but sadly mostly for mobiles.
>engadget.com/2014/09/04/samsung-gear-vr-john-carmack/

"At the start, the first couple months were so frustrating. When I'm talking about how we need front buffer access. We need the ability to draw directly to the screen without this triple buffering. And the way the logjam got resolved was I figured out a way to incorrectly hack the first phone to give me what I wanted through this really obscene programming thing. And I showed it to some driver people later and they were like, 'Oh god, John. That's awful!' But it worked well enough to show that, okay, front buffer rendering -- this works. It cuts out two frames of latency. It's important.

And I had argued for it a long time. I wrote so many of these multi-page emails about how important it was. But once we had it so people could see and see that it really does work, then Samsung went and wrote a proper interface for it. They gave me a good extension that gets me access without the grotesque things I was doing. And really that was -- once the ice was broken, they knew that these are good suggestions; these suggestions lead to real improvements. Then they started giving me things I didn't think I'd be able to get."

>VR
LITERALLY nothing

You're lying...

>ATI 5770
>Card came out in 2007
>1 gig
>DDR5
>higher clocks and cuda cores to your GT6600
>Ran like absolute shit on High settings
>Had to put use 1600x1050 to actually get 40 fps...

Stop pulling it out of your ass OP.

I think the difference is that the baked gi is "passive" in that average developers aren't usually writing the lighting parts of renderers, or renderers at all. Making it dynamic will necessarily require more input on the part of developers placing the lights in their game worlds, and we'll start to see ridiculous faggot bullshit before long.

I'm not sure if they're all in this keynote, but carmack had some fun anecdotes and other things to say about unrealistic use of lighting (and has some interesting points about just how solved a game optics in general is, and that most of the issues are now art side since we just have megs and gigs to throw at processing things)
youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1409&v=IyUgHPs86XM

He gave another talk at a recent GDC or something about this, and it seems like he prefers mobile-based VR because it's a more reasonable platform. He basically says straight-up that no one is going to buy actual full headsets, but everyone and their dog has a phone. It just makes more sense to develop for if you want to actually hit the market.

If no one works on it the tech will never get good.

2009*

that's also true if everyone works on it

>Patent everything
>Can't get any progress done whatsoever
Fuck yeah

It's necessarily not good because of the high barrier to entry (the headsets are expensive and require a lot of room that consoles/PCs/tablets/phones/handhelds do not) and it being kinda a shit medium in the first place for gaming

>it seems like he prefers mobile-based VR because it's a more reasonable platform.

The problem I see with this is that mobile VR is shit compared to the Vive (haven't tried OR).

The only decent mobile VR is the GearVR since it's made specifically for Samsung phones and works decently, all the other headsets suck.

>and it being kinda a shit medium in the first place for gaming

I agree with the rest of your post but this is wrong.

It's a shit medium for a lot of games, but it's also a fantastic medium for some games. Especially simulation games and other games where you sit in a vehicle profit a lot from VR.

A shit medium that's a stepping stone for proper VR. Unfortunately, everyone browsing this site will probably kill themselves before neurally connecting to hardware happens

>GearVR
Isn't that the specific one carmack is working with?

The problem with using it for simulation games is that you lose literal sight of your controls. A lot of people who are enthusiasts for flight or driving games have a stick or wheel or whatever. They'd be better served by larger TVs surround sound and rumble chairs and and booth-like things like are ACTUALLY used in ACTUAL simulators.

>proper VR
what nigga you think the holodeck is gonna come out? frig off

Not to mention it's just limited as fuck what you can do with it, at least in terms of more traditional video games.

I can't really see it ever becoming more than sort of just a specialized device. Like the hardcore sim fans will want it, and maybe it goes into more educational stuff, but most people will just get bored with it and go back to normal games after the magic wears off I recon. It's just to much faff.

>Ati Radeon
>CUDA cores
good one

Also reading comprehension: I played at 1024x768. NOT FullHD, not widescreen, but pure 4:3 "HD ready" quality. And I got ~35fps average in more demanding parts.

tl;dr : you´re illiterate Ati fag.

>Isn't that the specific one carmack is working with?

Pretty sure that's the one he's working on. It's also the only one as far as I know that has extra tools built into it such as a gyrometer that connect to the phone.

>The problem with using it for simulation games is that you lose literal sight of your controls
I don't actually have that problem anymore after using the Vive for a while. You learn where you need to reach without looking, similar to how you can type without looking. And there's a front-facing camera on the Vive in case I completely lose track (almost never happens though).
I think it's kind of important to set up your joystick/steering wheel etc. to be roughly the same distance and height from you as the in game model is though.

Super Mario 64 had a working mirror.
Checkmate, atheists.

>mobile VR is shit
That's what happens when you use a device for other than its intended purpose

as it gets more popular, better software will be written and phones will start coming with displays intended for VR shit

this, it is just next-gen mobile controls

people will tire of it like they tired of waggling.

why are you shilling so hard for a decade-old game?

The main problem with mobile VR is that the tracking is inaccurate and delayed.

There's a reason why Oculus and Valve both use mounted IR-Trackers to track the headset. You can't get accurate tracking with just a headset (and even less so with a phone), but accurate tracking is vital to prevent nausea.

I'm glad now I bought the MDK series during the GOG sale

>The main problem with mobile VR is that the tracking is inaccurate and delayed.
This is most likely due to phones being slow, and the interfaces for phones and their hardware being dogshit (basically any version of Android past 2.3 has the self-awareness of an autistic diaper fetishist with a bad hangover) so it'll probably not improve at all because phone hardware and software has only gotten worse and worse and hopefully VR memes will die soon

that said I got to try a buddy's vr headset with his phone and didn't feel sick at all trying stuff out. it's a strain on the eyes more than the inner ear imo. the REAL problem with VR is that there has not been one good VR game or app yet.

There's good simulator games with VR support, and EVE Valkyrie is really fun, but there's no proper made-for-VR games, and I doubt there will be any in the near future since the tech isn't widespread enough yet so it'd be too big a risk for a company to invest in a VR-only game.

>the REAL problem with VR is that there has not been one good VR game or app yet
Penguin effect. Nobody invests in VR because nobody invested in VR yet.
Unless something happens, it'll die because of this.

But even the indie stuff, which you'd think would have a lot of enthusiasm and people going for broke with fresh ideas unfettered by stockholders or the need for a return on their investment because they have a real job anyway, is mostly just cheap Unity "look at the object for a moment to advance the 'plot' " games.

Truth be told, I'm having trouble thinking of a possibly good VR game. I think it's the lack of decent input devices. With a phone, you can't really connect stuff easily or expect consistent deployment of things to use with a game. With PC-connected headsets, you have a mouse and keyboard or gamepad, but then you're just playing normal computer games with a more expensive monitor that hurts your eyes more.

The problem with VR is that it's fundamentally not a new medium, it's just a new display device. It doesn't add anything new to get creative with.

The motion controllers on the Vive are a new input device, but it only works well for specific types of games.

The archery game for example that comes with The Lab is really fun and would not work with classic controllers.

The problem here is the limitation that these controllers place on the player and the gameplay. They can only be used properly while standing and while they track your hand movement (awesome) you're limited to two triggers, two classic buttons and two touchscreens/buttons, so the game would have to be designed with that in mind.

Can't we just use it to simulate a larger gaming room, bigger screen TV and NES?
Hell you could sit in your closet all day with that.

For people who pretend to know so much about gaming, you guys are pretty ignorant when it comes to understand how mirrors work in games. Also entitled as fuck to start demanding that mirrors be functional.

You don't know anything about mirrors either.

I could see it having an appeal in virtual worlds.

Like having a really high quality recreation of a museum, or maybe even a carefully constructed "this is how Rome would look like in 20AD" type stuff. Even just simulating a movie theater if you have a shitty monitor. I wold love that as a NEET. Exploring the world from my home.

And porn of course.

Not to mention the more you move towards making a realistic experience the more aware you will be of it's limitation. Like every melee combat game would have you wielding what is basically lightsabers since there is no feedback in hitting air. You will never feel like you are holding a heavy weapon or hitting something.

Infinite doesn't even have shadows for Booker

Yes and no.
Yes, it's possible.
No, it's not possible now due to the resolution of the headset.

Once we get 4k screens maybe, but at the moment the resolution is too low (1440x1080 per eye), which makes it look like you're staring at a 800x600 monitor.

I guess it'd work for NES emulation.

>Not to mention the more you move towards making a realistic experience the more aware you will be of it's limitation. Like every melee combat game would have you wielding what is basically lightsabers since there is no feedback in hitting air. You will never feel like you are holding a heavy weapon or hitting something

This is an issue with all the combat games I've tried on it. The controller can vibrate to let you know your hit connected (and of course visual feedback) but there's no resistance.

When your sword collides with a wall or an enemy, the in-game model stops dead but your hand keeps moving anyway because you didn't feel anything.

This also leads to wagglan gameplay when you're lazy. You can play through a game like Acan's Call (I think it's called) by simply holding your shield hand in front of your face whilst wagglan your sword hand back and forth underneath it. That way you can just waggle every enemy to death.

Wouldn't the pixels in the headset and the simulated screen start aliasing, too?
You'd have to make the screen static floating in your vision, or else the pixels don't align.

> to solve are dilemma with mirror reflections, we simply add a character model at the mirror, that prompts up as soon as the player comes into radios of the mirror, then have the sepperate middle "mirror" the players actions. Good fun

It does actually have them though they just look terrible

The mirror looks fine, the game just looks terrible.

The pixels wont' align anyway since you're seeing a bent image in either eye, so they pixels your left eye sees cannot overlap with the pixels your right eye sees. It's like looking at two bent screens instead of two flat screens if that makes sense.

>radios, middle
Send help, anons having a stroke!

So you'd always see interference patterns.
Wow.

it´s no wonder though.
Contrary to the common belief, DNF actually runs on very heavily modified UE1. Yes, fucking Unreal Engine ONE.

Ouch. Figures, I guess.

meanwhile PS3 2008 with 256 mb of ram
kek

now its not
i have to refund it twice with my 970
and bought it op PS4 (yep with 30fps lock but without other annoying shit)

You don't really see an interference pattern, but I'm not sure why. Either because the resolution is high enough or because it's blurry due to deferred rendering, or maybe our brain is just nice enough to not make us notice it.

Woooooooooooow a skybox!
TECHNOLOGY!

they can use it properly. every smoke and every mirror in any scene.

today it is just pure powerhungry shit without thought

>a skybox
whoa
neva been dun befo

developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/3D_Skybox

SOMA did mirrors really well, imo.

youtube.com/watch?v=Kb812LKdMgI

That's a cutscene, user.
Notice how there is no reflection during gameplay, and it fades in when you interact with the mirror.
And the background in the mirror is pitch black, while the room is actually lit. They probably only rendered polygons within a distance from the mirror in the reflection, for performance reasons

the game now run pretty fucking good, ive say is now even one of thebest ports,

At least some games have the decency to have the mirrors broken so we don't have to see an opaque slab of grey where the mirror should be.

>look down
>see your own feet

I owned goldeneye 007 on the wii. There was a mirror you could see yourself in. Then I bought GoldenEye 007 reloaded for the 360. Fucking mirrors were grey. Wtf? Superior console can't handle mirrors?

...

>look down
>can't see anything above your waist
Why even bother if you're not going to do it right?

do want

>lets play it safe, use the wand

Infinite doesn't have a lot of things

Someone post the UT4 skybox thing

>sounds like pure laziness to me
It's about being realistic with your budget and schedule, you braindead autistic fuck.

Don't know have a fucking clue what you're on about, and have clearly demonstrated this. Fuck off back to your rpgmaker.

>It's necessarily not good because of the high barrier to entry (the headsets are expensive and require a lot of room that consoles/PCs/tablets/phones/handhelds do not)
That's because it's emergent technology, you fucking idiot. Have you ever seen photographs of the first electronic computers? People NEED to BUY SHIT in order for it to get cheaper, smaller, more efficient, etc. You're just as fucking stupid as people who used to say that the concept of a home console, as opposed to playing video games at an arcade, would never take off.

>tiny slaw team with sub-1Mil budgets can make better vidya and graphics than most western AAA studios these days

If you're gonna take screenshots, take them maxed at 1080p minimum

Technically it's not worth having to bend FPS engine around making couple of working mirrors.

a) You don't have a body in FPS game
b) Whole purpose of the engine is to cull out geometry what is not in camera (i.e. in your eyes)
c) Development schedules are so bad these days they don't have time for this
d) It is completely doable but it's just a priority issue I guess
e) Did you know that sociopath Martin Shekel is buying Cred Forums off from Hiroshima? Hiroshima proved to be incompetent hack and is complaining he cannot keep this place up and running. And now he sells it to a guy who enraged everyone by increasing malaria medicine price by 100x. WTF is wrong with people?

>You don't have a body in FPS game
Except Booker has an in-game model

I´m stuck on my craptop this week.
Still got better resolution and performance than Xbone.

Got this nice shot saved up though.

>a) You don't have a body in FPS game
There´s numerous games where this is false.
Even System Shock 1 and 2 simulated full body awareness. Same thing with Crysis and FEAR.

>Whole purpose of the engine is to cull out geometry what is not in camera
you can have multiple cameras in modern games, and they are used more often than you´d think.

>c) Development schedules are so bad these days they don't have time for this
like said earlier, this stuff´s literally a stock, drag&drop -tier feature. Some slav modder fucks have implented it to some HL1 mods of theirs.

>Best skybox is still bungie's.

I know there are some technical issues, but also I think it's an immersion issue. Seeing your avatar move around will always look a bit disjointed because of the nature of controlling a proxy. In cases like Bioshock 3, where they wanted to hone in on immersion, I think that was one of their reasons

>immersion
I never get this. The fact that I do not see my avatar in obvious fucking mirrors is a way huger immersion killer for me.

Be it first-person or 3rd-person game, I always "become" the character, not otherway around.

"no"

This is because in previous years systems were actually different, whereas modern consoles are basically just toasters in a fancy box.

Hmm, I need to refresh my knowledge, good points.

What do you think about point d)?

if that's the case why was the "experienced" carmack responsible for some of the worst textures in recent memory

>What do you think about point d)?
A matter of pure laziness, knowing it takes literally a few presses of couple buttons to have working mirror-like surfaces in vidya this day and age.

If you are going to spend X months to carefully craft virtual rococo themed buildings, you should have couple minutes to activate working real-time reflections, and set decent LOD and disabling triggers on them.

>People NEED to BUY SHIT in order for it to get cheaper, smaller, more efficient, etc.
And VR needs to have games slightly better than Giant Cop and Job Simulator for people to buy it

Sorry, what about point e)? I'm not trolling, I just forgot... I'm worried about the future of Cred Forums.

Never heard of the matter, nor do I know who this shekel guy is.

And also a very simple vidya trick.