Unreal Engine 5 - holy shit!

[Morenatsu.]

Yes, early 2000s 3D is disgusting. I'd still play if it's a good enough game though, but it has to be really good.

Yeah, late 90s 3D is clearly superior!

 

[Nifft Batuff]

How many polygons till its indistinguishable from reality?

It is not the number of polygons. The problem is the basic knowledge of human anatomy...

So it's aesthetics and not technology that's holding back the technique.
Maybe it's their way of dumbing down reality to fit into computers?

Maybe, but I think that more and more people are so used to anime proportions, that actually think that this is reality, or, maybe, better than reality.

Spoiler

 

[Kev Inkline]

Tell me about any developments on the AI front?

What's the point of next level graphics if the people in the world keep getting dumber than a rock?

Well, the latter will solve the former, right?

 

[PapaPetro]

Maybe, but I think that more and more people are so used to anime proportions, that actually think that this is reality, or, maybe, better than reality.

Hyperreality
Where the CGI is desired over the real thing.

 

[gurugeorge]

At the end of the day, the whole idea of "art" is fundamentally bourgeois anyway

Art being "bourgeois" is not a defining, but a descriptive characteristic that was true only at a certain time. It's the same when Marx described the proletariat as extremely poor, and now many idiot-"marxists" think that it was a definition. The proletariat is defined by its source of income, nothing else. Today the working class isn't poor anymore, and as such they can afford to consume art as much as the bourgeois could way back when.

Putting it in a quick trope, let's say if we leave art to commercialism, you get a lot of "sugar art" - art that serves runaway instincts towards degeneracy, especially among the plebs. But in and of itself, would that be a problem? The liberal hope was that eventually people will become dissatisfied, learn and seek more elevated stuff. Is that wrong? What prevents such a learning process from happening?
[...]
You have to ask yourself, would the plebs really be elevated by having art they wouldn't buy anyway thrust upon them?

It's a liberal lie, not a liberal hope. It's the same idea that "democracy" works.

Society is not equipped to make smart decisions regarding complicated matters. The more labor becomes specialized, the more people only know one tiny thing. They can't also be excellent historians, philosophers, ethnographers, economists, etc to make decisions on foreign policy or internal economy.

Society is not equipped to form coherent demand for art, either. Society's interests are formed by objective needs or through manipulation. The latter is what forms most of it. Was there an objective need for Cyberpunk 2077? It was a need that was given to them by marketing. The same way, a society can be given a need for positive art that will inspire them, impart them with values, awaken their interest for the eternal. It all comes down to the social system: socialism wants to instill those things, capitalism doesn't. Simply, the goals of the two social systems are different.

A ticket to the Bolshoi was 1 ruble in USSR, which was cheaper than 1 piece of bread. The state attempted to civilize the masses that were all illiterate farmers just two decades ago. For one or two generations, mostly born in the 50s and the whereabouts, they succeeded and produced some of the best minds of the century. Art played a very important role in the formation of those people.

I suppose the reason I'm schizophrenic about it is that I can never decide whether true art is fundamentally Schopenhauerian or Nietzschean - whether it's meant to give contemplative peace or to stir the blood. If the latter, then you are right: its function should be to represent to the people an ideal that they can collectively strive to create, and the State should police that. But if art is fundamentally contemplative and mystical, then you need that underground.
[...]
It's interesting that we associate Soviet art with monumental "soviet realism." But that actually only took hold later on. Initially Soviet art promoted modernity and what we would call "degeneracy." Why that initial support and why was it withdrawn?

I'm not sure there was a support, so much as a lack of oversight.

Let's take painting as an example. All types of art have a rational reason for being, e.g. poetry was born by an objective need for rhyming, which helped memorize difficult and long texts. Painting's initial and rational goal was to portray things - there was simply no other way to do it. But then photography removed that objective need in the beginning of the 20th century. Painters became reactionary towards photography and needed to find a way for the art to evolve. Two ways emerged. 1. infuse paintings with socially-important content, and 2. a formal self-expression, which is a dead-end. All kinds of schizophrenics and charlatans went the second way.

The early soviet era was characterized by a certain amount of chaos and freedom to do anything. A lot of experimentation took place. The military had removed ranks even, trying something new. Suprematism and other modernist "art" was allowed to sneak in at that time, thankfully only for a few years.

Art is social, as its defining characteristic. As such, it must be socially useful. The meaningless, modernist self-expression in art is:
a) not interesting -- Someone will smear shit all over his face and say "this is me, this is my art." Who gives a fuck? This is not socially useful and hence a dead end.
b) contributes to degeneracy -- makes people stupid, atomizes society and makes it less prone to resist the elites. The guy smearing shit all over himself as "art" is the symbol of this violence by the elites: they make you literally "eat shit."

Furthermore

I do agree with a fair amount of this (although more the Fascist version ofc), and I do find some of it on-point; but at the same time, as I said, I think there has to be an underground, there has to be some chaos in the mix of society somewhere. It's just that it should be properly underground, away from the possibility of most people coming across it in the ordinary course of life, something unusual people find because they look for it, and forge their own communities in it.

The attitude of public society to degeneracy should be a wee bit hypocritical. (For example, like in England, the laws on the books against faggotry were really harsh, but in most cases they weren't implemented harshly - mercy and compassion were more often the rule, and the letter of the law was observed by legalistic fig-leafs. That's actually how it should be.)

Ofc the problem was the thing that begins with "j" and ends with "oos." Without them in the mix you can have this delicate balance I'm talking about, but with them in society, they will subvert the underground and turn it into a vehicle of revolution.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Art is a social construct herp derp im so smart

 

[tritosine2k]

they focus on GRAFX because it sells, if people stopped buying games based on eye candy there would be less emphasis on it

Imagine thinking realistic games with realistic sense of exploration pose a threat to that character centric dump called arpg:

The studio that’s doing this Arcane series on Netflix could do one hell of a borderlands series if they got the chance!!


[BL-Movie]
Guess it’s based on the league of legends universe which I’ve never played but the show has an art style that fits perfectly with what I’d imagine an animated borderlands show would use. The whole atmosphere they’ve created with the role to the dialogue and even the music all works so good and they could absolutely kill it with the borderlands universe too I think. Any one else watching this and think the same?

Curratum 's rating on this post was in so fast I'm predisposed to think he just doesn't think & apparently not alone.

 

[tritosine2k]

(...)

I'd like to see proper anatomy without weird deformations, non-sliding environment-aware animations, and the full facial sophistication in conversations (like in the Unreal 5 demo). Then I'd be satisfied.

Asked ,

There is surprisingly little public discussion and knowledge about how good artists set up their extra bones. Ripping models from games is the only option to get some insight

 

[ㅤㅤㅤ]

Yes, early 2000s 3D is disgusting. I'd still play if it's a good enough game though, but it has to be really good.

What are you talking about? Early 00's saw the peak in texture work before shaders and other gimmicks took over with the new generation of consoles. Instead of crisp and tasteful games that relied on artists to make them look good everything was smeared in bloom and games started relying on other effects. Going from Morrowind to Oblivion was not just a decline in complexity but also in terms of graphics. It's post-2005 or so that graphics saw the first major decline and they never recovered from it. The Silent Hill games on the PS2 still look better than what is offered on modern consoles. Same thing on the PC.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Only developer who knew how to use shaders well was Valve. Even cartoony TF2 was made with restraint. Other games be liek, yo, real life is wearing sunglasses at all tiems, dawg. Real men are made out of greasy plastic. And now games have this ugly bright/desaturated/low-contrast look with boring lighting but it's okay because WE USE PBR SO ITS REALISTICS, RTX ON!!!!

Source Engine still has the best HDR of all time even a decade and a half later.

 

[Drop Duck]

Only developer who knew how to use shaders well was Valve.

Shame they were incompetent in other regards. HL2 still stutters at certain times for me and does the thing where it repeatedly plays a sound effect. Goldsource never had those problems, or the issue of getting stuck on clutter, or the game updates that break old maps and the look they were going for when originally developing the game.

 

[Mexi]

I dunno, this might be old news to many of you hear, and of course it's hype, but holy shit, we really are getting very close to crossing that uncanny valley these days:-

https://odysee.com/@Coldfusion:f/next-gen-graphics-finally-arrive-unreal:9

That nanite technology sounds cool. Sounds like they're storing low dimensional embeddings in the hardware and continuously transitioning them through a decoder. Just the first thing that popped into my head when he talked about it.

 

[undecaf]

I've never liked realistic[tm] graphics on games except for frugally used cutscenes. They dictate too much and leave too little room for imagination, which I tend to find distracting. Certain level of abstraction and interpretability is something I kinda find a ”must” in games on general, because not having the presentation so overly literal, makes the player invest into the happenings on a more deeper level by actuallly having to think about it instead of simply consuming the stream of visuality.

 

[tritosine2k]

I've never liked realistic[tm] graphics on games except for frugally used cutscenes. They dictate too much and leave too little room for imagination, which I tend to find distracting. Certain level of abstraction and interpretability is something I kinda find a ”must” in games on general, because not having the presentation so overly literal, makes the player invest into the happenings on a more deeper level by actuallly having to think about it instead of simply consuming the stream of visuality.

The average shooter/arpg fan doesn't give two shits about this stuff.

1. They crank up FOV. By then it doesn't matter if its stylized or not.
2. If the game is not approachable they won't even learn its ins&outs. Forget about reinstalling and relearning.

Therefore GFX can be and usually is even a ladder leading to better abstraction overall,because learning it is justified because of GFX .

And just to give some idea how "deep" that character-centric-arpg-dump goes:

Aaron Thibault, vice president of strategy, production, and operations at Gearbox Entertainment Company, which created the popular “Borderlands” franchise, said that color science is an important topic for videogames. “Game developers are aspirational,” he said. “We want to create rich tapestries and it’s very competitive. Each year’s game has to look better than the one before.” Color also impacts gamers in many ways: player motivation, sense of wonder or awe, player identity, and player values. He focused on the importance of identity for gamers, who spend a lot of time creating their avatars. “We need to reproduce a range of skin tones and give players agency over who they will be,” he said. “Players want to be able to transport themselves into the game and feel their identity is true.”

 

[El Presidente]

but according to codexers 2d games from dos era looks so much better than this!

Some do. You won't find better realism in DOS but you can find lots of very pretty games, quite pleasing to look at, that are basically the artists' vision to represent stuff, which can potentially be very good. They're also symbols that leave room for the player's imagination, so it's a different kind of beast really. I don't wanna sound like that insufferable faggot 1eyedking but yeah, old vidya can look rather amazing.

 

[gurugeorge]

but according to codexers 2d games from dos era looks so much better than this!

Some do. You won't find better realism in DOS but you can find lots of very pretty games, quite pleasing to look at, that are basically the artists' vision to represent stuff, which can potentially be very good. They're also symbols that leave room for the player's imagination, so it's a different kind of beast really. I don't wanna sound like that insufferable faggot 1eyedking but yeah, old vidya can look rather amazing.

Good art is good art, and bad art is bad art, whether it's 2-d or 3-d. We know it when we see it, although it's difficult to define in words (since the only way of defining it in words is poetic, which is itself subject to the same condition).

I mean, for every example like this of stunning pixel stuff, there were a dozen games that looked just as crappy as the asset-laden, shiny, over-bloomy 3-d stuff we saw in the late Noughties. And by the same token, good-looking 3-d stuff is also being done today. Even photorealistic stuff has to be designed, and that design can be good or bad, can express a boring and generic or atmospheric and immersive 3-d virtual world.

Which is as much as to say: having a really good artist or two on the team is really important for game developers. Along with all the other stars that have to be aligned

 

[KateMicucci]

There are a lot of artists who draw photo-realistic art. As in you can't tell that it's not a photograph. They spend hundreds of hours lovingly massaging their charcoal until they get a picture that's identical to the photograph they're copying. People are very impressed by this- but still have good enough taste not to buy it.

My point is, if the developer has any artistic talent, then graphics that are indistinguishable from real life are unnecessary.

What do people actually want? This:

Spoiler

or this?

Spoiler

These are all finalists in an art contest for realist art. So these artists are all very good. It isn't good art vs. bad art- all of my examples are "good" art in the sense that the artist is extremely talented. But most people think the hyper-realistic stuff is tacky and would rather have art that looks like it was made by an artist, not a camera.

 

[thesecret1]

With how dogshit Unreal's documentation is in general, it'll take quite a while for studios to figure out how the fuck to use these things.

 

[tritosine2k]

saw this most interesting parametric modelling tool
(in case someone would want to get into content)
I'd use it with V-ray so I'd have this at hand:



+stuff

https://inachuslaurea.wordpress.com/2018/03/23/bcb-tutorials/

 

[what am i doing]

As far as art style goes I'm honestly pretty content with Victoria 2 type graphics, aka... text and some pie charts, maybe some hatching on a 2D map so I can see my Anglo Canadian colonists replace the Native American Minor pops as I bring civilization to the continent and consign the savages to the dustbin of history. If it's a 3D game I'd say all I really need is something around the level of Thief or Arx Fatalis. So I don't find this very exciting. I'm more curious about whether the Unreal Engine properly supports multi-threading yet or if it's still in a situation where you have to bring your own system (which is how I understand it currently works - I could be wrong).

 

[PapaPetro]

As far as art style goes I'm honestly pretty content with Victoria 2 type graphics, aka... text and some pie charts, maybe some hatching on a 2D map so I can see my Anglo Canadian colonists replace the Native American Minor pops as I bring civilization to the continent and consign the savages to the dustbin of history. If it's a 3D game I'd say all I really need is something around the level of Thief or Arx Fatalis. So I don't find this very exciting. I'm more curious about whether the Unreal Engine properly supports multi-threading yet or if it's still in a situation where you have to bring your own system (which is how I understand it currently works - I could be wrong).

How low will you go?
Roguelike ASCII?
Aurora Spreadsheet Simulator?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

How low will you go?

 

[PapaPetro]

How low will you go?

You have chosen wisely.

 

[what am i doing]

How low will you go?
Roguelike ASCII?
Aurora Spreadsheet Simulator?

Not that low, I still want my pie charts. Though I guess you could depict those in ASCII.

 

[PapaPetro]

Not that low, I still want my pie charts. Though I guess you could depict those in ASCII.

You can depict anything in ASCII.
Just use small enough pixels and imagination .)