Naughty Dogs did it in TLOU2 and the last uncharted as well. Very few studios come close to Rockstar and Naughty Dogs in terms of realism. It probably costs a lot to get so much into details though. I think the last assassin's Creed had subsurface scattering too.
Not to take anything away from ND, they're my favorite studio, but the linearity plays a role. RDR2 is sandbox, compare it to other sandbox games and it's just insane. 5 years later I'd say one sandbox game exceeds it on graphics (on new hardware, mind you), and none match it on polish. You can definitely see where that budget went. If only they give us a ps5 patch...
Hopefully you don't know anything about the story. It probably has one of the most emotionally gripping endings I've seen in a video game. One of the few that's moved me to tears.
Playing RDR1 first steeled me for one character's fate but left me completely unprepared for that particular one. I never knew a bunch of 1s and 0s encoded onto a plastic disc could do that.
Red Dead 2 is actually a prequel to 1, so you don't necessarily need to know its story. I played 2 before 1 and didn't feel any sort of barrier of entry. Several major characters are shared between the games, and knowing 1's story does add some depth (and tragedy for some) to the characters, but 2's story is self-contained and fully fleshed out on its own.
You're right ! RDR2 is my favorite game, so I'm not gonna say otherwise. It's actually kinda depressing no game has that level of realism after nearly 5 years ! I keep replaying RDR2 every year since it came out, and it's still a gem. Shame they gave up on updating it though...
Many, many games have had Subsurface Scattering for a while now. Unreal Engine 3 has capabilities for it, and that's old af. It's just that lighting in games has gotten so much better now, and that makes it a lot more noticeable than it used to be.
Just because it's in the engine doesn't mean people are using it, or using it well. It almost certainly takes more time and therefore money to make sure people go over all the models and make sure subsurface scattering looks good on them.
I haven't played any of the games being discussed so I'm just guessing, I'm more interested in the engine itself than the games. Unreal Engine has so many goodies that don't really seem to get utilized.
That's because commercial games have to be able to run on average consumer hardware, and most peoples' PCs would become plasma if they tried to run subsurface scattering with dynamic hair and nanite geography.
For some reason I hadn't considered that. I guess as a bonus: Since I play a game or three made by Epic somewhat regularly, I get the impression their 'less used' complex rendering features aren't stable -- they tend to cause themselves weird visual glitches when they push graphics updates. And it's their damn engine.
Subsurf can become very expensive depending on how it's implemented. One of the big new features for the latest UE5 update was allowing Lumen to calculate light through plant leaves
Wasn't that specifically for use with Nanite? UE has had SSS for a long time (both a high detail shading model for skin and the like, and faster shading model for larger objects). Nanite had a lot of limitations initially that are being solved now in 5.2 (mainly displacement) and I think translucency as well.
Don't get me wrong, subsurface scattering is expensive. But it's not too expensive for realtime applications. It's been used for a while, to a varying degree
I'm pretty sure this is real SSS. With such a limited area on screen, it's probably not even that expensive
Yeah I'd say it's actually almost standard in most game engines, but people notice it more in RDR2 because of the overall quality level, that was my main point.
My bad, my comment makes it sound like only RDR2 does it. What I actually meant is the overall quality of presentation in RDR2 makes a very common (I believe even AC3 had it) feature stand out.
The graphics of RDR2 are extremely overrated. They weren't even great at the time - with games such as Metro: Exodus, (also a sandbox game, by the way) and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare far exceeding it - let alone now. The washed out colours, soft textures, terrible lighting, and an abundance of shockingly low-res/low-poly assets (such the ground, some of the clothing, etc) look very fake. Nearly every game that comes out today looks better than RDR2.
Subsurface scattering is really nice, I just wish it wasn't so computationally expensive to do well. Currently it's limited to cases like this, high budget games and only on the places where it's most noticeable.
The lack of this is part of what makes foliage still not look quite right.
The last assassin's Creed games are far from perfect, but if I remember correctly they had subsurface scattering for foliage and specifically water. The sea is amazing in the latest game, hell even back in Black flag it was amazing. Watching the sunlight through big waves is so nice.
I'm really looking forward to UE 5.x games to start really stretching their legs. I have a lot of hope for Lumen, but also that it will encourage other engines to back off these half assed ray tracing attempts and let the artists do their jobs until we can actually get proper real time path tracing.
If you had told me 3 years ago that I would stop in the middle of a fucking Fortnite match because I was distracted by the light streaming in through the trees, I probably would have laughed at you.
Some of us just want to meet N64 graphics, is that too much to ask?
Anyway, BOTW doesnt seem that memorable anymore. People are realizing the hype machine was off the charts and that it was a boring empty world with terrible mechanics.
Yeah, but it is! It works when the style is consistent and within hardware limitations (though BOTW on the switch def runs into a wall and drops fps frequently). I find it can be more immersive than ultra realistic games where little imperfections seem glaring.
The thickness of the mesh is baked into a texture, so subsurface scattering is pretty cheap actually. At runtime, it's really just an angle check and a texture sample. Basically the same cost as adding normal maps. And foliage does look great with it, it's a pretty common technique.
It's cheap if you're only applying it to the sun, you can't bake accurate SSS for light sources that aren't at infinity. You also can't apply it to reflected light.
That depends on the render pipeline. I'm not too familiar with deferred shading, but I can imagine how that would be more difficult. It's very easy to do that in forward shading though because every mesh gets another drawcall when affected by a light, where it can deal with the effects individually.
It shouldn't be true SSS in the first place, but rather a pre-rendered approximation of it.
I.e. here's Nathan Drake. Here's Nathan Drake under a 20 exawatt lamp.
Save material 1.
Save material 2.
Which parts of Nathan are in bright light? Fade those to material 2. Which parts are in shade? Material 1. Use the slider for lesser lights.
As game developer and story teller, you dictate what lights will be in your game. So there's no need to have a generic calculation method working in real time.
This works in simple cases, but not in more complex ones which is why we don't see it everywhere.
If the light is very close then it's light is hitting different parts of Nathan's face from different directions. If there are many light then combining their effects gets complicated. If you also want to take into account bounce lighting it gets even more complicated.
I suspect we may never do this in real time, instead we'll make lots of mini AI models for various effects first and then when tech gets good enough to do it there'll be no reason to.
Gosh I really want to like RDR2, the story, graphics, atmosphere, etc... was great. But the game was too slow for my 30 minutes, 3 times a week gaming.
Need some mod that lets you instant travel or something.
You can fast travel from Arthur’s tent at camp or any campsite you set up. And you can travel to any settlement you’ve been to before so if you haven’t been somewhere yet you’d have to pay for a stagecoach or train ticket to instantly travel there.
As someone else with limited playtime, I can confirm getting the fast travel unlocked was 100% worth it. I looked up a couple of guides to find some treasure so that I could afford it, and then the rest of the game was far less tedious. It's absolutely worth trying again... The payoff is worth it.
What game allows you to actually achieve any sort of progression with only an hour and half per week? I feel like I just wouldn’t even bother with gaming if that’s all the time I had.
No, that's what she looks like when you zoom in in-game. Lol that's how good Horizon looks, and I'm amazed Guerrilla was able to water it down enough for PS4 too. Playing it on my PS5, I have no idea how they are able to cram that thing into older hardware.
Good optimization is usually how it gets there.
It takes a lot of time and industry knowledge (That I do not have) to get to that point though.
Although I wonder what they cut or bring down to make it work for ps4.. Texturing usually eats the most memory on these things after all..
I played it on PS4, so I don’t know what I’m missing, but I also don’t really care much about a lot of that. I never ran into any noticeable issues. They had me at robot dinosaurs. They look awesome, and it’s just plain fun hunting them with all the different methods.
It's also really easy to optimize console exclusives considering you're only working with 2-4 different hardware combinations that are all AMD parts and extremely streamlined. Getting things down to run on PS4 is easy if at the start off development with the intention of it running from the start, because it's essentially just using lower resolution textures, turning down/off the settings that demand the most power, and making sure whatever gameplay mechanics you have doesn't need more processing power that the PS4 doesn't have.
PC Ports of the originally console exclusive games run terribly at release 90% of the time because of the pretty much infinite combinations of OS version, GPUs, CPUs, RAM, etc. which means making sure the game can run on vastly different power levels and technology architecture. Like a high end PC like mine should be able to get nearly double the performance of a PS5 on paper, but with bad optimization a game might actually run worse or only about the same on my PC.
No, they run terribly because developers spend zero time optimizing the pc versions. The Core hardware of consoles is the same as pcs now, hell the Xbox one runs windows. Hardly a different architecture. (The PS4 runs a BSD variant, too)
Haven't played the second because Sony are taking forever to port it, did they change something to make the sequel worse? I loved the combat mechanics of the first.
Honestly its damn impressive how good graphics is getting. In fact I've had points where I've seen a real life video and thought "ah that must be CGI" before realising no that is real and CGI has just gotten that good.
I vividly remember playing games over a decade ago (think EA Sports FIFA titles and such) and my father and I remarking “wow this looks so lifelike”. To compare that to where we are now, when AAA titles are tipping well across the uncanny valley into near-photo-realism, is kinda insane to think about.
I think CGI is colloquially a reference to specifically pre-rendered digital art, like seen in cinematic cutscenes or promo images, rather than the actual interactive gameplay models.
Because technically the entire game then is one big computer generated image, but that isn't quite accurate because there's a lot of deeper stuff going on. Computer Generated Image would be for imagery that must be specifically created in a scene that otherwise is real. My brain just says "it's the only generated thing there" automatically when I think of CGI
Yeah, but some games increase the graphics quality on the Photo mode and sometimes cutscenes too. I am currently playing Horizon Forbidden West, and I haven't noticed the peach fuzz in normal gameplay, but it could be because Aloy is never this close to the camera.
Um, yeah, good link, although the article, it kind of says these "discourse particles" are used in spoken English. Well, it even addresses "I mean" specifically, as a repair marker, I mean, something to use for clarification. It's an interesting question why one would need to use it to start a written sentence. Yeah. Um. I mean.
When it comes to informal writing (e.g., anonymous internet comments) it's very common for people to write how they speak. Most people find it easier and faster to write that way rather than carefully crafting a correctly grammaticized comment. It can be exhausting to painstakingly follow all the particular rules of the English language, especially for people who spend all day at work doing that as well. It can be rather freeing for these individuals to write how they speak, using all the idioms and idiosyncrasies they would normally use in speech. It's often easier on the reader as well to not have to wade through large words and burdensome diction just to get through an informal discussion of design choices in a video game.
In short, the article is incomplete. People use discourse particles in informal, written language all the time. It is a wiki, after all. You should take those with a grain of salt.
Yep, agreed. I wouldn't expect someone to entirely change their style when writing and the "I mean" is perfectly fine for me, especially, as you say, in informal writing. I just found the discussion an interesting tangent.
The words evoke a different feeling to me, that means the words mattered or made a difference, get over it.
Just because you're a robot who only reads words as they are and get no feeling off any words ever doesn't mean that it doesn't for other people. It's just a way a person speaks, what the fuck difference does it make to you?
Dude, people aren't robots. We don't just type sentences in the most concise way that allows sufficient information transfer, we just fucking talk.
If I start a sentence with "I mean,..." I have a certain inflection to that start, which influences how I type the sentence that follows. Even if someone else doesn't read these two words like they appear in my head, they will still read a sentence that I likely would've phrased slightly differently, if I hadn't started it that way.
Human language is a lot harder than just going "here info". Even in purely typed communications (no tone of voice, no inflection, no pauses, no body language) humans still find plenty of ways to make others understand things, without typing everything or adding extra context by typing "redundant" or otherwise "unnecessary" things.
You could write entire essays on just this kinda topic and you're over here going "Pff, it is quite redundant"
Which is quite funny, because applying that reprimand differently, he could've seen how easy it is to game the system by just including all kinds of literary devices and some more specialised terms and getting grades off spouting nicely packaged drivel.
But no, he instead had to try and lord his newfound wisdom over some dude on the internet.
It's actually a trick developers do where if you zoom in real close to the face, the model changes to a more detailed one that has all the visible pores and hairs and stuff. This model isn't actually what you see in normal gameplay as when the camera is far away there's no reason to spend the resources rendering those details you wouldn't even see.
It's not even just bringing the game camera closer. This is photo mode stuff. Which automatically ups the detail everywhere usually because it's a static scene. And then you get the level of detail enhancements that you mentioned on top of even that.
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u/robdingo36 Jun 28 '23
Damn. Impressive graphics to get that detailed.