3D in games. Do you see faults when you play?
polycounter lvl 17
Just a quick disclaimer. I know people make mistakes, I've done many myself in games that have been released and I don't really mind. Time, budgets, etc. All of that. This is not a bashing thread in any way. I'm just interested in seeing if more people notice graphical glitches related to production in their games.
Disclaimer out of the way.
When you play games. Do you look at the graphics and analyze it? I do it subconciously it seems and some of the times when I play games with my mates I can just end up staring at a floor or wall to look at a horribly stretched texture saying, "Guys, look at this. Wtf" and they're like "Eh? What? Ah. Meh". I guess it's a 3d artist thing
Other times I really sit there and wonder what the artist was thinking. One of those moment was in an fps where you equip an axe and there's a huge seam going down the wooden handle facing the players view. Gnrgh.
Disclaimer out of the way.
When you play games. Do you look at the graphics and analyze it? I do it subconciously it seems and some of the times when I play games with my mates I can just end up staring at a floor or wall to look at a horribly stretched texture saying, "Guys, look at this. Wtf" and they're like "Eh? What? Ah. Meh". I guess it's a 3d artist thing
Other times I really sit there and wonder what the artist was thinking. One of those moment was in an fps where you equip an axe and there's a huge seam going down the wooden handle facing the players view. Gnrgh.
Replies
But when I'm playing for fun, I don't let it get in the way.
Otherwise I'm not actively searching for mistakes, but a few things really annoy me. Like some of the unintentional texture stretching in Stormwind (yeah I know, a lot is intentional)....but c'mon guys! you have all the cash in the world, just pay someone to fix some of these newb mistakes!!!
Also I was a bit surprised about the low quality of a few assets in Dragon Age. Maybe a tradeoff for performance? The characters had extensive texture mirroring going on and some textured were quite low res on the PC.
It reminds me of those paintings when the artist paints very rough/crude details that look like a mess when examined closeup, but when you look at the overall piece it looks awesome
I see the faults but it doesn't ruin gameplay for me.
Other times it van be things like an environment and why they did/didn't do something with it.
I guess its just inherent in doing this stuff yourself, being pro/amateur. I suspect muscicians pick up stuff like that in music they hear.
Bioshock 2 is the most resent. They use a lot of pre made map objects, such as dirt piles of rubble etc, that are made to fit a flat plane, but in some cases these are turned 45 degrees and placed on a 90 degree bend, making it obvious that its just a decal because you can see under it...
Texture stretching, really obvious mirroring (the girls at gatherers garden, BAD mirror), things like that, they distract me more than they would my friends, because sadly I look at the art more than I play the damn game... Its a curse, really is... In fact many a time I've done the opposite and actually stopped playing just to take a few screenshots for my inspiration folder... and then not gone back to the game because I borke the imersion... WTF?!
Its got to the point now where I do it on pre-release shit, and THAT bothers me, because everybody moans, and they are right... its pre release/alpha, shits gotta be worked on, right? But I just end up thinking "Then why show it off in the first place if you know its terrible...?". Case in point, the terrain stretching/blandness in Halo Reach, or Alan Wakes knees having a total of 2 polygons. I swear, if Alan Wakes polycount isn't fixed by release I'll boycot it... And then buy it anyway, ala MW2...
so there's a seam and alot of stretching in wow, but everything looks fantastic together.
inconsistency, now thats a moodkiller.
One thing I do notice that bugs me is ugly changes in texel denisty.
There's also some floating rocks in TF2
Doesn't matter, I still play and enjoy the games, but it's kind of fun to see that I'm not the only one who makes mistakes :P
The biggest annoyance for me is.. Facial animation. Its an area I have interest in, and I see it done again and again so half assed.
as for faults, like folks say if the big picture looks good, I tend to just roll with it
I spend loads of time in games checking out random environment bits when i should be playing and for me the forests in Oblivion are a perfect example of that...to the point of getting annoyed that a monster attacks me because i was looking at a sweet tree or whatever :P
I also find that i cant listen to music in the same way that i could when i was 16 because i have been playing guitar for so long and end up analysing the sound more than enjoying the music.
Its all part and parcel of the game though, i guess
Borderlands had some really bad poping, and you could easily get out of parts of the map (I liked it more than it bothered me, they were more like short cuts than falling through the map or anything)
Art issues bother me a lot less than glitches or bugs in the engines.
He had no idea what I was on about...
On the other hand, I also try to learn from games that look good, but I've found that you're more likely to pick up design techniques than technical ones.
What actually does bug me though is wacky anatomy and really ugly faces. I think that is bad because they could have probably gotten a better artist. By extension, character creators that let you create really non-human weird facial shapes bug me. I'd never want a model I make subjected to a bad character creator.
Haven't done anything related to game art in a while now, and in return I started to enjoy games once again.
This totally.
It looks awful when it moves and deforms like rubber, while the wrinkles remain intact.
I also hate how hair is crappy in 99% of the games, and notice when developers try to use 8-bit alpha transparencies ANYWAYS, but live with a crappy 1-bit cutout that looks crappy.
I guess most of my gripes are with the limitations of the current-gen technology.
I find Resident Evil 5, and Final Fantasy had the best looking characters. Lack of Normal Mapped wrinkles, with decent facial animation.
[ame]
...a friend of mine watched it a couple of times before me and never spotted it...when he showed it to me I immediately saw it and pointed him to it, but he wouldn't believe me until he watched it again, paying extra attention...I think you can get away with many flaws with the general audience...
I know that most of the time, they do this for either frame rate reasons (more effects etc) or space issues... But they could at least fix up the terrible clipping and bugs, just distracts from the overall feel.
My favorite is in Mass Effect where you get the assignment to take out those two corporate dudes from that old lady: For some reason she re-positioned herself like 10 feet in the air, so my character was looking up at her, and she was looking down at my character.
Also I guess there is a streaming bug on Mass Effect where you come out the mines after that mission where you gotta kill the bugs (the one where you hook the vehicle to the generator to power the turrets). Well you come out the mines and performance drops to 1FPS then to .01 FPS. No joke. Happened every time (3rd playthrough 100% repeatable). I just save before I leave the mines, and right when I get out. Maybe this happens only when you are running the game off the Xbox HDD.
I remember playing morrowind and Hazard would be like "Omg look at the seams on the rock, an this tree, but when you pull back from those things and you look at them as a whole, we both agreed it was just awesome art.
Im just glad even the 'big boys' make mistakes sometimes
One thing I do often do is kind of the opposite from noticing errors: When I see something well done or a cool shader I try to figure out how they did it (water in bioshock, prince of persia textures, nintendo ds games with amazing details/style). Reverse engineer all over those bitches!!!
Normal mapped clothing ( suits with plastic specularity ).
wholeness:
Now it looks terrible, the final game looks a lot better...
The 1 thing I hate (and I can get it to happen in Fallout 3 a lot) is when a character dies, they turn into this big black spider looking mesh and fly off into space and all the verts go crazy. I have no idea what causes it by Fallout 3 and Fable 2 seem to do it a lot (on 360, never saw it on PC).
And I guess it only gets worse as your skills as an artist gets better.
On the other hand, there's a few games, that I only replayed them just because how awesomely made they are, like Doom3. Last time I replayed it, I took more than 400 screenshots, their sub-d work is fantastic.
same thing on fallout 3 with the tesla gun when u reload a massive seam is just staring u in the face.
i did however end up spending hours looking at the environments in uncharted 2 because of the opposite reason:
i couldnt find flaws
I see stretching, inconsistent pixel densities, the shading on the brick wall and the modeled bricks is different (and looks bad in places). Etc, etc.
It does look really good, but nothing is perfect.
Epic did improve readability of their scenes by a tenfold since UDK due to the new lightmap baking system, but it does not change the fact that each piece of the big ut3 pie was built with quite a narrow sight, each to perfection, when the scene itself should've been the focus.
Sort of an overfocus you could say, overdetailing.
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