Apart from graphics most stuff in games is pretty rough. Animations are generally bad and ways before reaching the uncanny valley of "getting close"; they're still in the "abstract representation of concept" detail level. AI is dumb (largely for [perceived] player-acceptance reasons). Sound is generally poor; some games still don't use 3D sound. Physics are "abstract representation" level again, some games still have fly-through walls and vibrating items. etc. etc.
For example, I can clearly see that ray tracing produces better results. But it's a bit harder to tell how better it is, to find the words that describes how better it is. Of course, one can say that, for example, photon tracing is more physically accurate. But still, what words can we use to describe how real (or not real) a still image is ("more realistic" doesn't count :-))
But also, the design often adapts to the capabilities. Games like GTA3 used to have thick fog just to hide the fact that they couldn't render stuff far away in time. You can say that's an artistic choice to give a smoggy big city atmosphere, but clearly it was a practical choice as well. Even today, game designers like to make things dark, blurry and rainy, so that the un-realism becomes less obvious.
The rest, not so much, sure.
It’s basically using the same technique as hand drawn animation where as long as you realize what’s being represented you can automatically fill in missing details. However, this fails as soon as you focus on any one detail.
Honestly, it’s not bad for what it is. I mean the physics engine was probably the worst part, but as a visual demo that’s fine.
This hasn't changed. New "realistic" games still range from horrible to boring-looking. I don't know if it's collective delusion or if I'm missing something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isvWpUXgKgM
Take this as a compliment, not a criticism when I say you've rigged your proposition by holding up Nintendo first party games, and Shigeru Miyamoto for comparison. If you were to look back at he average Nintendo game, not made by Nintendo, they are mostly unremarkable.
Which is something really obvious with the PS5 UE 5 tech demo [0]. The environment looks great and very realistic, while the character is very stylized and looks more like a comic than realistic.
Why not? With procedural generation and LOD rendering it's not impossible. Not that it's easy, but not impossible?
Also, some games are intentionally cartoonish as an artistic choice so photorealism isn't always the goal.
We've probably reached the point where human cost exceeds computational cost, which is to say that developing and QA testing such a feature would probably cost more money than it's worth. How many users of software would gain from such minutiae?
Sounds like a fun project for the next generations. Something to play when I am older.
Now suppose I want to take some fruit from the trees. And I want to slice and dice the different fruits. Peeling the skins when appropriate.
Or I want to plant a new tree. Or I want to remove it, with say, a lightsaber.
That's a couple generators more. Now add birds, dogs, insects, moss, moist surfaces, and so on. Hence, my point on needing several generators.
There are lots of things to be improved in games, but what you're describing are improvements to a real life simulation.
We are getting better. Like snow deformation in RDR2, for instance(works even in a PS4).
But random bits of debris that can get kicked around - and subsequently inspected - no. That's a problem.
> No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will
That's an easier problem than tracking all the debris. Before you inspect, you have no idea what will be there - the computer also doesn't have to and it can be optimized away until there's an observer.
Think heisenberg uncertainty principle but for virtual worlds.
You could implement little bugs without all that much trouble, true. Maybe a better way for me to think about it is more like, the real world has an incredible diversity of appearances at a small scale, that's hard to reproduce in a video game. The bug isn't the part that causes trouble, it's the fact that every leaf looks different, some leaves are oddly discolored, some leaves have bug bites on them, some got a little torn up, et cetera.
- Hair. Up until very recently hair was downright awful. Nowadays it’s acceptable-ish, but there’s still lots of room for improvement, in particular in natural motion of long hair.
- Water. I spend a big chunk of my time on the water, so I’m probably more attuned to how it moves than most. Games just don’t have it down. In particular, I think a lot could be gained by embracing it’s fractal nature: in my experience, at every human scale (mm to dam and everything in between) very similar wave patterns exist, but games tend to have just a small fixed number of “wave-layers” at various scales stacked together.
- Clouds. I can easily spend hours just observing clouds, looking at things like their shape, overall motion, internal motion, composition, edge behaviors, etc, and how they change over time. Game clouds are lacking in all these regards, particularly the time-sensitive nature of a cloud.
- Foliage. In games I’ve seen, individual plants/etc. in isolation generally look really quite decent. But the second an physical object interacts with them, they very clearly don’t respond in the right ways. There’s a lot about how branches bend and leaves rustle and more that is lost. Additionally, in groups of plants it’s often clear that some small number of models are being reused, possibly with some generated randomness added. But the variety doesn’t come close to matching what one would really see.
- Human faces and expressions. These are generally really bad, especially in normal gameplay (cut-scenes are sometimes better)
Again, this is probably all just really weird stuff I notice because I spend the vast majority of my time outdoors and only see “HiFi” games being played very infrequently. I don’t think games are worse for not implementing these, but I am very interested in what they’ll look like 10-20 years down the road.
What I think will be a huge boost is proper raytracing. You can see animated movies and blender renders look stunning but they take minutes per frame.
Foliage seems like something that will be difficult to get realistic for any close inspect, at least from a layperson's point of view.
It was so noticeable because it was such a huge increase in quality compared to what passed for water in games before - usually some kind of blue-grey translucent texture. For the first time, pixel shaders produced water that was clearly an attempt to imitate water IRL, not the cartoonish representation of it.
My vote would be cloth simulation and clothing clipping. I've yet to see a game that comes even close to doing this realistically. Imagine what happens to your sleeves when you lift your arms above your head for example, or how the plates of a suit of armor naturally slide over each other. In every game I can think of, clothing is rigidly attached to the underlying skeleton and it just stretches/clips as the character moves.
I guess fidelity of everything else has gotten much better, because I recently started noticing this and now I find it very distracting in any game that has in-engine cut scenes involving character closeups.
http://www.retroadv.it/images/03082019/Home_Computer_Magazin...
ML creative tools stand to automate a lot of this imo.
[1] random example: https://snapperstech.com/
> Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now?
Yes - well said. That's what I was trying to convey in my comment.
Then there’s the more obvious stuff that isn’t done well even today: skeletal animation is still lacking and feels unnatural, physics systems are still very approximate and constrained - often times most things are indestructible in games, fluid dynamics are still very slow/limited. Human models still don’t look real though, and the voice acting never quite matches the mouth movement or body language.
I do really feel like we’ve crossed the uncanny valley when it comes to natural scenery rendering. But a lot of what makes things feel real are still missing from games.
It's very cool tech. But it doesn't look real.
Take a look at The Mandalorian series, almost all of the outdoor scenes were shot using the video wall technology.
I've worked in computer graphics and I didn't realise the sets were fake until after I finished the whole series.
How about ray tracing?. If we get real-time 60fps+ ray-traced computer graphics in games, that would blow what we have now out of the water