Amsterdam looks incredibly realistic in the new Call of Duty
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Fun facts:
(1) A year or two ago several guys spent days using some sort of device to scan all buildings in our street. They got complaints from several bar owners and tenants as they appeared to be taking photographs inside the buildings, and they wouldn’t explain why. I wouldn’t be be surprised if it was for this map.
(2) The footage is hyperrealistic not just graphically, they got the details right with surprising accuracy. Even the garbage bins are in exactly the right place. (It’s also not unlikely that a guy could be subdued like this without people being too surprised, as tourists like to use this district to get wasted 24/7.)
And the „we don’t tell you“ would not fly with the police.
Ironically other than the fact that you have to pay per game and that you’re often forced to die, I prefer arcade games. They generally minimize friction to play
edit: to clarify, I mean games with good graphics specifically. There are many great games (especially indie) out there.
IME games do. But then I also don’t play any shooters.
Paying for lives was the first micro transaction!
I don't really have time for really long games anymore and these are as entertaining as movies IMO.
Many games seem to transition into more movie-like experience. Assassins Creed games for example, I found at some point I prefer to watch someone play it who cuts out the filler (while providing limited & entertaining commentary) and its just like a movie.
Similarly there have been so many health systems in FPS games you don’t need to invent something particularly new, but you do need to pick something appropriate to the gameplay. For example in PvE players need to be able to fight waves of enemies but in PvP games nobody wants to stand for 30 seconds firing at a bullet sponge.
Puzzle games need interesting puzzles, racing games need appropriate tracks, and so forth.
asking for good graphics seems ironical since you complain about devs focusing on graphics instead of gameplay
We actually took GIS data from the real DC and modelled the world. So the map should be very close to accurate.
The Division 1 was handcrafted, so we cut a lot of the world away that wasn’t interesting, small alley ways and such.
I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to hear that you enjoyed the work that went in.
On the GIS side of things, didn't Ubi team up with some European nonprofit to make other real world locale into games for educational purposes? Can't remember the details, but I used to work for a museum and my boss wanted us to do something like that. And I was like that'd be nice, but we're not Ubi.
It would be awesome to read about your production pipeline, like did you go from drone footage to photogrammetry to dozens of artists manually fixing things, or? Was there much ML involved?
I wish I could show you our internal demonstrations of it. Basically we would plot the map in snowdrop using GIS, then raise cuboids from the shapes on the map. Then we would manually try to match google street view with something in our template library, and modify the object to match reality.
It was a very manual process, but we based the map on the real thing so distances should be 1:1.
You're likely thinking of the Discovery Tour line derived from Assassin's Creed. https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/assassins-creed/discovery...
"[F]reely roam Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Viking Age to learn more about their history and daily life. Students, teachers, non-gamers, and players can discover these eras at their own pace, or embark on guided tours and stories curated by historians and experts."
I didn't find The Division too interesting, just couldn't get into it. I also don't really understand why they keep going on with that Tom Clancy label. The guy's been dead for almost a decade. If they feel the need to badge his name all over it, it feels like it's just B-content and they need to stick such labels on it to sell it.
I think his early books were pretty good but the later series were just drivel IMO. I don't think he even wrote them himself.
Some of the geography has been futzed with for gameplay purposes, which was incredibly confusing as someone who could navigate the area without a map!
Not walking simulators but low-key “just sorta look around” games I like: Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch.
Edit: Corrected the Finch title, thank you!
The pub over the road from Parliament was a bit jarring but understandable.
https://www.ovationvr.com/ https://virtualspeech.com/ https://virtualorator.com/ http://presentationsimulator.com/
Although this beautiful recreation is missing the endless tourists aimlessly walking on bike paths and the very loud conversations between Dutch people (their talking volume is what many of us consider yelling, but that's just normal).
Once we get VR headsets that are maybe twice as good as the best now, and we have high quality simulations, the scifi stories of people choosing living in unreality seem more plausible.
It's funny, I thought it was Americans who are so loud compared to the Dutch.
GTA 3/4/5 are in the megalotesticle category (characters moving like wavering boats).
What had been omitted though was that efficient photorealistic rendering, as well as the visual elements that human perception instantly picks up on such as material(s) translucency, lighting/shadows, and as you've already mentioned animations (and the bigger challenge of facial expressions!) is what everyone's after.
And what we have at the OP is indeed impressive work, which still looks artificial. Contrary to the critique of the comments so far, and outside the graphics research interpretation, this isn't something necessarily negative imo. I like video games that preserve a few elements of non-photorealism.
Sure, you can compare two and tell which one is better but unless it is really bad humans won’t be bothered by it or even explain what’s wrong.
Don't get me wrong, the visual clarity is a great achievement. But if they're gonna spend more effort on making it more convincingly real, that's a better target IMO than reflections and wave patterns.
At least, the fact that this game has familiar human movement tropes that resembles decade old games sounds like a testament to that.
And the camera is very smooth, which filters out the little balance shifts we all do (even typing something here I notice the subtle changes to vision oscillating in complex patterns which head-bobbing would be a simplified first-order approach to).
I assume it's still very difficult to do all these things with current computing power, and in the case of the camera I'm not sure it will ever be possible for something interactive to feel quite perfect unless you switch to a VR headset and carry your own balance into it.
It feels like character movements haven’t changed much in the last 20 years. Which is a shame because the visuals are great, but let down by 2006 style animation.
From watching these videos it seems like the player does not influence the story at all?
What if you jump into the river for example? Would you be able to swim around in it? Would bystanders be worried about you, call the police, the police would come and get you out of the water etc?
Or would a magic hand keep you from jumping into the water and you have to stay very closely on track to the scripted story?
Expecting what you write about in the third paragraph is a misunderstanding of what the game is trying to be.
This clip has lots of things that stick out to me as video gamey, but the color is on-point. I suspect that's a huge part of the realism.
[0] https://80.lv/articles/games-look-bad-hdr-and-tone-mapping/
I just finished Horizon: Forbidden West, and the more fantastical setting let the devs stretch their legs. (Coincidentally, Guerilla Games are from Amsterdam). Few moments of that game aren't jaw-droppingly beautiful. I frequently heard my companions "can we go now" dialog lines because I was crouched down staring at the moss. And I played half the game at 720p30 MPEG compressed with PS Remote Play because I didn't want to take over the TV. When I moved the ps5 to my desk it was like seeing it again for the first time.
The trick here is you have a very POV camera-mounted-on-head effect with lens distortions (in I think VR) and the environment is very deteriorated, making me doubt it was a game in the first place!
I'd love to know what optimization techniques are used so that those precious CPU/GPU cycles can go to those good looking things.
Side note: being absolutely forced to optimize the heck out of games as an essential practice gives me a much greater sense of performance characteristics in my "real" job and also in leetcode.
Use the GPU to decide what to render, and in a growing number of cases, will cull triangles in compute (software) instead of letting the fixed pipeline do it. The vertex shader feeds parameters to the fragment shader even if the triangle is culled (depth or backfacing), so with vertex counts climbing, there is a lot of dead time spent feeding fragment shaders that are never ran.
Render at a lower resolution and temporally upsample to a higher resolution.
Using low overhead apis that optimize command recording performance (DX12, Vulkan) and transfer / memory access.
Multithread all the things.
Obsess over data locality and compression.
Rendering objects that 'we can't see' has been done for as long as shadow caster light sources have been around. Even though we cannot see the mesh directly, the light can, and the viewer can see the shadow. These indirections all play their role in the greater "rendering equation", and the specific solution depends on the constraints of the application and resources of the development team.
Some renderers have abandoned triangles altogether for signed distance fields, but this involves re-creating from scratch the entire art pipeline.
That said, it seems like the culling advice for RT is "expanded camera frustrum" culling, distance culling dependent on size, and choosing the right geometry LOD. Beyond that they want you to aggressively mark geometry as opaque and carefully arrange objects into groups (BLASes) according to a couple rules so the GPU can skip as much work as possible.
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/best-practices-using-nvidi...
[1] https://medium.com/@ThisIsMeIn360VR/motion-sickness-and-the-...
Don't allocate memory. Don't re-layout ui. etc
CoD Infinite Warfare (I.e. “the one in space”) had sequences in between every mission where you could talk and interact with the crew of your spaceship and the NPC animations were a lot better there. Also they had a lot of NPCs modeled after celebrities for some reason (e.g. F1 driver Lewis Hamilton) so there was likely pressure to animate the NPCs better.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VxbTiuabW0k
I wonder if those techniques were used.
If metaverse looked like this instead of crappy new horizons app, i’d be a lot more interested.
This reminded me of the lara croft demo unity had a while back.
Amazing to witness evolution of realism in games.
I visited Amsterdam a while back and couldn’t tell from first few seconds whether it was real or not. The jerky human movement gave it away though.
Not even a second in the video you can see some weird artefact through the car windshield, the lighting looks completely off too
What fools us is the low res + motion blur, pause the high res video at any point and it looks like a video game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_LlSR6-ibA
I agree that we'll be shaving off these last 3% of visual artifacts for a while (honestly, on a good setup, games have been looking like this for 5+ years, the main thing this video has is photogrammetry and lighting). But this does look realistic.
I guess it depends on your definition of realistic, I'm a photographer, everything screams "fake" in these supposedly "realistic" games. Some of them are artistically pleasing (rdr2, tlou2, &c.) I'll give you that, but everything is off, the lightning, the camera movement, shadows, reflections, depth of field, motion blur, textures, ...
1. You see the sidewalk on the bridge is wet like it's been freshly rained on. Other things don't look like this. The bridge is higher than the road on the far side so should be drier but the road looks drier;
2. The boat just looks off to me. It's like it's too "clean";
3. Of course the movement of people is off. Games just haven't conquered this yet.
4. The water also looks off given the lighting and the conditions. It should be murkier rather than dark with an almost oily finish;
5. It looks like the near side of the canal is in shade but I don't really see the line from whatever is obstructing this (assumedly it's buildings to the "left"). The Sun is low in the sky to the left;
6. The sky just doesn't seem to match the expected position and lighting from the Sun.
Don't get me wrong: it is amazing, particularly rendered in real time. But there are uncanny valley artifacts.
Still impressive! But probably not terribly compelling for anything other than pure looks.
Amsterdam looks very pretty!
Why can't video game use actors to model movement and looks and then extrapolate from there? Maybe they do already, it's just not very convincing.
There's also no realistic gravity between their feet/body and the ground or objects around them. They pop up and down if there's a step and appear to be floating.
[1] https://twitter.com/byramb/status/1326098732501381120?lang=z...
(Credit https://twitter.com/cd_hooks/status/1559665074868031490)
Who do you think is making the lighting, textures, and polygons? Who do you think is coding the engine for it?
Also, I gather Call of Duty is a shootyman game so players will presumably be murdering these realistic people in great detail?
Sadly it was ignored. The graphics are really impressive!
Here there's a higher quality video
PCVR support when?
Just playing it randomly, without some tryharding you can complete it in something like less than 10 hours, it sucks.
To my teenage self it would make sense, though. Enough time but not enough money, which makes long (sometimes artificially long) games a necessity.
Compare those CoDs to e.g Cyberpunk which I needed like 40 hours to complete
it was way better
A game like SOMA has low mechanical pleasure (it's a walking simulator, essentially) and a short length, but the story and atmosphere are so high that I will forever remember the experience.
Cyberpunk has decent length, decent story/atmosphere (obviously this is subjective) and decent mechanical pleasure so it's a great game.
CoD has a short length, decent to high mechanical pleasure (well at least I hope so for their sake since it's supposed to be about the multiplayer shooter replayability) and low story/atmosphere because it's just a string of action movie clichés. I think that's what makes it sound very mediocre compared to Cyberpunk.
Other gamers might see mechanical pleasure as the trump card, and I can definitely understand their POV (Portal 1 for instance). I'd venture a guess that length is rarely a trump card except if you are stuck with the games you do have. Usually for length to be the most important factor, you need at least a decent degree of the two other factors to go with it. For example, what people love about Skyrim is that the basic gameplay of walking around and doing things is fun and you can just pick up the game everyday for months and still have things to do. The story is nothing special, but the atmosphere is comfy enough. You know the game is there for you when you come back from work.
Someone once said that virtual reality will never look right "until you put some dirt in it". And that's just it. They've recreated the irrelevant clutter that goes along with real life and that's what makes it look right.
The visual fidelity here is really incredible. Some elements, such as animations and water look bad by comparison, but it is still impressive.
The biggest budgets in Hollywood still can't escape the uncanny valley.
This was sometime before 2010.
Take it for what it is people. It's not the next GTA, nor is it minecraft. These levels are basically highly scripted walking simulators.
I'm glad the indie game scene is as vibrant as ever because in the early 2000s the urban ghetto simulators was all that there was.
If Spiderman can't move a bit of rubble (he doesn't really do dirt) then he can't pull something into or out of place to free a friend or trap an enemy.
It's (all) the little things that are in the way of a game feeling immersive and appealing to people who aren't just into the main mechanic (ie shooter on rails).
In real life, you can punch holes in and through buildings and trees, given enough bullets and a high enough caliber
I'd really prefer for the developer to focus on the gameplay and plot rather than make a perfect simulation of earth. What you describe sounds like a cool sandbox, like Flight Simulator, but isn't appropriate for most games.
In the real world you can't enter or demolish any building you want. So it makes sense for games not to offer this either until it's an actual plot point to do so.
Smaller indie studio scanned huge parts of Chernobyl and perfectly recreated it for thier game.
I havent played it, but interesting stuff.
Seeing the whole thing on 2D screen, i feel, makes it less realistic as the graphics improve. The difference between reality and the screen becomes more stark.
If it were liken cartoon, i think I'd suspend reality better just to be in it. This leaps away from artificial into reality and doesn't get there thereby raising my expectations and then disappointing me.
Great technological achievements though.
This is why I don’t see inherent value in increasing realism of film and videogame visuals (I do think contrasting degrees of realism could be used to achieve an artistic effect, but am yet to see this technique employed) and incidentally why I start to find unstaged photography frustrating and consider learning to draw (the technique employed by many illustrators, where a photo of an actual scene is taken as a reference and then traced over to leave out unnecessary detail and focus on shapes and colors of interest, is appealing).
2) Yet I can see that it is fake the second I look at it. No need to analyze. I am not trying to diminish the work done in any way as it shines.
Dumb question, but this is an intro it seems. It's not going to have gamers shoot machine guns FPS-style through these street right? Right?
Thankfully, this is not like the "No Russian" mission in the original Modern Warfare 2. Instead, you're tasked with intercepting a known terrorist, and have to protect yourself against the cartel. You will be punished for harming anyone that isn't part of the cartel.
Sure there's some things 'off' but there is so much right. Wowwww
There is something of with them and very noticeable, I think because of the uniformity and "polish" of the surface/texture/materials.
The rest of the city does look pretty great tho.
If this were a link to a discussion of some special technique that the creators of the last CoD used maybe that would be interesting. But this is lacking in any kind of substance.
It's not perfect yet, definitely not but it's a major step IMO. Perhaps it helps that I know the city.
RDR2 in particular looks much more realistic. More detailed terrain, better lighting, leagues better character animations.
- The wave breaks/spray from the boat doesn’t look right
- NPC motion is still janky and robotic.
- Lack of wind. All vegetation is motionless as is the hanging sign. Even on windless days vegetation still tends to sway minutely.
- Lack of squelch. The ground is wet and has leaves and puddles all over it but everyone sounds like they’re walking on dry ground. Some NPCs don’t seem to have audible footsteps at all.
- No people actually riding bikes
- The guards are casually standing in the middle of the road
- The curb doesn't drop properly where the pedestrian area starts
This is a common trope in media where nobody in the production uses a bike for transport. There are bikes there for setting, but people never use them as intended. They either just stand around them, or do this weird thing where they take their bikes out for a walk.
For cars this is a solved problem, and walking people are moving slowly enough for cameras to easily keep pace.
The alley wasn't correct. It's not a dead-end street.. :-)
Whether or not it appears in a game will usually be dictated by budget: both hardware budget (usually dictated by the current console generation) and budget for content creation.
A scene like this probably leaves it out because they felt like they could use that budget better elsewhere. There are a ton of characters walking around this scene, and also a ton of geometric detail and texture detail. I am guessing the directors for this scene felt that was more important to allocate budget to, for wow factor in those areas, rather than subtle wind effects which would probably go unnoticed in a game where you spend very little time stopping to appreciate the trees and flowers.
edit: I have to take that back: actually if you look at the full resolution video it's clear they included subtle wind effects, as well as details like falling leaves
One of the documentary makers asked him why he had a dedicated sound guy; the rest of the production was so stripped back, there was no lighting guy, why a sound guy? Edwards responded that, as long as you’ve got a good story that keeps them hooked, the audience will forgive bad visuals but they won’t forgive bad sound. It’s a sentiment that I believe was also echoed by Robert Rodriguez in his low budget filmmaking days. Good sound is essential to keeping people tuned in and immersed in your video. It’s why the number one thing recommended to any YouTuber starting out is “get a good microphone”.
The graphics are 80% of the way there now. Weather and character animation still needs work but the most bang for the buck might now have swung round to sound design.
It also has transparency bugs. You see the boat through the reflection on the windshield of the car right at the beginning.
Walking animations are a bit clumsy with the path finding that is a bit unrealistic.
The water effects around the boat look bad.
This isn’t very much better in terms of technology than a AAA from about ten years ago. The artists did a great work.
Here's a 4k60 YouTube video: https://youtu.be/VGnuGnOWeTE?t=605
Also this seems like a result of photogrammetry - so I think you can credit artists and the tools which make this possible.
Since then, every game that embraced it for photo realism looks basically perfect in terms of world geometry. Doesn't even have to be crazy high-res or high poly, as long as you don't stick your virtual nose directly in front of stuff, you can easily fill every pixel on screen with one that's ~95% there from where it should be in a real-world photograph.
I guess technologies like Nannite will also reduce the need for this type of grunt work.
But in either case, artists will still be involved in framing and staging the scene, doing the actual capture etc.
Creating a beautiful scene through photogrammetry is still a form of art, the same way photography and painting are each forms of art.
The lack of cyclists passing through is weirder IMO.
Full of excitement I've opened the comment section for this post and what do I see? The top comments are full of negativity about how the waves in the water don't look right, the sounds of the footsteps are not squelchy and there are artefacts in the rendering.
Why is HN so negative about amazing things? I get that we like to provide constructive criticism, since we are so passionate about technology. But come on guys, this is just spewing hate at the level of some cesspool internet forums I will not name. Be better HN!
Basically, they lost perspective on how amazed an average person would be. Similar to how porn addicts don’t flinch at triple penetration videos, or … you get it. Wish I could come (ooof) up with better analogies.
Yes, even I went “nope, that’s not real enough”.
This looks pretty amazing, I'll give that, but you can still clearly see it's a computer game. A bit better than the last one maybe, but not "can't tell if rendered"-realistic.
> you can still clearly see it's a computer game
I'll give you that, but we are comparing this footage to footage of other video games from the past. Can you name a video game that looks more realistic than this? Maybe some of those realistic racing games I guess, but that is a different type of video game. My point is: currently, this is as close as we get to real-life, no? Sure, it can be better (and it probably will be in the future), but I'd say this ranks pretty high.
> almost can’t believe this is a video game
Hyperbole is fine but it does tend to cause backlash.
It's not trying to look impeccably realistic cinema level CGI, but it's damn impressive given the limitations of a video game, and of gaming hardware.
HN users want to test how true a statement is because when you’re coding a program, any edge cases that prove your code wrong can literally break everything. I think that begins to rub off on how you perceive all kinds of propositional statements in other areas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi_RW2ofkFY&ab_channel=Gamin...
But I think it's quite amazing that we've gotten to the point where people in this thread are pointing out the details which betray that this is not photorealistic, in order to prove that point.
Even a few years ago, we would have been pointing to the small details which do make it seem photorealistic, like volumetric lighting or well done reflections.
In my decades of watching technology, those voices have always said things with the same tone.
I think this is it. When the games are less realistic overall, the mind can still suspend disbelief. And in fact it often does; so low-fi everywhere is all accepted and forgotten.
Who hasn't read a book (or in the HN crowd, also played a text MUD) and become completely lost in the fictional world?
But once we hit that near-perfect, we stop suspending our disbelief (or the bar is raised near the top); so the imperfections which are detectable become jarring.
We don't improve things by gushing over how great they are already. We improve things by pointing out where improvement is possible. Clearly there are game devs (past, current and future) reading these discussions. Maybe just one can be inspired to solve one of the technical challenges mentioned?
I think it was John Carmack who bemoaned the fact that the video game audience quickly accepts any advancement in graphics as the new status quo for gaming, and complains about any game which doesn't immediately match it.
I think consumers of the medium don't always appreciate the technical achievement which modern AAA video games represent - it's maybe one of the few domains of computing which demands the people working on it to use 100% of the hardware, and to pull tons of dirty tricks to eek out every last bit of performance.
So sometimes it seems the audience attributes something to laziness, just because something is missing they have seen in another game, while what they are seeing is the result of very talented engineers working overtime to deliver a miracle.
This short video looks amazing, specifically because its not state of the art in engine work and current level of tech. Yet you feel like you are there, on one of the canals. Many games these days use better meshes and have higher count of triangles and other techniques yet they don't deliver these emotions to those who visited Amsterdam.
And games were, are and always will be about emotions.
But if you live in New York, San Francisco or London you would be tired of seeing your city in games. Even games like Assassin's Creed Valhalla, supposedly a Nordic setting, it mainly focus on England and the visit to North America is as important as the time that you spend in actual Scandinavian land.
So, some people is not impressed by the settings while others are grateful just by being represented at all.
Rural town in thethe US with dinners and odd gas stations or some Manhattan clone like Max Payne? That's exotic.
Huh? I live in NYC and I don't think I've ever played a game set here. I know vaguely there's a Spider-Man game set here, that I never played, and at least one GTA inspired by but not actually set in NYC.
I'd love to play a game set in NYC that looks this great. It'd be my first time.
Wikipedia has a list [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_set_in_N...
Very impressive for the time!
I also like to hear from people involved in these things, who may post a comment or reply about efforts going into solving these challenges. I’ve learned some cool things about Far Cry 2 which I didn’t know about after posting that comment.
Nothing should be above criticism. The Titanic was an amazing achievement for its time but thankfully we have learned from its mistakes and now build better and safer ships as a result. We need both praise and criticism in the world in order to succeed. Whilst it is tempting to “bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone eat and be happy” it does not lead to happiness or successful outcomes in the long term.
To paraphrase Ferris Bueller, we should “stop and look around once in a while, else you might miss it”. We should especially do this after our successes. But nonetheless, the world spins ever onwards and we should aim to improve with every iteration of that spin lest we fall backwards.
This scene in particular is aiming for realism in an everyday scene, and likely relying heavily on photogrammetry (which makes it look even more realistic). But it's far from perfect. And so some may be able to simply appreciate it as a step forward in technical achievement, but for others it's going to be triggering uncanny valley effects. I suspect this may be a driving factor in the negative responses.
If this is the case this is going to be a major bottle-neck for graphics going forward. Even something as small as a character's eyes being in some indescribable way 'off' can trigger uncanny valley effects. So there's a long road ahead to trying to overcome the uncanny valley, but one where each step forward may not be able to be appreciated for the technical progress that is.
Have a look at the Final Fantasy movie. A lot of moviegoers decried the Uncanny Valley, especially regarding Aki, but if you watch it with today's eyes, there is no such effect.
That came out ten years ago! At a glance, this looks like it is using ray tracing, which is a big improvement in rendering.
Gamers and tech forum posters like HNers do this all the time about the things in their wheelhouse that they would say they know a lot about from graphics to React to dev tools to games.
It’s boring and I think it’s a dreadful thing to practice. A better exercise is to try to see the good things in something and appreciate those in light of the trade offs the thing must make.
Anyone can come enumerate the bad things about something.
It's not considered positive to be impressed easily and often, that's similar to how a child acts, which equates with immature for most people. Also, if you are hard to impress then you must have experienced more than those easily impressed. For some it's a way to appear superior with just a simple opinion. Basically arrogant assholes.
The alternative is cynicism but then again that's also sometimes used to seem elite.
E.g. I saw the CoD video, then clicked to see comments. And while my first thoughts were “yeah, this is pretty stunning,” I didn’t have anything else to say.
I wonder if most that agreed also didn’t have much to say? Especially since this wasn’t a “Show HN” where more positive feedback is targeting the author. There’s no one here to give positive (or negative) feedback to, so discussing criticism may be the more interesting discussion?
But I suppose this is pretty amazing tech, too, and there is likely something interesting to discuss there.
Also, basement internet drastically underappreciates the magnitude of effort that goes into creation.
I don't play CoD, but I can appreciate the years of development of work that likely went into this (+ the engine, the libraries, the mocap animations, the sound work, etc).
Is it perfect? No. But it would take an incredibly large and well-funded team a lot of calendar time to produce anything that surpasses it.
So kudos to the entire team at Infinity Ward for making something and shipping!
If you don't have anything to say beyond "yeah it looks awesome", upvote and move on.
I always attributed it to people needing to reaffirm that they are experts. They don’t really care what they are talking about, they just want everybody to hear them contribute. Perhaps it’s because they are defensive about their own skill level and are feeling “imposter syndrome.” Or maybe they are just super egotistical, who knows. Psychology is complicated haha
But like you, I was thinking, is that a video with actors pretending to be computer characters or actually a thing.
If you only want praise I recommend LinkedIn.
Blew my mind!
There's nothing "amazing" about this. Graphics don't make a good game.
In recent years I've been way more impressed by the visual design of highly stylized, anti-realistic games that, instead of simply trying to look like real life, instead create environments with distinct looks that you don't get anywhere else.
It shows that you can get a lot of the way towards people saying ‘wow that looks real’ just by using high def HDR textures and a good environment map. In almost every other respect this render is far from state of the art.
And as you say, if that impresses people then that’s great! The team have discovered the shortcut to where to put in the effort to convince viewers! The goal of this kind of game environment engineering is to create sufficient verisimilitude to have the player suspend disbelief - and this seems to do the trick for a lot of people.
But looked at critically it’s surprising how many ways this engine is producing bad results and yet people are willing to overlook and say they’re blown away by the realism. Maybe the uncanny valley for environments is not as deep as we thought.
Technologies or tricks that enhance it are used. Technical masturbation that's ancillary is eschewed.
In the first CoD game, the illusion shattered instantly when you deviated from the expected path (e.g. linger in an area, backtrack, or take an odd turn).
But that was part of the focus and prioritization of effort... they could have improved that, at the expense of making the main path less stellar. They didn't.
I've gotta admire the focus and feature discipline.
Edit: One of the core things that strikes me from the video (not having seen generations of intervening games) is how far human animation libraries and mocap has come. At some point, they've climbed enough of the opposite wall of the uncanny valley not to have it be obviously wrong. Glad we finally got there.
And other side note, everyone should remember this is a multiplatform release. They don't have the luxury of spec'ing to the latest and greatest hardware from Nvidia and AMD. This has to run on consoles with decent performance and with a minimum of per-platform code rework and optimization.
Something that really struck me when I when I first played Half-Life 2 was how much it all felt like a movie set, where everything was designed to look fantastic along this one narrow path that you're quickly ushered along, but there was absolutely nothing beyond that path. It's all just lovingly detailed facades.
That's the story with all linear AAA games. I think for most players the illusion works great, but I can't help but see the artifice.
It's okay, since this a stylized classic HN insight porn comment.
Calling it an "illusion" is a really dumb take. It reminds me that hardly anyone in this forum reads fiction, and even if you created Ready Player One for them, they'd do exactly what the game designers gave them to do.
Anyway, Call of Duty games have a great variety of levels. "Defend Burger Town" comes to mind as a Modern Warfare 2 (2009) level you could explore pretty freely.
Half Life 2 had open set pieces. Uncharted 4 has possibly the best chase sequence in gaming. It would be so stupid and reductionist to call that an "illusion," just because they have some paths for your car to take.
What do you want? Even the real world expects you to walk and drive along paths. That's just architecture dude. It exists just as often in "open world games" like Red Dead Redemption as it does in "sequence of setpieces" games like Call of Duty.
I agree it's not an example of massive improvement technically, but I think it's pretty good work that pushes incremental improvements in a forward direction.
The only thing that makes it immediately obvious that this is from a game, is the clunky movements from the people. They should really start putting some effort into that.
- the screen space reflections are broken in the left-hand 10% or so of the screen
- early in the clip there is some weird z-buffer error where reflections from the boat’s roof are showing in front of the car windows
- although the water surface has reflections that make it appear not to be flat, its geometry cuts off along the side of the boat in a pure straight line
- there are tearing artifacts a couple of times where we are seeing the top of one frame and the bottom of another (may be a screen recording artifact rather than a rendering one though)
I don’t think these are merely being ‘nit picky’ - these are clear ways in which the render is a long way short of ‘realistic’.
As I say, great modeling and texturing with environmental PBR clearly does a lot of work convincing a viewer a place is ‘real’. But it seems a bit sad to present that in an engine which has such glaring flaws and ignore them. Other engines exist that do this better.
I just watched it again on a bigger screen, and I didn't really notice any of the details you mentioned. It's clear it's a render from the slightly artificial look many things have, which is especially the case for people. But the city scene in general looks absolutely fantastic. If you know games that look more real than this, I'd love to know which.
The human models aren't as convincing, but there's also dozens of them on screen at once, the developers are still bound by what a pc/console can do.
You’re literally shutting down free speech. Metaphorically you’re creating a walled compound where all the “happy” people can pretend everything is fine and dandy meanwhile on the opposite side of the wall is a bunch of unhappy homeless people who literally had their house taken away by the people in the compound just because they happened to disagree with something one of the powerful people said at a dinner party.
The free speech martyrdom angle makes sense on paper, and it's true that there are users that act as commissars, but the practical reality is that no interesting discussion actually flows from the flagged content. This is something every online community eventually learns through experience.
Most of the time, the abstract idea of free speech is the only merit these comments have, and from that we can also ask if flagging is not an expression of speech in and of itself.
In this case, your comment spawned helpful discussion so I'll happily vouch for it if it is ever killed.
Pretty soon they'll demand that there just be a menu of approved viewpoints you can choose from.
False flaggings should shadow-ban your account. Let the deletionists feel important without bothering the rest of us.
Shows you how our moral compass is based on nothing but thin air, when society thinks shit like that is fun and cool, while games depicting a naked human for example is completely unacceptable.