A little info on HDR etc.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Go here

It's pretty detailed and has some good screenies, but isn't overly geek biased.

[deject]

YAY FOR HDR!

this is one big step towards true photo-realism. of course, the next steps are modeling and texturing. let's face it, the current texturing system just isn't good enough for photoquality.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I agree, in a way.

I think we'll be more towards more complex surfaces (think BSPs that are mapped to match textures) and a lot more impressive bump-mapping in textures.

of course, this means a *fuckload* more polys, but give it time.

[deject]

I agree, in a way.

I think we'll be more towards more complex surfaces (think BSPs that are mapped to match textures) and a lot more impressive bump-mapping in textures.

of course, this means a *fuckload* more polys, but give it time.

Pedant correction: you mean normal mapping, which is worlds better than plain bump mapping.

otherwise, I agree...

[Dr. kitteny berk]

yeah, normal mapping is a type of bump mapping, and was used to simplify things a little.

[FatherJack]

This is how I understood stuff, although some of it may be a bit off with current advances.

I thought bump mapping was still done so that it didn't increase poly count, whereas what I'd call normal mapping would be to accurately model the surface of an object using polgons - the classic example being the skin of an orange:

- Texture mapping would use a sphere with the photo of a real orange mapped onto it, looks pretty crappy at any angle other than the one shot in the photo, and can't have effects applied to it.

- Bump mapping is the same, but with another invisible "skin" of grey tones used to represent "height" or the Z-axis which causes the surface to reflect different amounts of the raycasted light sources. It can have effects applied to it, as the heightmap and lightsources are bound by the 3D engine and looks good from most angles except ones almost parallel to the surface, when the trickery is revealed. Requires a lot of power to process, and until recently was only used in pre-rendered scenes, where computing time was not in issue.

- What would be a massive step would to have everything modelled as the 3D objects, so the orange would no longer be a sphere, but a very complicated object indeed. They've gone some way toward this - modelling human hair as seen the Final Fantasy movie, and animal fur, as seen on the Softimage XSI web pages, but it will be a while before it's used in-game - a lot of developments in 3D cards seem to have been with particle effects, for making glowing clouds and sparkly swords and the like - but it's raw processing power that's needed to render highly complicated 3D objects.

That it's even possible in pre-rendered scenes is encouraging though, while they don't look entirely "real" - coupled with the stuff they use to enhance live action movies means it can't be far away from being very convincing.

I'm not sure who leading the advance anymore - the games makers or the 3D card manufacturers. The advances between Wolf3D and Doom, and betwen Doom and Quake were monumental considering they all just used VGA cards - but they began the widespread use of commoditised 3D engines, which are often developed independantly of any specific game these days.

HDR seems to be an interesting direction - simulating the way our eyes actually work, rather than making the scene more complex, and tricking our eyes into believing something is real is the whole idea in the first place.

[Woo Elephant Yeah]

I think game developers should stop concentrating on making stuff look nicer, and spend more time and effort making new and interesting games that break the mould in ways other than the graphics department.

However saying that, I can't deny that I like a game to look nice, but it's not the reason I'll play a game months down the line.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I think game developers should stop concentrating on making stuff look nicer, and spend more time and effort making new and interesting games that break the mould in ways other than the graphics department.

However saying that, I can't deny that I like a game to look nice, but it's not the reason I'll play a game months down the line.

I think this is true to a point, people still play CoD and CS1.6, even though there's games as pretty as doom 3 out there, which suck.

[FatherJack]

That's also because they run well on old PCs, not everyone has hardware capable of source engine stuff, never mind the other new stuff around which is typically similar in graphic detail but requires even better hardware.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

yup, this is true, but then, a lot of things can run source respectably, nothing amazing, but playable.