Real ingame screens of mgs4
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http://ruliweb.dreamwiz.com/data/rulinews/read.htm?page=&num=14981&find=&ftext=
i really like the imense detail on the characters, but the environments are a tad weird , still i like the overall mood, but i think it looks nothing like what was presented at E3.
i really like the imense detail on the characters, but the environments are a tad weird , still i like the overall mood, but i think it looks nothing like what was presented at E3.
Replies
I still think it looks fuckin amazing and it makes me want to buy a PS3
The only thing that i noticed on the lastest movie i saw , is that the animations don't seem as half good as they first shown. Too bumpy, or too old style, not that soft animation nextgen style
I wish it looked just like the trailer from e3. *cry
BTW is MGS4 coming out this season? Is it Gears of war competition?
Just looked it up and Gears of war competition is Resistance: Fall of Man. MGS4 is to come out sometime next year, so its halo 3 competition. That should be intresting...
I find the very low poly / very low res environment disappointing though it still reeks of atmosphere which counts for a lot but it seems like they need to balance their elements more.
However, this game is a year away so I'm sure we can expect something very close to the E3 trailers as these are experienced people working on this and it IS sony's biggest hitter atm so I don't see them sacrificing quality as they haven't in the past.
I enjoy the fact that the designs and materials on characters and mechs are quite bold and smooth though that's maybe because of how much is contrasts the styles I work with on Gears/UT ; always refreshing to see something different!
r.
I really like the mood of this though the push for texture resolution over polycount seems odd considering the PS3's strengths.
I find the very low poly / very low res environment disappointing though it still reeks of atmosphere which counts for a lot but it seems like they need to balance their elements more.
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If I understand what you're saying, I don't see it that way. The textures look like the weak spot to me, with some of the environment textures being particularly weak. I don't have an issue with the world geometry though. Aside from the arches, which have obvious facets to them, what in those pics is distractingly low-poly? I think the character models pretty much look top notch, except again with the textures (and specifically a lack of shading).
And we all know that mgs always uses higher rez characters/objects for cutscenes right?
in that aspect, it doesn't look very 'next-gen' to me.
didn't really like the ingame anims in the older titles as well, strange style and so different from the cutscene mocap stuff.
that decline in quality is ... awful
ALL the environment assets are overly low poly , this may be clearer to you if you look again and see how no corners have been chamfered so that one smoothing group can enclose the entire object and allow the normal maps accomplish their major strength which is to catch the light bending at a wider range of angles beyond what is modelled.
Chamfering of hard edges is one of the first thing's that are required in order to create realistic 'next gen' environments, hard edges and vertex lighting are a thing of the past with this generation of technology and consoles
and betray the stage of development they are at and also some mistakes being made that hint at their use of inferior technology to UE3 for instance.
I would guess that they are using a bodged piecemeal piece of tech to put this stuff together still and later on things may come together in a superior fashion but for the moment its very noticeable bad compared to UE3 games for instance, on both PS3 and Xbox360.
Texture balancing on Gears was one of the last things we completed because when a project comes close to the end and is prepared for the certification process the main mandate is to pull everything down to a level that will run without crashing within memory on the console.
Once that has been achieved, then proper balancing of the elements can be undertaken once the main factors like meeting memory contraints have been met, and then the attempt to optimise code further and increase the texture pool resolution can get underway.
This is an example of one of the ways in which a game can really come into it's own in the last days and a facet that many people in the amateur communities and the supposed professional review trades are blissfully ignorant.
So to sum up, I think they have a lot of major balancing problems so far, which does not worry me, their major choices about how to proportion the balance between environments and characters is a worry to me as I am not sure what their plans for the development of their tech are, perhaps they have something that will smooth round those awful facetted edges, i don't know, certainly it does not seem likely to me.
Regardless of all that, their design choices and atmosphere as a whole are strong and that's what makes me confident of how things will progress.
r.
Chamfering of hard edges is one of the first thing's that are required in order to create realistic 'next gen' environments, hard edges and vertex lighting are a thing of the past with this generation of technology and consoles
and betray the stage of development they are at and also some mistakes being made that hint at their use of inferior technology to UE3 for instance.
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I did not know this. Since most of what I've seen of next-gen console games is shaky-cam or demo footage, I didn't know the standard was that much higher. Only Xbox360 game I've spent any time with is Perfect Dark Zero, and it seems less visually sophisticated than the MG4 screenshots.
I'm very excited by the footage I have seen of Assasins Creed for instance, have you downloaded from on the 360's bringing it home section yet?
It's being made by the same people that made prince of persia and reeks of the same professionalism in environment , character and gameplay.
I also think heavenly sword on PS3 is a far better example of its power than MGS4 as it currently is though heavenly sword is much further along.
r.
One of the things that works is the use of multiple overlays - you can use the same base textures then layer on a dirt pass, meaning you no longer need to dirty your textures at the base of a wall, making your base textures tile more easily. Also you don't paint trims on yur textures - you poly that in.
Like Ror mentioned, the lighting doesn't need to be baked (or baked as much). You use extra geometry and the poly pushing power of the new hardware instead.
Well that's why I tried to take a little more time instead of being terse with my 2nd post.
I'm very excited by the footage I have seen of Assasins Creed for instance, have you downloaded from on the 360's bringing it home section yet?
It's being made by the same people that made prince of persia and reeks of the same professionalism in environment , character and gameplay.
I also think heavenly sword on PS3 is a far better example of its power than MGS4 as it currently is though heavenly sword is much further along.
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I actually just hit the link for Assassin's Creed after I replied to you and yes, you're right. That video blew me away, the sort of visuals that sell consoles.
It's hard to imagine that Kojima/Konami would develop a substandard game, but I can't understand why they'd develop assets for demo footage that wouldn't actually go into the game, either (I understand the value of publicity, but it would seem a waste ofdevelopment time to build temp models just for that, yeah?)
Not to defend the quality of these shots I do think they look awful. However what you descibe about scaling down textures and optimizing in the end is typical of what most of us "westerners" are used to in game development.
Many Japanese games are developed differently however, where the team has a strict rule to maintain performance throughout the project only to add more detail when performance allows. This is the reason you see more 60fps console games coming from Japan.
I can't say how much better or worse this is going to look in the end but I'm sure that factors in to how these screens look.
I am sure everyone has seen this tech demonstration, which is a breakdown of the very first trailer of MGS4, but i'd just like to point out that this rendering technology that kojima is using is inferior to engines such as UE3 which use fully dynamic lighting etc etc ...
You can see in the video that the environments all have baked shadows and lighting on characters isnt truly realtime-dynamic.
This brings to mind HL2, we all could notice that there were low rez textures all over the place, low poly models and texture seams, we knew that the lighting wasn't in fact dynamic and the tech used a lot of tricks to achieve certain kind of effects.
But in the end the art direction in HL2 really pulled through, and as a whole the project was a great artistic achievement.
The same applies to the way Metal Gear Solid stacks up technologically, despite ps2's hardware, i personally thought that despite using low rez textures and models Snake Eater came together wonderfully. The presentation and artistic atmosphere in his games are phenomenal, he really knows how to sell the mood.
Now looking at MGS4, having a trained eye we can definitely point out the fact that it it's not crunching as many polies and pixels as other games, despite that, i think the tone and mood of the characters and environments are pretty belieable.
I am sure i sound like a fan boy, but very few games achieved the same kind of artistic consistency.
MGS4 probably wont be the showcase of all the real-time rendering and shader tech, but as a game with fantastic art direction it'll be remembered.
The characters look next gen, but if this is all the PS3 can do there is no way I am going to buy one. Really, I thought MGS2 sucked balls and it was a huge disappointment-- so much so that I have yet to play MGS 3. I beat Metal Gear when I was 8, and I must have played it over 100 hours, so I used to be a pretty big fan of the series.
And its not that assets are purely for the demo, theres noone that can afford that, rather they are the ingame assets, but they may had to scale them down to get things running how they needed.
With normal maps, scaling up and down, added extra facets to a curved arch, these things are not too difficult really
as long as the source assets were created with forward thinking.
Okkun: Yeah I had read about this now and then, I can't help but suspect the source assets are at a higher res and that the tech and the need for presentation has hit them with a curve ball, well for now anyway.
r.
http://image2.ruliweb.com/data/news7/09m/tgs2006/22/ps3/mgs4_02.jpg
That looks grainy. I realize that developpers are still getting used to new hardware, especially the first batch of games, but still. It's a good thing people are buying HDTV's and using HDMI cables, it's really going to be necessary to appreciate all that beauty. Obviously you can't take some screenshots and say it's all ugly now, games always look better in motion anyways. Still though, I'm actually really really surprised at how different that looks from old "in game" footage.
Edit: The irony is that in order to get the game to run decently at 1080p they are probably having to make sacrifices in the polygon and texture departments.
I think they will sort it out
The screens don't look good. Shadows seem a bit weak (a lot of ambient light),
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Well yeah! He's fucking outside with the sun blazing away at high noon. Of course you're going to get an ass load of ambient light because light is bouncing off of everything in the scene.
LOLOLOLOL
The screenshots REEK of MGS art style. If you run through MGS2 on the PS2.. you'll see what I mean. MGS4 is much like MGS2... but with a yellow overtone instead of blue/green.
As far as the difference between the old demo VS in-game shots. What did you honestly expect?
That the in-game would look like the cinematics shown in the past? No way. MGS has always used smoke/mirrors during it's cinematic scenes. Everything from one-off assets to special scenes made for specific camera angles. It's no different this time around.
15K polygons for Snake's mustache? Sure... but probably if snake's face was the only thing on screen.
but seriously soul, i dont think most people have an issue with most of the lighting outdoors, it's just that certain shots when he is fullbright stick out, like the dumpster etc ..
Well yeah! He's fucking outside with the sun blazing away at high noon. Of course you're going to get an ass load of ambient light because light is bouncing off of everything in the scene.
LOLOLOLOL
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The lightmaps look like shit. You think they look accurate? LOLOLOLOL
There are some areas in those shots, and in the movie thats around somewhere that kinda feels like a letdown. Specifically; the walker-bot things. In the trailers, and E3 stuff, their detail level was awesome. The new in-game mesh feels a little too plain in comparassion.
I love the art in MGS, some of this stuff seems a little bit like 'they arent trying hard enough,' but i agree with you soul about their set style. However... look at MGS3, they know how to do grime when needed
fanboy section:
and hahahahahah they gave Snake an "eye patch." Thats hillarious. I am really intrigued as to where in the shit this story will go... and if its any statement to what happened in mgs2, and the quality of the mech textures... maybe the first 1/8th of the game takes place here, and the rest is underground, where you play as manly-raiden-ninja.
OOOORRRR, you get to the end of the first segment, and Snake is going to kill himself, so you have a flashback of post-mgs2 and beyond, to where he is now. so the story would be a series of vignettes.
The models look somewhat the same poly-wise, but environment texture have certainly taken a huge hit and been reduced extensively. I guess 256MB of texture memory wasn't enough to hold the resolution in the early videos.
keep in mind this isnt the finished product, its mostly showing off the gameplay they are getting. The graphics have another full year to polish off, red steel and other wii titles didnt look good when they first showed gameplay but it is looking better near launch.
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Keep in mind that more so console games graphics actually *deteriorate* closer to launch. It's really hard to judge available video ram on a console early in a games development (heck not to mention early in the consoles development). Every single console game I've ever worked on required some downsizing of assets late in development to get everything to fit into ram.
It would make little to no sense to start out with lower resolution assets and ramp up.
SouL: You know as well as anyone what I feel about the quality of Art in the MGS series. But I actually feel that this has lost something over the previous generations and lesser hardware. That pixel perfect immaculate texture style has been compromised a little here I think, and it feels to me like the team is in this strange middle ground of not quite having the horsepower they need to go all out crazy, but having enough resources to negate the need to paint and UV assets with the same anal precision as they did before. The Art looks messier and less stylized to me here. Those characters look more photosourced and simply less clean and immaculately crafted than in previous MGS titles, albeit higher resolution.
I'm perhaps not explaining myself too well, but in a nutshell I find the last MGS is more artistically satisfying to look at than this. Oh and what SuperOstrich said. The difference in the sophistication of the lighting model is clearly vast. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I'm not looking forward to this, and that it doesn't look decent. But I do feel that this is one worth chalking up to the Sony hype machine. In summary: the differences between that trailer and these shots are in my mind a good indication of the bs that has surrounded the PS3 since its conception.
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Well yeah! He's fucking outside with the sun blazing away at high noon. Of course you're going to get an ass load of ambient light because light is bouncing off of everything in the scene.
LOLOLOLOL
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The lightmaps look like shit. You think they look accurate? LOLOLOLOL
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YOU look like shit. LOLOLOL!!!!!!!!
ROFLSKATELOLERCOPTERSAUCE4YOU!!!!
Not that any of this makes me any less excited about this game, mind you. An artteam having issues with transferring to higher specs does nothing to make the gameplay less fun, so i'm still really looking forward to playing it.
Cry cry and cry! the game aint even done yet,