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http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/16/mari ... -unreal-4/

I think I just wet myself.

That looks awesome. I wish Nintendo would do this.

Call me a hipster but I am unimpressed by this realism. The way things are going lately with video game graphics is just not for me. I would much rather see more stylized designs like in old games where you could feel an artists touch behind it.

Aren´t we seeing both, realistic and stylized?

Mixing cartoonish and pseudo-realistic art styles was what Sega tried with Sonic '06, and that didn't exactly go down well.

I think Purple was speaking very general and not Sonic specific.
I´m questioning if there realy are so few stylized games.

salm wrote:I think Purple was speaking very general and not Sonic specific.
I´m questioning if there realy are so few stylized games.

It's a sliding scale, and what suits you is very much up to personal taste. I will admit that. But basically what I like: Spoiler Spoiler I like things to feel drawn and artistic as opposed to feeling like someone reached for the real and stopped somewhere along the way. So in that respect you can take a complete fantasy object such as a mecha walker or blue hedgehog and make them "realistic" in that you reach to get away from artiness and toward plastic smoothness.

DaveJB wrote:Mixing cartoonish and pseudo-realistic art styles was what Sega tried with Sonic '06, and that didn't exactly go down well.

Saying the art style is what didn't go over well with Sonic06 is like saying a bus wreck that maimed 20 toddlers is terrible because the driver spilled his coffee when it happened. There is so much wrong with that game, the art style really wasn't one of them when I had to misfortune of playing it.

Purple wrote:I like things to feel drawn and artistic as opposed to feeling like someone reached for the real and stopped somewhere along the way. So in that respect you can take a complete fantasy object such as a mecha walker or blue hedgehog and make them "realistic" in that you reach to get away from artiness and toward plastic smoothness.

"Plastic smoothness" is usually a stylistic choice, not a realistic one, at least when it comes to rendered assets. A big problem with early 3D modelling was trying to paste realistic textures over a model with 8 polygons and a system with 2 bytes of RAM. They looked like muddy garbage and aged horribly.

Considering the time, X-Com isn't stylized at all. The game was very realistic looking. For a stylized game in that time period, look at Star Control 2. I find the new X-Com game has a much more stylized look considering the technology available today. They have to ability to render much more detailed and accurate human models and textures and they don't, whether due to technology or choice.

Even still, realistic sprites were doing quite well, as opposed to 3D modelling. I remember the ones from Wizardy VII being quite detailed (that, and the world-space). Systems like the N64 had to get around limited texture memory by, generally, making stylistic choices. Nintendo proper was big on this. Rare and LA went contrary with Goldeneye and Shadows on the Empire, respectively, and whereas they were both awesome games, it's hard to argue that they aged better than Mario64 or Ocarina of Time.

Going a bit further, Halo and Metroid Prime came out with a year or so of each other. Prime is still playable, right now, with no graphics updates. Halo.... not so much (at least on an Xbox). In fact, the most jarring part of Prime was the one time they tried to make the game look "realistic" when Samus' face is revealed. This is also why, just by cranking the resolution up, Final Fantasy X looks like a new game. Higher-res textures is really all it needs.

DaveJB wrote:Mixing cartoonish and pseudo-realistic art styles was what Sega tried with Sonic '06, and that didn't exactly go down well.

I'm not sure anyone knows what they were trying with that game.

And it's probably best not disinterred to find out.

TheFeniX wrote:

Purple wrote:I like things to feel drawn and artistic as opposed to feeling like someone reached for the real and stopped somewhere along the way. So in that respect you can take a complete fantasy object such as a mecha walker or blue hedgehog and make them "realistic" in that you reach to get away from artiness and toward plastic smoothness.

"Plastic smoothness" is usually a stylistic choice, not a realistic one, at least when it comes to rendered assets. A big problem with early 3D modelling was trying to paste realistic textures over a model with 8 polygons and a system with 2 bytes of RAM. They looked like muddy garbage and aged horribly.

Considering the time, X-Com isn't stylized at all. The game was very realistic looking. For a stylized game in that time period, look at Star Control 2. I find the new X-Com game has a much more stylized look considering the technology available today. They have to ability to render much more detailed and accurate human models and textures and they don't, whether due to technology or choice.

Even still, realistic sprites were doing quite well, as opposed to 3D modelling. I remember the ones from Wizardy VII being quite detailed (that, and the world-space). Systems like the N64 had to get around limited texture memory by, generally, making stylistic choices. Nintendo proper was big on this. Rare and LA went contrary with Goldeneye and Shadows on the Empire, respectively, and whereas they were both awesome games, it's hard to argue that they aged better than Mario64 or Ocarina of Time.

Going a bit further, Halo and Metroid Prime came out with a year or so of each other. Prime is still playable, right now, with no graphics updates. Halo.... not so much (at least on an Xbox). In fact, the most jarring part of Prime was the one time they tried to make the game look "realistic" when Samus' face is revealed. This is also why, just by cranking the resolution up, Final Fantasy X looks like a new game. Higher-res textures is really all it needs.

another example of stylizied without being a low-ress would WoW even with model upgrade done in WoD, I dout there would be any sane person who would say that WoW looks "too realistic", even if the models are decent looking.

Lord Revan wrote:another example of stylizied without being a low-ress would WoW even with model upgrade done in WoD, I dout there would be any sane person who would say that WoW looks "too realistic", even if the models are decent looking.

Blizzard was incredibly smart to not only make their characters caricatures, but also not try to mess with realistic skin texturing. This is really what made a lot of games show their age (same with CGI movies). A lot tried and failed.

That said, even the new models are heavily stylized and at least is isn't incredibly grating. What does make it clash is that the engine has seen so many upgrades as to what it can render, outside higher-resolution, such as specular maps as new armor and models actually reflecting light. Some older armor is, at least from what I can tell, completely devoid of normal/bump maps as well, varying across different race models. The game can and does clash with itself at times, even though it's mostly stylized. I ran into this in SWTOR a lot too, some armor parts lacked whatever bump mapping system they used, sometimes across the same armor model.

Stylized doesn't always mean low-res or low quality though. Squeenix 3D games use high-resolution texture and high-poly models and they still age incredibly well because they weren't trying to mimic a human being, but a "cartoon" version of one. Even years later, Lulu's introduction is still HNNNNG to me, but that's because she's basically Jessica Rabbit. Ignoring her curvacious proportions and her somehow having 50,000 belts on an island in the middle of nowhere, her overall design is cartoonish. The didn't get stupid and try to change that in the HD remake either.

Meanwhile, CAPCOM of all companies impressed the Hell out of me with it's RE6 characters with both the modelling and the animation work (RE5 was no slouch either). The game, to me at least, really hit a solid blend of stylistic and realistic choices. However, only the males seemed to get the lion's share of the realism. The female character are still heavily stylized. That actually holds true for a lot of games. Gee, I wonder why.....

One of the best examples for stylized games is Mirrors Edge. It´s old but still looks better than a lot of games that are released now. It´s still going to look good in 20 years.

A game using a similar graphics style is Superhot. It composes an ultra small color palette, slowmotion and a whole bunch of stuff flying around into great looking scenes.

But even if you´re looking for stylized in the sense of the XCOM games you can find a whole bunch. Hotline Miami was a huge success for example.

TheFeniX wrote:

Lord Revan wrote:another example of stylizied without being a low-ress would WoW even with model upgrade done in WoD, I dout there would be any sane person who would say that WoW looks "too realistic", even if the models are decent looking.

Blizzard was incredibly smart to not only make their characters caricatures, but also not try to mess with realistic skin texturing. This is really what made a lot of games show their age (same with CGI movies). A lot tried and failed.

That said, even the new models are heavily stylized and at least is isn't incredibly grating. What does make it clash is that the engine has seen so many upgrades as to what it can render, outside higher-resolution, such as specular maps as new armor and models actually reflecting light. Some older armor is, at least from what I can tell, completely devoid of normal/bump maps as well, varying across different race models.

I didn't claim it was flawless, but still it's decent enough example that high-ress doesn't equal realistic and you can stylizied models that still use high ress textures.

I suppose that's part of the reason why WoW for all its flaws has aged as well as it has compared to some of it's competion that have not age nearly as well.

Who assumes that highres = realistic anyway?
It seems incredibly obivious that this is nonsense. I mean, I can draw whatever the fuck I want onto a highres texture. Nothing constrains me to draw something realistic onto it or use a photo.

Borderlands and, though I hesitate to mention it in positive light, Prince of Persia both pulled off great stylized graphics by way of cell shading.

I think that if they wanted to do Super Mario: Universe or Sonic: Yet Another Fucking Sonic, (or, what I actually want to play desperately, Pokemon: Uhh, Chrome?), in next-gen-graphics style, they need to come up with something like that - highly stylized and distinctive, rather than drag inherently cartoony characters into the world of 4K graphics and computers with 16GB DDR4 used only to check email.

Lord Revan wrote:I didn't claim it was flawless, but still it's decent enough example that high-ress doesn't equal realistic and you can stylizied models that still use high ress textures.

Sorry, didn't mean to claim you did. I recall the game looking a lot more "alive" than Galaxies' sometimes walking corpses. I wouldn't pick up WoW till WotLK, but it does stand as unique in the one game I can recall constantly clashing with itself. It also help that WoW will run pretty much any resolution natively. I still need to try it in 4K, just for laughs.

I suppose that's part of the reason why WoW for all its flaws has aged as well as it has compared to some of it's competion that have not age nearly as well.

I loaded up my old copy of Galaxies right around the time they were going to pull the servers. It was painfully dated. That said, I load up my lowbies on WoW sometimes, due to the F2P sub-20. After playing a modern-MMO with stylized characters and much more fluid animations (FFXIV), WoW finally feels dated to me. The updated character models are actually part of the problem as they now clash pretty badly with the classic gear and areas. I'm sure if I was in WoD areas with WoD gear, it wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue, but I don't' have access to any of that.

The more I think about it the more I think it's the fact that you can't get things to be perfectly realistic. So if you try too hard you'll look good now but 10 years from now it will look horribly dated. Where as if you take an artistic direction and just go for pretty than your game will still be pretty 10 or 20 or 60 years from now.

I think 'perfectly realistic' is possible... but it's going to be fairly hard to pull off for a pretty good while given the fairly inherent limitations of trying to fit games within a certain range of programming/hardware capabilities.

I would be completely unsurprised if porn leads the charge in 'perfectly realistic', especially immersive environments and simulated reality setups. But there's always going to be categories where the art styles of the various games are deliberately 'unrealistic', such as cel-shading and what not.

Purple wrote:The more I think about it the more I think it's the fact that you can't get things to be perfectly realistic. So if you try too hard you'll look good now but 10 years from now it will look horribly dated. Where as if you take an artistic direction and just go for pretty than your game will still be pretty 10 or 20 or 60 years from now.

It's still subjective. Battlefield 2 is still passable. Gears of War made more stylistic choices, but went with realistic texturing and it will still be a decent looking game years from now unless you're a graphics whore. We've pretty much reached the max diminishing returns on polygon count. But, until such time as both hardware and developer interested in complete high-quality textures across the board in games is a thing, all games will age in one way or another. But texture quality itself isn't everything. UV, Bump, and specular mapping, among other things, is also very important. I've looked at many textures for Skyrim and they are quite well done, but Beth really dropped the ball on applying them in-game.

For an example, RE6 has very detailed character models, but a lot of the world textures are flat and lower-quality. This is most likely due to CAPCOM making conscious design choices around hardware limitations to pack as much punch where they figured it would have the most effect.

But you have a point in the realism department. If the broshooter continues to go more and more realistic with it's modelling and texture work, comparisons to newer games will make them look dated as a matter of course. If you instead break off where technology is limited, make good stylistic choices where needed, you can basically make a game that will hold up for 20 years. Those RE6 character models aren't likely to "age" much at all. Same with Gears of War character models.

It's this same reason why early realistic CGI in movies has aged horrifically, while Toy Story/etc is still watchable even with all the improvements Pixar made in animation for the sequels. Except for Scud, that they tried to render more realistically and about gave me fucking nightmares.

Elheru Aran wrote:I think 'perfectly realistic' is possible... but it's going to be fairly hard to pull off for a pretty good while given the fairly inherent limitations of trying to fit games within a certain range of programming/hardware capabilities.

More like impossible. I could be a nitpicker and point out that since we are talking about a digital signal being presented to an analog sensor perfect fidelity is actually physical impossible. But that's not what I mean.

I would be completely unsurprised if porn leads the charge in 'perfectly realistic', especially immersive environments and simulated reality setups.

Honestly I would be surprised if things went that way. I suspect that what you'd get is a complete split with VR videos of real people (possibly even live VR chat) on one end and completely unrealistic games with a lot of customization on the other (color your own tentacle...). But to use my own nomenclature, I do expect type 2, just not a lot of type 1.

@TheFeniX
I think we are talking about two different types of "realism". Let's just call them Type 1 and 2 for the sake of the discussion.
Type 1 realism is trying to emulate the real world in as much detail as possible and generally make your game look like it was plucked from our reality.

Type 2 realism is trying to make your world feel fleshy and alive and "realistic" in the sense that you have good bump maps, enough polygons and generally take care to make it immersive and alive so that the player feels it is a real place. And quite a lot of times this means you have to break away from #1 completely and just go with something that looks good.

My problem is with #1. Because #1 ages poorly. #2 is a good thing.

I think you're setting the bar a bit high there. By 'perfectly realistic' I mean 'photo-realistic within a normal play environment'. That does include things like throwing in physical laws-- if someone drops something, it makes a sound, you see it fall and bounce off the ground in a realistic manner, and so forth-- and events happening outside the player's control, such as someone cooking in the background, NPCs having a conversation, or whatever. It could be argued that running some of the very top of the line games at maximum graphics with a high end VR set like Oculus Rift come close to this level of graphical quality.

thing about humans is that we're very good at seeing those tiny flaws on how something depicting a human moves or acts and then there's things like how cloth moves or liquids, we're still far from anything "realistic".

Lord Revan wrote: and then there's things like how cloth moves or liquids, we're still far from anything "realistic".

After seeing the NVidia Flex demos I don´t think we are very far from decent real time liquids, smoke, cloth and granular particles.

salm wrote:

Lord Revan wrote: and then there's things like how cloth moves or liquids, we're still far from anything "realistic".

After seeing the NVidia Flex demos I don´t think we are very far from decent real time liquids, smoke, cloth and granular particles.

Those are all fine and well in a vacuum. But try rendering that sort of thing in real time and in a semi-unpredictable system at 60 FPS.

Lord Revan wrote:thing about humans is that we're very good at seeing those tiny flaws on how something depicting a human moves or acts and then there's things like how cloth moves or liquids, we're still far from anything "realistic".

This. In fact it is a well documented phenomenon that as things approach a certain degree of realism our ability in this skyrockets to the point that the "super realistic" becomes very uncanny.[*][/url][/super]

Going by the trend, anything you can currently do on a supercomputing cluster at one hour per frame will be possible in real time on a commodity processor about 20 years later. e.g we can now easily do A Bug's Life level of graphics in PC game engines (it was only rendered at 2K resolution!), while techo demos (which generally cheat a bit) have just about caught up with Monster's Inc. Of course the exact technology details and consequent artistic trade offs are different for video games vs CG animated movies.

Some of the lowest hanging fruit, e.g. racing games, are getting quite close to photorealism, but we're not there yet.