Hacker News Reader

Comment by pprotas | Hacker News Reader

Let me go off topic a bit here. I've never seen a scene in a game as realistic as the footage provided in this tweet, and I say this as someone who has been gaming all my life. I am not even a fan of CoD, don't even play those types of games. As a Dutch citizen I was simply happy about the fact that they were able to recreate Amsterdam in such a beautiful way.

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!

View on HN

People seem to gain something by trying to be the person hardest and last to impress. It’s like some sort of Simon Cowell effect where people think being able to point out the flaws in something is a quality of an expert rather something anyone can do about anything.

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.

With you, and I hate the destructiveness of it. I notice thought, it's those who have least to offer are first to criticise. Look at the comments of those who are genuinely good (eg. BeeOnRope here on HN) and you see a far more tolerant and constructive responses.

"People seem to gain something by trying to be the person hardest and last to impress. "

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.

I don’t disagree with anything you or the parent post said. And while I don’t feel like I’m quick to criticize HN posts, I wonder if part of it is that negative/critical comments spark more interesting discussion?

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.

Negative thinking usually makes you sound smarter than positive thinking, with less effort. Not a criticism, just an observation. I think you're right that an empty thread would be worse than a bunch of nitpicks.

There's an infinite number of reasons something can be wrong: there's only a few it can be right.

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!

It is kind of sad though, and I say this as someone who has been trying to analyze more of my own negative reactions and be more positive. A video like this has so much potential to to inspire. And in that vein I do think it’s pretty cool, I hope at some point someone makes a “game” or simulation that’s just an open world earth with some land air and see vehicles. (Time travel would be neat too, but that’s a lot of continent) Moon would be cool to, though a bit less varied :-)

This is an even bigger issue, people feeling like their opinion is so important they HAVE to have one and they HAVE to share it.

If you don't have anything to say beyond "yeah it looks awesome", upvote and move on.

I distinctly remember a shift in the quality of my colleagues when I started noticing they all pointed out what was good about my equipment/work (I’m a video/audio producer and editor). They saved critiques and suggestions for when I solicited them.

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

One adage I like: "pessimists sound smart, optimists make money."

You are talking to generations of people that grew up with video games. This isn’t some shit they saw for the first time, they’ve been watching the progress since childhood at this point.

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”.

Also, we've been able to generate pretty realistic images for quite some time now. For some expertly crafted ray-traced stills, it's nearly impossible to tell whether the picture was computer-generated.

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.

Are you comparing 1 frame of a still that hasn't been rendered in real-time to a video game that is being dynamically rendered at at least (I hope) 30 frames per second?

> 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.

I think people are reacting to the tweet saying

> almost can’t believe this is a video game

Hyperbole is fine but it does tend to cause backlash.

It's a video game, that is, it renders in real time on hardware costing a couple thousand dollars max.

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.

Is that really hyperbole considering the quality?

I agree. I wouldn’t even say it’s backlash it’s just debugging out loud.

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.

Yeah, it's much, MUCH different to have those vistas unfold in front of your eyes at smooth 144 fps while you have control over the movement and everything compared to hyperanalizing 1 still frame or a sequence of frames with no real control.

All of these demos look way better than the one in the OP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi_RW2ofkFY&ab_channel=Gamin...

It took me a whole few seconds to confirm it's a game. Mind you I've been to that place and I've rendered my first wire mesh in 1991.

Love this perspective :)

My first thought was "ok, that's the reference video of real Amsterdam, now where is the video from the game..."

> you can still clearly see it's a computer game

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.

I suspect that even in 50 years there will still be people pointing out their modern equivalent of inaccurate lighting and saying how it breaks the illusion.

In my decades of watching technology, those voices have always said things with the same tone.

The fact of the matter is that this is not an example of a massive improvement in world modeling, simulation or light transport.

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.

From my limited experience, that's always something the CoD teams have done incredibly well: maintain focus on suspension of player disbelief as their core KPI.

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.

> maintain focus on suspension of player disbelief

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.

> 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 appreciate it because of how well it captures the look of a real world location. I've seen a lot of games attempt to capture the spirit of a real place and not get nearly as close as this.

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.

That may just be a reflection of the kinds of games you’ve been playing. Forza Horizon has been doing an incredible job of creating convincingly real locations at high frame rates for a while now, for example[1]. In terms of busy, detailed urban environments that feel solid and alive, look at Half Life: Alyx. Others have pointed to the Matrix unreal demo that shows off some truly gamechanging techniques for environmental modeling and realism.

[1] https://youtu.be/r1xK6PRk1DU

It is absolutely brilliant world modelling. I'm looking at it on a small screen, but the level of detail and accuracy blows my mind. I've never seen anything this detailed and accurate.

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.

Some things to look more carefully at, then, if the only thing you noticed was the character animations:

- 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 was commenting primarily about the modelling, which is absolutely amazing with the exception of the way people move. That the rendering is not perfect is a different issue. I still maintain it's incredibly good at first glance. That there are details that betray it as a render is hardly surprising, but by far the most glaring thing giving it away is the way people move.

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.

Where you see negativity and hate, I see constructive criticism and an honest conversation about flaws out of love for the craft and a desire to get the best we can.

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?

This type of criticism sometimes seems to capture the spirit you're describing, but sometimes it seems to verge on entitlement when talking about video games.

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.

Well yes and no. If general tone of most discussions is just critical, overall mood is crappy to be polite. If you are in crowd of complainers, even if they keep saying its constructive, its a properly depressing place to be. Life is not just numbers, points, striving for perfection. What makes us humans is much, much more.

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.

I’d consider the criticism more uncanny valley type stuff - because it looks of a certain quality the flaws are more evident. It seems for the most part the excellence here is in the art design taking advantage of modern GPUs and the criticism is warranted from a technical perspective.

> uncanny valley

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.

Poster of the waves and squelch comment here. I probably should have added that I too find it an incredible achievement before listing the things I noticed that were off. I listed those things because I know that the people who work on these games and engines frequent hacker news so if I point the main things out that I’ve noticed as being off then it’s feedback for those guys as to what to work on next. Things like the NPC animation are pretty obvious but stuff like the lack of squelch are easy to overlook.

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.

> As a Dutch citizen I was simply happy about the fact that they were able to recreate Amsterdam in such a beautiful way.

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.

Me as an European on phantasy RPGs. Stone walls? Any historical center of part of town/cities. Villages? Villaremota de Arriba from Nowhereland with wheat fields for kilometers.

Rural town in thethe US with dinners and odd gas stations or some Manhattan clone like Max Payne? That's exotic.

> But if you live in New York, San Francisco or London you would be tired of seeing your city in games.

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.

The original Deus Ex (1999) takes place in NYC for about 1/4 of the game, and the city is really recognizable.

The GTA game is set in NYC in all but name. I have played a lot of games set or partially set in NYC. It’s sort of the default “we need a big city”.

Wikipedia has a list [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_set_in_N...

I don't recall playing in a London setting ever since some PS1 game from the 2000's.

Watch Dogs Legion?

PS2 - The Getaway.

Very impressive for the time!

Have you seen the Matrix demo from a few months back? If not, you might appreciate it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29533685

Blew my mind!

I had a less than positive impression of this trailer, while simultaneously acknowledging that on objective merit it surely deserves a quite positive impression. And I think there's a very specific reason for this! The uncanny valley [1] is caused by things looking realistic, but not quite right. But the important thing is that in many this often causes a sense of discomfort or even revulsion.

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.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

I don't think the the Uncanny Valley Effect is as much a problem, because I believe it's a moving target. "The Avantgarde" in media will always suffer, but the next installments will profit from the public getting used to it and the "new avantgarde" moving the goalpost again.

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.

I didn’t read that as spewing hate at all, especially compared to what cesspool forums are capable of. They listed a few things that are still not up to a realistic level, which started some interesting conversations around why that stuff is still hard.

Actually, you are right. Looking back at the comment, I didn't provide constructive criticism to my fellow HN commenters.

Perfection through negativity is a thing I am guilty of. "Wouldn't it be better if..." is often a phrase that runs through my thoughts when evaluating something artistic.

But like you, I was thinking, is that a video with actors pretending to be computer characters or actually a thing.

Funny story: I got deja vu working along the Seine in Paris due to first experiencing it in Battlefield 3.

That came out ten years ago! At a glance, this looks like it is using ray tracing, which is a big improvement in rendering.

Being a CS player, I had the weirdest dejavu feeling ever when I went to Venice. The level of detail is so much better now its not even funny.

I don’t mind a spectrum of opinions. I never played video games and it’s hard to tell har far ahead this reel is compared to other modern games. It looks appealing, at the same time there’s clearly a room for improvements. I don’t have a trained eye, but I’m really curious what gives it away.

I'm as impressed as you are but telling people that the graphics are realistic is basically a challenge. Nobody complained about the unrealistic graphics of Super Mario 64.

Yes I criticised the technology in my comment that got flagged, while saying that the artists did a great work.

If you only want praise I recommend LinkedIn.

Yeah, I don't understand negative comments. I don't care if it uses the most state of the art whatever mapping, fact is I used to live on the square where the main part of the video is shot and I was shocked by just how close to reality everything looks. I think it's the most immersive environment I've seen in a game.

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.

> Why is HN so negative about amazing things?

There's nothing "amazing" about this. Graphics don't make a good game.

But this is about the graphics, and good graphics pretty indisputably do make good graphics.

These aren't good graphics though, they're realistic graphics. "Good" is subjective, and most people who have been playing games for a decent amount of time have moved past their "realism is the most important aspect of game visuals" phase.

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.

Smart comment

Hacker News became Nitpicker News a long time ago. Might be a dysfunction caused by employment. In software development a "nit" (i.e a bug such as as null pointer dereference) ruins the whole experience. In most other fields such a nit would be wholly irrelevant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com