In 1998 it was coloured light.
In 2004 it was bumpmapping.
The 2011 candidate for "too much! overdone! tone it down!" is bloom.
What do you think?
That aside, the game is wonderful. Yes, so the textures are lower-res than other modern games. So what? Big swingin'. It's a tradeoff, and anyone who complains about that really mustn't have played much further than the first few minutes of it. Once you get to the first bandit lair it really becomes obvious what you're trading lower-res textures for, and as you progress further through it that comes out more and more. The Dead City really hammers it home - THIS is the power of megatexture (shout out to Mixom!)
Let's get this much straight. With traditional tiled texturing it's impossible to do this kind of thing and maintain high performance. OK, I spotted one or two cases where textures were tiled (check out the flyover):
But presumably that's just a megatexture trick.
One last one; recognise her from the previews?
Monday, October 10, 2011
Too Much!
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4 comments:
Yeah, it's true that megatexture does this loads better than tiled textures ever could.
The other method is to just use models with proper UVmaps, or mix and match the two. I'd be interested to see a Rage level in editor, just to see how much of it is models and how much is brushwork, for example. To see how it's done.
Great looking game, obviously, and if there really is a hires patch for PCs... ouch.
The bloom... it's just the art style I guess. Question of taste.
I don't really mind the bloom in Rage, I've seen much much worse examples tbh... and bloom is something I almost always turn off, I didn't feel the need with Rage... and it's only in a few places that it's used as much as in the dead city. Also when looking outside from inside bandid hideouts... but I think that's artistically justified.
In the end it's highly personal,
heck, some people thought the color grading was a bug.
1998 was colored light
(unreal, Q2)
1999 were coronas everywhere (unreal tournament)
2004 was bumpmapping
(doom3)
2006 was lightbloom
(this is when the effect was considered a novelty)
I'dd say these days SSAO and overdone depth of field.
I loathe crysis a bit for those things...
Also object motion blur... but when framerates are high it does help making movements appear a little more smooth.
PS: notice how they baked (!) specularity into the diffuse texture in some places, it even looks pretty convincing, oddly.
Yup, the technology is definitely impressive and personally I don't mind the extreme overbright (bloomed) situations that much, it fits the overall art-style of the game..
I'm not too fond of the gameplay so far tho.. It is all very linear and semi-predictable, not a lot of skill required, except when you decide to just dive in (run and gun style) but then the complex and slow weapon-changing mechanism really gets in your way.. (custom-semi-scripted cfg becomes a necessity, as is the case with quake).
Having said that, the gameplay does get more interesting the farther you progress into the game.. So I may come to a different conclusion after finishing it.. and I have not yet bothered with MultiPlayer either..
Carmack mentioned at QuakeCon that they might do a higher res patch for the PC-version at some point.. So that will be interesting (if it ever happens).
As I understand it, the main reason for the somewhat disappointing texture quality, is the heavy compression of the textures <-> storage capacity limits of the medium for the consoles (dvd/blueray).
Right. The original virtual textures are ~150GB. The VTs they shipped are around 17GB. Assuming there was no downscaling involved in bouncing the final VTs, that's a lot of compression, and certainly explains the rampant compression artifacts. (Which the over-done color grading only emphasizes)
I don't expect to see a high-res texture patch for the entire game, since doubling the bit rate of the textures won't yield much of an increase in fidelity, but Carmack did mention releasing a high-res pack for a certain section. Dead City is probably the best candidate for it given that it's actually one of the worst-looking areas in the game.
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