PUBG low texel density. Why?

jordank95

From a technical standpoint, why does PUBG have such low texel density? I just notice that compared to other FPS games like Destiny, PUBG doesn't look that great texture wise. Is it cause the world is huge? But can't you just not render worlds at a certain distances so all your close assets can have same texel density?

sltrOlsson

When you make large open world games you need to have a great streaming solution for your assets that goes in to video memory. But if you don't, lowering the resolution of your textures is the most straight forward way of cutting down on the memory use.

But when you have a great streaming solution you need to have a system that picks what to prioritize and what objects should get the good stuff. Things like distance, screen size, story telling importance and so on are all factors that you might want to weight in.

gnoop

Smaller texel size become, more repeating textures would appear, less natural, distinctive details they could have. Small texel size requires lots of special tricks to hide the repeating ugliness, especially in outdoor scenes : multi layers . decals , special "covering" geometry , UV splits . It's a non-stop fight and sometimes a real puzzle in every specific place.

In a word very time consuming and kind of hard to do in an automated easy approach open world games have to follow. I mean comparing to usual FPS with levels. And there are no tools on the market that would help to automate such very special tasks. I personally wasted lots of time on Houdini trying to squeeze something from it. Maybe with some AI in the future but so far "open world" means so so visuals usually until it has really huge budget and an army of artists.

So I bet money and priorities are the main reasons here.

jordank95

gnoop said:

Maybe with some AI in the future but so far "open world" means so so visuals usually until it has really huge budget and an army of artists.

So I bet money and priorities are the main reasons here.

Got it. But why do some other open world games just look better? Horizon Zero Dawn comes to mind.

danr

jordank95 said:

But why do some other open world games just look better? Horizon Zero Dawn comes to mind.

Bigger budgets, bust mostly different priorities. Certain games need to invest heavily in visuals-driven tech for player immersion and marketing

PUBG just isn’t that type of game. Makes more sense to spend the cash in getting the gameplay tight, which is where the engagement and retention comes from

Mark Dygert

With curated content you get to pack your entire budget into what you know the player will be looking at. It is a much tighter scope and allows you to pack all of the tricks into that specific scene. You can imply a lot of detail outside of the playable area because players will never get there during that session. You might load that previously out of bounds area later, as part of another mission but then you're not loading all of the previous content.

When "they could be looking at whatever, whenever" it all can be important "potentially" you're options become a lot more restrictive. You can't imply detail if they are going to go there. You can't purposefully trim your budget tightly around the area and pour those savings all over the content that matters.

Knowing your player will move through a specific story point, like a valley, from start to end and never be able to "climb off the rail", is very different from, the player drops from the sky and could choose to touch down anywhere on an island that has no rail and needs to be able to climb into and out of the valley, oh and they can clutter up the space with buildings, did I mention it also needs to run on mobile?

There are choices to be made and tech concessions to be considered with every game. That's most of what game development is. Giving up a little X to make Y work. I'm not saying they've made the right decisions 100% of the time and that they can't do better, but they are working within some fairly large conceptual ideas that will limit what they can do.

poopipe

jordank95 said:

gnoop said:

Maybe with some AI in the future but so far "open world" means so so visuals usually until it has really huge budget and an army of artists.

So I bet money and priorities are the main reasons here.

Got it. But why do some other open world games just look better? Horizon Zero Dawn comes to mind.

In this specific case there are two reasons (IMO etc.) ..

1. Guerrilla absolutely do not fuck around when it comes to art quality - the PUBG guys have other priorities.

2. Horizon's engine was built specifically to make that game work properly, PUBG has to make do with ue4 which wasn't optimised for really large maps during most of it's development.

Alex_J

Wasn't PUBG a small time indie game comprised of asset store items tossed together -- but they hit the jackpot with the gameplay and it became a big deal? Whereas Horizon and similar titles are multi-million dollar blockbusters made by big companies who hire the best people in the field.

After PUBG's success, I'd expect more professional work from the same group in the future. Shiny shit takes time, and time cost money.