Unreal Engine 5 - holy shit!

[gurugeorge]

Oof, that's a pretty serious indictment. I don't have enough tech know-how to judge, but if what the guy is talking about is true, visuals are in a mess atm.

I've suspected something is off for a while - just at a basic layman's level, as modern games should have been getting sharper, they've been getting more blurry

 

[flyingjohn]

Do gamers care? No.
Does using this engine save time and money? Yes.
Is the choice obvious if you are making anything that isn't a solo dev project? Yes.

 

[Lyric Suite]

"Gaymers" were fine with 360 era graphics, which were full of bloom, fuzzy textures, and shit filters everywhere. They are going to be fine too with this. Those of us who can actually see will suffer as usual.

 

[flyingjohn]

"Gaymers" were fine with 360 era graphics, which were full of bloom, fuzzy textures, and shit filters everywhere. They are going to be fine too with this. Those of us who can actually see will suffer as usual.

The jump from sixth to seventh gen was the last big graphical improvement, for better or worse. Even with all the filters and fuzzy textures, there was genuine improvement in terms of physics and graphics.Ninja gaiden 2 enemy count simply couldn't have been done on the original xbox.
Modern gen's ( 8th onward) are practically identical with huge performance hits for practically no gain.Some even lack features from the ps2 era.

 

[thesecret1]

Eh, it's just the usual 90-10 issue where things that only make up 10% of the visual quality take up 90% of the performance. The usual practice with graphics was to cull minutae details for the sake of performance, bake lighting rather than dynamically computing it, and a lot of other shit in similar vein. Newer tools are here so that you don't need to do it and can do everything without these shortcuts, at the cost of performance. The final effect is similar because people were very good at doing these shortcuts, but at the end of the day, it's a logical path for graphics development to take, especially if one is going for photorealism.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Well, i for one have a huge problem with fuzzy anything, and i also hate how most gaymes implement post-processing effects. I remember trying Dirt Rally and the game genuinely looked twice as good with all the post-processing turned to minimum (no options to turn them off altoghether). That's when i knew something was fucked with modern nu-graphics.

Even early 3D garbage looks better to me than modern gaymes with a good dose of anti-aliasing. I just like things that are sharp and clean. Photo realism isn't a problem. Kingdom Come was photorealiastic and still looked sharp and clean. It's modern devs that suck ass, it's not the kind of graphics, whether they are realistic or stylized, that makes a difference. It's how things are designed. Plenty of pixel art games that looks like incomprehensible gibberish to me.

 

[JC'sBarber]

Graphics peaked in the early 2000s, especially on PC with Unreal Engine 2 titles looking exceptionally crisp and appealing to the eye. Everything else that came after just added blurry, unnecessary effects that made it all worse.

 

[gurugeorge]

Graphics peaked in the early 2000s, especially on PC with Unreal Engine 2 titles looking exceptionally crisp and appealing to the eye. Everything else that came after just added blurry, unnecessary effects that made it all worse.

Didn't Digital Extremes (makers of Warframe and its precursor game) have a lot to do with Unreal Tournament, and wasn't Warframe somewhat based on some of the same code?

Interesting in that Warframe is, comparatively speaking (I mean granted that showoff graphics aren't its primary selling point), a good looking game, but also runs incredibly smoothly even on a potato. DE have always had an eye on graphics improvement - I recall lots of little vids they made over the years about small improvements in graphics.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Was playing Noone Lives Forever 2 yesterday and wondering if "this as good as it should be". I concluded that there is no reason to add "better" graphics for 99% of games. Unless you are making some kind of flight simulation or need all those vegetation for stealth, or distance for sniping, all this extra graphics porn is just very grating on the eye.

 

[gurugeorge]

Was playing Noone Lives Forever 2 yesterday and wondering if "this as good as it should be". I concluded that there is no reason to add "better" graphics for 99% of games. Unless you are making some kind of flight simulation or need all those vegetation for stealth, or distance for sniping, all this extra graphics porn is just very grating on the eye.

I think I've outlined this in several threads, but it's not the chase for versimilitude in and of itself that's the problem in terms of gaming, it just requires careful art design so that game-relevant objects stand out in a way that's easy to see at a glance. So a bit of sylization, but only enough to achieve that (e.g. a medpack has a certain look about it, easy to see at a glance or in the distance).

Our normal 3-d vision doesn't present us with a visual soup in which it's difficult to distinguish objects, normally we can pick out important things quite easily. And that's (mainly) because we have depth perception and we don't just perceive a flat 2-d visual field. This is a hard problem to crack, even with VR (as Carmack said, it's the most difficult problem, and certainly unresolvable outside of VR refinement without a total technological leap into something like a "holotank" or something that has similar real or virtual functionality).

So short of that, until further tech leaps are made, the design of games has to find the sweet spot between visual fidelity and enough stylization so your brain doesn't have to work extra hard to pick game-relevant things out.

But one is grasping the wrong end of the stick to think that we should abandon the quest for visual realism at x level, there's no good reason for that at all.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Was playing Noone Lives Forever 2 yesterday and wondering if "this as good as it should be". I concluded that there is no reason to add "better" graphics for 99% of games. Unless you are making some kind of flight simulation or need all those vegetation for stealth, or distance for sniping, all this extra graphics porn is just very grating on the eye.

But one is grasping the wrong end of the stick to think that we should abandon the quest for visual realism at x level, there's no good reason for that at all.

For 99% of games it ought to be abandoned at all costs.

 

[Lyric Suite]

There's no quest for visual realism. If there were we wouldn't be having this discussion, all games would look crisp and clean, the way real life does.

What's happening is that AAA slop is going for stylization, specifically, muh cinematic stylization.

Visuals in movies, for the record, have been terrible since the 2000s too, and movies by necessity are all about visual realism (since it's a camera capturing reality), and yet the last time you had movies that looked realistic was the 90s.

Just look at this shit:



Notice the parallels with mid-2000s console vydia. This is NOT realism.

 

[Gerrard]

Graphics peaked in the early 2000s, especially on PC with Unreal Engine 2 titles looking exceptionally crisp and appealing to the eye. Everything else that came after just added blurry, unnecessary effects that made it all worse.

Didn't Digital Extremes (makers of Warframe and its precursor game) have a lot to do with Unreal Tournament, and wasn't Warframe somewhat based on some of the same code?

Ha ha. No. Were they involved? Sure, DE is in the credits. But "a lot to do" is highly doubtful.

 

[tritosine2k]

bake lighting rather than dynamically computing it, and a lot of other shit

My dude. Scene complexity used to go up with precompute and what you got instead is stutter and not even half decent corridor shooters because not even that exists. But more kiddy bro -s play fortnite now oh yeah.

 

[Gerrard]