@JoeJ Baked stuff fails at dynamics, so it fails at immersion as well.

No because most of the scene is static anyway. And quake 3 has dynamic lighting on the rockets. And the players have moving blob shadows which is just another form of ambient occlusion.

But i would say Quake 3 marks a sweet spot, and the diminishing returns started here.

yes

Doom 3 was super impressive after that. Since that, i never was impressed from gfx so much again, til yet.

I thought doom3 had bad gfx tbh, even a long time ago. I forget if i thought the gfx were good on day one though, i might have been impressed back in the day

Currently i'm very impressed from UE5. It's real progress and good work. But sadly, no games i like anymore, so it comes too late for me.

i prefer the ide of ue4, ue5 has tech such as lumen and nanite that i can never use

Well no. AAA companies invest half a billion maybe for a game. They have 1000 workers, investors, etc.
You as a single person invest very little on production and marketing. After that there is Steam, taxes… but you might 50 % from the cake.
In the end, it might not matter if you work on GTA 6 or a successful indie game. Financially, a similar outcome is quite likely i guess.

ceos will get millions no matter what, even if their company files for bankruptcy.

JoeJ said:
ot enough. For proper VR, we need display tech with true depth. In theory it can be done using kind of layers (i'm no expert), but afaik no success yet, and nothing practical in sight. If you want to make a VR game, the advise is to avoid close up stuff, or if so avoid a large depth range behind it, to

i used vr once and it felt the same as real life. i only used it for a minute though bc i thought somebody would rob me IRL, i was in a public place.

i didnt notice any depth issues but i only used it for a minute. how would your eyes and brain “know” the depth though if each eye is seperate?

Zuck must be from another planet

of course

assuming people would wear VR/AR goggles for longer periods of time.

seems like it would cause head and neck strain because of the helmet

I never dared to ask. But i think there must be a reason beyond artistic choice.

it fits the theme of the game

No, only one way is valid.
What i really mean is attitude, again. See the reactions to your other post. Just is i had predicted, no?

modernity

i noticed this as well. like game devs will not make videos criticizing a game engine, for example: they will say they use Unreal engine instead of Godot. but then when they discuss Godot, they will put as much padding as possible for godot and saying its a good engine. it makes me unable to trust reviews anymore. if a game isn't complete shovelware, reviewers seem like they will go out of their way to make excuses and give a good rating to the game. Of course i didnt get any such luck for my game, only seems to happen for games above a certain market threshold

for example i thought metroid dread was an embarassment but all the game reviewers give it glorious praise. A long time ago when Metroid Other M came out they would have bashed the game, but if Metroid Other M was released nowadays they'd give it glorious praise lol. For example, metroid dread misses the point of metroid which is casual exploration, and the entire plot is absurd also.

Hey man, you can sit here all day on your keyboard and blame the software used to make games, but at the end of the day, releasing a fully-fledged and realized product to the potential masses is no easy feat. You can demand for all the features/modules/mechanics in the world from an engine, that still won't make your game any less easy to make. Just saying.

ReignOnU said:
No because most of the scene is static anyway.

Characters are not static, but the cast shadows and reflect light.
But the more obvious problem is doors.

And to some people dynamic time of day is very important.

But ofc. it's still practical to bake lighting for games which are not too large.
It looks very good for the diffuse part.
But reflections are usually bad. So i would not use the modern PBR material stuff eventually (although it has seemingly solved the problem about ‘dullness’.)

ReignOnU said:
I thought doom3 had bad gfx tbh, even a long time ago. I forget if i thought the gfx were good on day one though, i might have been impressed back in the day

There was a leaked build, and you had a flashlight casting shadows. 20 fps at most, but it was impressive AF. Unbelievable realistic.

The released game did not have the flashlight, ran faster, but was not as impressive. Huge difference.

ReignOnU said:
ceos will get millions no matter what, even if their company files for bankruptcy.

But you are a dev, not a ceo. The ‘competition’ between AAA and indie is very friendly. They do not hurt you at all, and vice versa.

ReignOnU said:
i used vr once and it felt the same as real life. i only used it for a minute though

Same for me. I've shared second hand knowledge from someone working on display tech.

But i know the VAC. I made a stereo renderer myself, running on a flatscreen. Two thin and small framebuffers right beside each other, with a distance of 3cm. Pinching eyes like with the ‘Magic Eye’ print books, it gives ‘true depth’, just like VR goggles. It worked, but the headache was big after 5 or 10 minutes. My brain and eyes could not really accept the cheat, although it worked really well.
That's what VAC means. It's surely not that bad with proper VR goggles, but they have this problem. It's their biggest problem right after motion sickness.

ReignOnU said:
i didnt notice any depth issues but i only used it for a minute. how would your eyes and brain “know” the depth though if each eye is seperate?

Look at some distant spot and pot your finger close to the eye in between. The finger becomes blurry.
Focus on the finger. Now the finger is sharp but the background is blurry.
Your eyes change their internal ‘lenses’ to do this.
In a VR game, your eyes still want to change their lenses. But it does not work, since both the foreground and background is at the same distance. Result is discomfort, and pain in the worst case.
Rendering some DOF effect and tracking eye focus can't fix this.
We need sci fi true depth displays to get a convenient VR experience.

ReignOnU said:
modernity

Times change, but not really. Always the same cycle. The earlier you break it, the better for you.

@JoeJ Look at some distant spot and pot your finger close to the eye in between. The finger becomes blurry.
Focus on the finger. Now the finger is sharp but the background is blurry.
Your eyes change their internal ‘lenses’ to do this.
In a VR game, your eyes still want to change their lenses. But it does not work, since both the foreground and background is at the same distance. Result is discomfort, and pain in the worst case.
Rendering some DOF effect and tracking eye focus can't fix this.
We need sci fi true depth displays to get a convenient VR experience.

hmm, what if vr goggles were further away from the eyes, like 200mm, would that fix it?

how would a sci fi true depth display function?

But you are a dev, not a ceo. The ‘competition’ between AAA and indie is very friendly. They do not hurt you at all, and vice versa.

probably is better to be an indie dev than a wageslave of blizzard. game dev is super draining and i couldn't work a 9 to 5 being glued to a desk

Characters are not static, but the cast shadows and reflect light.
But the more obvious problem is doors.

they cast blob shadows

and most players dont notice or care that the doors don't make physically realistic dynamic lighting

for example when someone is watching cartoons, they don't calculate the raytracing of every light in the scene and complain if the artist made a cartoon that doesn't have physically correct lighting. this stuff only matters in AAA games because of uncanny valley

But reflections

quake3 reflections were a strong point for me. enviromap reflections look better than some of the next-gen stuff that looks weird looking

ReignOnU said:
hmm, what if vr goggles were further away from the eyes, like 200mm, would that fix it?

No, the lenses do already project the image to a larger distance. Maybe 4m, but likely i remember this wrong.

But there is indeed a related 'solution'. Parallel projection, like using a ortho perspective matrix e.g. for 2D games. This projects the image at infinite distance, which is convenient for the eyes. Such ‘collimated’ displays exist.
But we loose VRs primary advantage - depth perception. And tracking head rotation alone is not reason enough to wear headsets or even glasses.

(Edit: It can still do 3D scenes. Perpsective projection still works, but the eye directions are treated as parallel, so you see a image of a 3D scene at infinite distance, which relaxes the eyes.)

However, it's still a minor problem compared to motion sickness. If movement in a game has to happen by teleporting from place to place, i loose interest in VR already at this point. And this problem seems really impossible to fix.

ReignOnU said:
and most players dont notice or care that the doors don't make physically realistic dynamic lighting

They don't care because the level designer makes sure the lighting conditions do not change too much if a door is open or closed.
Realtime GI can lift immersion to a new level, but for that it has to be realtime fro real. Current solutions are just ‘interactive’, because they take a whole second to adapt to significant changes in lighting.

ReignOnU said:
this stuff only matters in AAA games because of uncanny valley

It matters for movies as well, if they are RL + CGI not cartoons.
Which is exactly why NV pushes path tracing. It is accurate and the slowest method, so perfect to sell 2000$ GPUs to sheep which refuse to think for themselves.

ReignOnU said:
quake3 reflections were a strong point for me. enviromap reflections look better than some of the next-gen stuff that looks weird looking

The problem with reflections is the fresnel term, which was not yet used for Quake3.
Any RL material becomes reflective at grazing angles, and it's modeled with the fresnel term in game PBR materials, introduced at PS4 gen.
Usually the reflection was obtained from sparse environmap probes, just like Quake did.
But because the probes are sparse, maybe one probe per room, or per a 2m cube, the reflections are incorrect.
Often we see bright reflections where they should be occluded by some nearby object or a wall.
The result looks like rim lighting, which is the same as those glowing object contours highlighting interactive objects.

So, initially PBR gave a real progress towards realism for very little cost, and i have not complained about the rim light.

But pretty quickly i started to see it everywhere, all the time. And i hate it. It's just ugly.

Thus i would just ditch the fresnel term at least, if not the whole PBR idea, eventually.
It's pointless to model complex materials, as long as we fail at calculating the incoming light correctly.

So if you feel similar about it, that's probably one technical reason explaining why.
(Notice: My argument is backed by educated facts, so i can express my critique in a way it's not perceived as just negative or rant. That's how we should express ourselves in general. The arguments spur improvements and alternatives instead ignorant rejection.)

The other big reason why people don't like modern gfx is likely temporal instability.
TAA, SSAO, SSR, up to upscaling and frame interpolation. Nothing of this is stable. It smears, errors vary across time and scene, it's blurry, etc.

Older games did not have such issues. And in many cases the improved realism isn't worth the price.

@JoeJ The problem with reflections is the fresnel term, which was not yet used for Quake3.
Any RL material becomes reflective at grazing angles, and it's modeled with the fresnel term in game PBR materials, introduced at PS4 gen.

And that is when graphics started rolling downhill.

To be clear, I kind of like the new mario gfx, because its new and different. If what you are talking about is what I call the “Switch Fresnel Effect". I just think that most gamecube games looked better.

Now all Switch games look like this:

It does not look realistic to me. Gamecube looked or at least “felt” more realistic.

So, initially PBR gave a real progress towards realism for very little cost, and i have not complained about the rim light.

But pretty quickly i started to see it everywhere, all the time. And i hate it. It's just ugly.

Thus i would just ditch the fresnel term at least, if not the whole PBR idea, eventually.
It's pointless to model complex materials, as long as we fail at calculating the incoming light correctly.

Yep exactly. Now all games have the weird “Switch Fresnel Effect”. To be clear, I'm glad they added it because its new and different, and adds variety. Its basically a “new artstyle”, its just not as good of an artstyle as previous consoles. And hence it makes retro graphics look superior to new graphics.

Notice: My argument is backed by educated facts

But is not as amusing, as witholding the facts and watching when other people don't know what they are talking about give their opinions (such as people who think switch has better artstyle than gamecube era nintendo.)

The other big reason why people don't like modern gfx is likely temporal instability.
TAA, SSAO, SSR, up to upscaling and frame interpolation. Nothing of this is stable. It smears, errors vary across time and scene, it's blurry, etc.

very much agree. first of all AO doesnt add realism to a game, there is no such thing as AO in real life, and screenspace is even worse. It just looks like some amateur put a Photoshop glow around everything, but some kind of emperor's new clothes dystopian reality where everyone nods their heads in agreement that its a great feature.

For some reason SSAO seems to enhance the gfx of certain games, but i dont know why.

However, it's still a minor problem compared to motion sickness. If movement in a game has to happen by teleporting from place to place, i loose interest in VR already at this point. And this problem seems really impossible to fix.

Yep. I think VR will be limited to niche games that take place in small rooms only.

Augmented Reality may be the real future of gaming. People could build giant gaming centers IRL and then people could actually socialize with each other.

ReignOnU said:
It does not look realistic to me.

Before i have learned about PBR, i have never noticed the fresnel effect in real life.
If reflections are right, it's very subtle.

Also, if we do a path traced render of a Cornell Box, using just a diffuse material, it looks correct and like RL. But it isn't, since every RL diffuse material actually has fresnel. There is no perfect diffuse material in RL.

Here is result using only a perfect diffuse material (lambert), like Quake does:

Not totally sure i did PBR correctly, but here is result, including fresnel, like modern games do:

Beside being more noisy for the same sample count, which is indeed reflections at grazing angles, i see no difference i would care about.

Since most RL materials are diffuse, i would not mind removing the fresnel term if it looks bad, which it mostly does.
We can still get those interesting effects of varying roughness, like many PBR materials tend to exaggerate. Scratches, smears from cleaning, or fingerprints. Such stuff. They look cool but don't cause rim lighting effects.
For reflective materials such as metals, you'll always see the reflections are eventually wrong. But they reflect everywhere, not just at grazing angles, so the error does not annoy me as much.

So i would never say older techniques look more realistic, but the can look simply ‘better’ imo. And then i would fall back to that. Looking good is more important than looking realisitc at the cost of noticeable error.

ReignOnU said:
Now all Switch games look like this:

Yes, that's exactly the fresnel effect i mean. It's worse on Switch, because that's a really weak GPU (0.4 tf vs 2 tf of a PS4), their reflection probes are even more sparse, they can't afford SSR, etc.
Imo, most Switch games look terrible, mostly because of that. Ditching fresnel would look much, much better.

But the same issue is visible in most UE4 games also on PC or PS, and it's still a problem in many current gen games. Correct reflections require some form of raytracing, which is costly and also temporally unstable in practice.

ReignOnU said:
But is not as amusing

Hehe, yeah. But this way i accumulate some bonus of trust, and when the pile is full i spill the rant out for fun. : )
It works i think. Some people will always hate me for the outsmarting, the rant, or both, but others who agree might offer me a job.
I could work at some large and renowed engine maker on gfx now, if i wanted.
But i have to save the world with efficient GI, so i had to reject the attractive offer. \:D/

ReignOnU said:
first of all AO doesnt add realism to a game, there is no such thing as AO in real life, and screenspace is even worse.

They did it because for huge games they could no longer precompute detailed lighting. SSAO still gave some depth perception, and it can be marketized as a new feature, previously available only to offline rendering.

Today it's luckily already toned down compared to the early days, and quality became better too.

But personally i would not even like ray traced AO. It's just wrong and i dislike the darkening, which just makes stuff more gray than it already is.

ReignOnU said:
Augmented Reality may be the real future of gaming. People could build giant gaming centers IRL and then people could actually socialize with each other.

A come back of arcades, where people hang out with glasses?

No, that's not the future. The future is people hanging out in their gaming room, not having RL relationships at all, but AI boyfriends and robot f***dolls.
Consider overpopulation a solved problem. :D