Well whenever an engine allows for 'gradient' transp for hair it often looks like trash (like background foliage showing through characters hair in UT2004!) ... and on top of that hair is not really a transparent thing anyways so 'alpha hair' can only go this far.
By looking at the early screenshots and even more so by comparing the 360 and PS3 latest grabs of FFXIII, the thing that stands out the most to me is that the hair masking, even tho its calling the same texture asset (1bit masking), looks quite different from one platform to the other. I remember that the subject was discussed here a long time ago, and I think CrazyButcher explained what it was about. It seems like a very PS3 specific thing. Or maybe a japanese developper trade secret hehe.
Or maybe I'm just imagining things! :P
It was already gorgeous on PS2 ... and I am 90% sure they did not have access to greyscale alpha on that system!
Really interesting, I simply never thought about it, but now that you mention it, and elds description of it, it makes perfect sense.
I always marvelled at it the hair in FF as well, and ALWAYS wondered why they never appeared to have sorting issues!
actually, I believe they had to sort the hair on ps2 ff's and they had full transparency, but they put alot of thought into how to sort them, the amount of grouping on the hair-polygons they'd have to do etc.
no magic there, just that with the low resolution of the ps2, not having full transparency on hair usually makes hair looks like shit on it.
oh and they didn't have to bother with fancy stuff like deffered rendering that makes full transparency a bitch.
but dithered transparency is something I'd love to see more of in new games.
What you are talking about is a simple trick we use in our engine, its called Alpha To Coverage.
The pro's are that it works on any 1bit alpha tested surface, i.e. grass, foliage, hair etc, and that "when used with AA" it dithers the edges to make it look faded. Only works with AA on however. Also much faster/easier to sort.
The cons are that it can be quite ugly at times, it will never look as nice as alpha blending, and if you put a lot of instances in front of each other they tend to look very strange if not careful, for example a heavy leaved tree.
Its also very dependant on on both screen resolution, media asset resolution and AA mode.
The reason they look different in both the 360 and PS3 pic is simple, its just a different screen resolution, making the hair look poorer on the 360 one because it has less pixel space to work with.
Fun Fact: I remember when Vlave released a big statement on adding it to source, like it was the best thing since normal mapping and how amazing it was... We were all like "Dude... We had that like a year ago, its pretty cool ay..."
I marvel at how this is used in FF games, to date I have seen few developers bold enough / game enough to even try to pull off female hairstyles such as:
Its just so nice and soft compared to snow's hair in this, which actually looks alot harder, almost straight 1 bit:
Erm... Because those are pre-release screenshots that have been given the Ubisoft treatment...?
i.e. the pic was taken at INSANE RES with INSANE AA, then downsampled to a stupidly low res. The result is a VERY nice looking screenshot, no errors, no issues with alpha, it looks good.
Ubi have been doing this for years. Just look at how "perfect" the latest batch of Splinter Cell shots look. Not a single issue in sight. Of course they would do this though, releasing pics of the game STATIC and at NATIVE res looks shit, no matter how good the game may look.
Ahhh the fun of marketing... Lie to the consumer, because they won't know anyway...
But the actual hair modelling... Top notch. Always is in SE games.
Odium: Sorry man I have to disagree, not about the treatment to the shots, thats commonplace, but the fact that even treated screenshots of OTHER alpha'd hair never looks as good as FF hair.
I dont attribute that to marketings photoshop skills at all, but to the skill of the art / tech folks doing what they do.
View FF on your lcd and check out the hair ( even one of the older FF's ) and compare that with any other game say lost odyssey or Metal Gear Solid 4 ( closest to FF I believe with alphad hair ) theres a pretty big gap.
I wasn't saying they don't do good hair. SE modelers are some of the few left that have the balls to even TRY to do nice hair, rather than shaved heads or simple short solid haircuts.
But if you see THAT hair ingame on the PS3/360, you will just go "ugh..." because the alpha to coverage dithering ruins it. Trust me
An example? Well, lets take Snows hair (the blondes) shall we? Here is the pre-release:
And here is how it actually looks ingame (Sorry the pic I had before is gone, so Ill sub it for this one):
The trouble is these days not that modellers cant model the hair, its just that getting an ingame final result that not only works with the mesh but also the rendering, is tough.
I wasn't saying they don't do good hair. SE modelers are some of the few left that have the balls to even TRY to do nice hair, rather than shaved heads or simple short solid haircuts.
But if you see THAT hair ingame on the PS3/360, you will just go "ugh..." because the alpha to coverage dithering ruins it. Trust me
The trouble is these days not that modellers cant model the hair, its just that getting an ingame final result that not only works with the mesh but also the rendering, is tough.
Bahaha couldnt agree with you more about the haveing the balls to try some hairstyles.
I see what you mean now, Im really curious, maybe ill buy the ps3 version and hire the 360 version for a night and get them going side by side, - I really want to check out how bad it is!!!
Loving it when a GD thread becomes TechTalk!
Good info guys, thanks!
So would it all mean that, since full transparency alpha blending is hard to pull off in a deferred engine, alpha to coverage is then a very good substitute?
Loving it when a GD thread becomes TechTalk!
Good info guys, thanks!
So would it all mean that, since full transparency alpha blending is hard to pull off in a deferred engine, alpha to coverage is then a very good substitute?
This is worthy of a new thread, if we can get some tech guys to chime in and break down ( with coder art omg ) what all this means it would be fantastic.
FFXII looked amazing (on ps2). I've just downloaded Vagrant Story on PSN. To me that shit looks as good as any current game. FFXII was the tits in terms of video games graphics. Just my HO.
Please tell me you didn't fall into the trap of saying screen resolution = size on disk...?
The game could be 25p or 1080p, the size on disk won't change
But I agree with your last point. Its more likely they said "right, lets cut some corners here and there, it will sell regardless and we can make the date". I would have much rather they said "Ok guys, sorry but 360 owners are gonna have to wait a month or two more while we get it up to par because we believe in giving you quality, not just any old mess".
Sadly, Money > *.* to most devs these days, and the customer comes last... I would give examples of this but in recent times I would likely be here all day typing...
uhm...
i'm pretty sure i'm right in saying that in order to look good on a higher resolution output, you'd need higher resolution textures (1024*1024 AS AN EXAMPLE!!!!! would look better at 1080p than a 256 texture). and similarly, on a lower resolution output, any detail from the larger texture will be mostly un-noticed, so you can afford to scale down textures.
this works in reverse. if the storage space you're working with isn't large enough to handle huge textures, you would want to output at a resolution optimal to making the most of your textures. right?
so output resolution COULD be directly related to storage space.
Also disagree. While I se what your trying to get at, its not actually the point, as it were. A classic example of this is playing a retro game at 1080p.
Good art is good art and will show at any resolution. Bad art however...
i'm pretty sure i'm right in saying that in order to look good on a higher resolution output, you'd need higher resolution textures (1024*1024 AS AN EXAMPLE!!!!! would look better at 1080p than a 256 texture). and similarly, on a lower resolution output, any detail from the larger texture will be mostly un-noticed, so you can afford to scale down textures.
this works in reverse. if the storage space you're working with isn't large enough to handle huge textures, you would want to output at a resolution optimal to making the most of your textures. right?
so output resolution COULD be directly related to storage space.
In bizarro world probably. Developers will scale down resolution as the shortcut to gain more of a framerate on the platform, storagespace will not affect that much, considering the fact that the graphics memory is finite and clearly alot smaller than the storage on a blue-ray disc.
SE has solved that issue by scaling down the ton of pre-rendered movies and uncompressed audio on the blu-ray disc to fit better on several dvd's, texturespace for a given scene will be pretty much the same considering the equal amount of memory on both targets.
However, since ps3 has been a primary platform, they've had to take shortcuts for the 360 instead of restructuring things to run better on it.
Well, the latest official shots from both SE and MS show clearly that the 360 version is indeed in 720p native, although I can't see any AA on them. In other words, it looks like the original idea that the 360 shots were taken either badly or from a video source at the wrong res seem to be pretty spot on.
Anyway, check the latest official shots that are confirmed NOT fake (like the PS3/360 ones with buttons swapped) too see.
Of course, the PS3 version will likely still be the weapon of choice with its 1080p video, but knowing the game is at least HD makes it a little easier on the eyes compared to the sub HD mess we could have had.
you just posted a picture, saying it is from the 360 version, which has a size of 720p, and has perfect antialiasing.
edit:
the theme of this thread is this though: due to technicalities, someone could render out a game at 320x240, scale it up, and print out a nice fluffy 1080p support on the back of the package.
what is the point of HD if developers can just skip that part.
Well, sadly thats true... I don't agree with 360 games on that one at all. They all say "1080p" on the back, which is obviously bullshit... And if they all say it, why bother printing it on there, if we know it?
They should do what PS3 does and say what NATIVE res is supports. We all know damn well it upscales to 1080p...
They should do what PS3 does and say what NATIVE res is supports. We all know damn well it upscales to 1080p...
Not mine...On the back of the box, if it says 720P, when I start playing my TV states it is displaying 720P. Bioshock 2 was displayed in 1080p while Dragon Age displayed in 720p. I assume those are the native resolutions...
The PS3 does not upscale to 1080p if it only is 720p.
All 360 games I play are in 1080p unscaled. All of them. Same for pretty much everybody else I know... In fact your the first person to say something doesn't...?
All 360 games I play are in 1080p unscaled. All of them. Same for pretty much everybody else I know... In fact your the first person to say something doesn't...?
I am pretty sure there are a few games that run at 1080p without upscaling. Sorry can't provide game names at the moment.
Native 1080p games available for the Xbox 360 include the following 6 titles: new![native 1080p] Wolf of the Battlefield Commando 3 [Xbox Live Arcade] new![native 1080p] Feeding Frenzy 2 [Xbox Live Arcade] new![native 1080p] Portal [Xbox Live Arcade] [native 1080p] Boogie Bunnies [Xbox Live Arcade] [native 1080p] Street Home Court [native 1080p] Virtual Tennis 3
hehe, actually wipeout HD dynamically changes the resolution when frames get more intensive. I think it's the only game that does this. You don't notice it though because everything goes so fast .
All 360 games I play are in 1080p unscaled. All of them. Same for pretty much everybody else I know... In fact your the first person to say something doesn't...?
I was talking about my PS3, I really do not play my 360 much any more...
You know, ingame I noticed the 360 was smoother frame rate wise, and yeah, so its not HD...
I just don't know... Theres the inner Cloud of me thats poking me all the time and saying "just buy it and dont expect it to be as good as seven!" then theres the geek in me that says "Dude, if you wanted to play at Wii resolution you would play the wii".
That is strange. The overall capabilities of the consoles seem on par to me. So far most of the multi platform games run better on the 360 and/or have AA.
As someone else said, the 360 has a better GPU, the PS3 has a better processor (processorS). And possibly the 360 is easier to program for?
Even if the extra grunt of the PS3's CPU's end up outperforming the 360, I seriously don't think this is the game to tell us that.
If anything, the engine was based around PS3 architecture, and when coding it for the 360, they had a hard time getting identical performance, so scaled down the resolution.
The reason I say that, is it doesn't look like it's pushing either platform to it's limits, far from it.
I have to admit, though I like some JRPGs (Skies of Arcadia ) - I never cared for the FF series. I didn't play the SNES ones, I was into Secret of Mana and Zelda, but I played FF7 and FFX on the PS2.
Too on rails for my tastes, and too many cutscenes etc. It seems like those aspects have become even more pronounced as the series has "progressed".
Replies
Really interesting, I simply never thought about it, but now that you mention it, and elds description of it, it makes perfect sense.
I always marvelled at it the hair in FF as well, and ALWAYS wondered why they never appeared to have sorting issues!
no magic there, just that with the low resolution of the ps2, not having full transparency on hair usually makes hair looks like shit on it.
oh and they didn't have to bother with fancy stuff like deffered rendering that makes full transparency a bitch.
but dithered transparency is something I'd love to see more of in new games.
The pro's are that it works on any 1bit alpha tested surface, i.e. grass, foliage, hair etc, and that "when used with AA" it dithers the edges to make it look faded. Only works with AA on however. Also much faster/easier to sort.
The cons are that it can be quite ugly at times, it will never look as nice as alpha blending, and if you put a lot of instances in front of each other they tend to look very strange if not careful, for example a heavy leaved tree.
Its also very dependant on on both screen resolution, media asset resolution and AA mode.
The reason they look different in both the 360 and PS3 pic is simple, its just a different screen resolution, making the hair look poorer on the 360 one because it has less pixel space to work with.
Fun Fact: I remember when Vlave released a big statement on adding it to source, like it was the best thing since normal mapping and how amazing it was... We were all like "Dude... We had that like a year ago, its pretty cool ay..."
Its just so nice and soft compared to snow's hair in this, which actually looks alot harder, almost straight 1 bit:
i.e. the pic was taken at INSANE RES with INSANE AA, then downsampled to a stupidly low res. The result is a VERY nice looking screenshot, no errors, no issues with alpha, it looks good.
Ubi have been doing this for years. Just look at how "perfect" the latest batch of Splinter Cell shots look. Not a single issue in sight. Of course they would do this though, releasing pics of the game STATIC and at NATIVE res looks shit, no matter how good the game may look.
Ahhh the fun of marketing... Lie to the consumer, because they won't know anyway...
But the actual hair modelling... Top notch. Always is in SE games.
I dont attribute that to marketings photoshop skills at all, but to the skill of the art / tech folks doing what they do.
View FF on your lcd and check out the hair ( even one of the older FF's ) and compare that with any other game say lost odyssey or Metal Gear Solid 4 ( closest to FF I believe with alphad hair ) theres a pretty big gap.
But if you see THAT hair ingame on the PS3/360, you will just go "ugh..." because the alpha to coverage dithering ruins it. Trust me
An example? Well, lets take Snows hair (the blondes) shall we? Here is the pre-release:
And here is how it actually looks ingame (Sorry the pic I had before is gone, so Ill sub it for this one):
The trouble is these days not that modellers cant model the hair, its just that getting an ingame final result that not only works with the mesh but also the rendering, is tough.
Bahaha couldnt agree with you more about the haveing the balls to try some hairstyles.
I see what you mean now, Im really curious, maybe ill buy the ps3 version and hire the 360 version for a night and get them going side by side, - I really want to check out how bad it is!!!
Good info guys, thanks!
So would it all mean that, since full transparency alpha blending is hard to pull off in a deferred engine, alpha to coverage is then a very good substitute?
This is worthy of a new thread, if we can get some tech guys to chime in and break down ( with coder art omg ) what all this means it would be fantastic.
uhm...
i'm pretty sure i'm right in saying that in order to look good on a higher resolution output, you'd need higher resolution textures (1024*1024 AS AN EXAMPLE!!!!! would look better at 1080p than a 256 texture). and similarly, on a lower resolution output, any detail from the larger texture will be mostly un-noticed, so you can afford to scale down textures.
this works in reverse. if the storage space you're working with isn't large enough to handle huge textures, you would want to output at a resolution optimal to making the most of your textures. right?
so output resolution COULD be directly related to storage space.
Good art is good art and will show at any resolution. Bad art however...
In bizarro world probably. Developers will scale down resolution as the shortcut to gain more of a framerate on the platform, storagespace will not affect that much, considering the fact that the graphics memory is finite and clearly alot smaller than the storage on a blue-ray disc.
SE has solved that issue by scaling down the ton of pre-rendered movies and uncompressed audio on the blu-ray disc to fit better on several dvd's, texturespace for a given scene will be pretty much the same considering the equal amount of memory on both targets.
However, since ps3 has been a primary platform, they've had to take shortcuts for the 360 instead of restructuring things to run better on it.
Anyway, check the latest official shots that are confirmed NOT fake (like the PS3/360 ones with buttons swapped) too see.
http://www.gamersyde.com/pop_images_final_fantasy_xiii-12238-4.html
Of course, the PS3 version will likely still be the weapon of choice with its 1080p video, but knowing the game is at least HD makes it a little easier on the eyes compared to the sub HD mess we could have had.
edit: I mean, how do people confirm stuff as not fake when an image has super perfect supersampled antialiasing.
Are you saying with AA a 576p image upscaled to 1080p will look as nice as a 720p native upscaled to 1080p...? Because I don't agree on that one
you just posted a picture, saying it is from the 360 version, which has a size of 720p, and has perfect antialiasing.
edit:
the theme of this thread is this though: due to technicalities, someone could render out a game at 320x240, scale it up, and print out a nice fluffy 1080p support on the back of the package.
what is the point of HD if developers can just skip that part.
They should do what PS3 does and say what NATIVE res is supports. We all know damn well it upscales to 1080p...
Not mine...On the back of the box, if it says 720P, when I start playing my TV states it is displaying 720P. Bioshock 2 was displayed in 1080p while Dragon Age displayed in 720p. I assume those are the native resolutions...
The PS3 does not upscale to 1080p if it only is 720p.
I am pretty sure there are a few games that run at 1080p without upscaling. Sorry can't provide game names at the moment.
100% correct, there are. What I meant to say was "all games NOT 1080p are upscaled to 1080p on 360"
Wipeout STARTS at 1080p, but drops in resolution depending on frame rate.
ah okay.
I'm not really sure if the 360 even can do 1080p
GOOGLE POWER...
Results:
http://www.makeyougohmm.com/xbox360-1080p-games/
Native 1080p games available for the Xbox 360 include the following 6 titles:
new![native 1080p] Wolf of the Battlefield Commando 3 [Xbox Live Arcade]
new![native 1080p] Feeding Frenzy 2 [Xbox Live Arcade]
new![native 1080p] Portal [Xbox Live Arcade]
[native 1080p] Boogie Bunnies [Xbox Live Arcade]
[native 1080p] Street Home Court
[native 1080p] Virtual Tennis 3
EDIT.. woops, this was already posted XD
.
I was talking about my PS3, I really do not play my 360 much any more...
I just don't know... Theres the inner Cloud of me thats poking me all the time and saying "just buy it and dont expect it to be as good as seven!" then theres the geek in me that says "Dude, if you wanted to play at Wii resolution you would play the wii".
Really is hard to be a nerd sometimes...
No it is not, buy a PS3...No more Wii resolution debate.
But with FFXIII, I'm thinking if its worth the hit just for chevos...
As someone else said, the 360 has a better GPU, the PS3 has a better processor (processorS). And possibly the 360 is easier to program for?
Even if the extra grunt of the PS3's CPU's end up outperforming the 360, I seriously don't think this is the game to tell us that.
If anything, the engine was based around PS3 architecture, and when coding it for the 360, they had a hard time getting identical performance, so scaled down the resolution.
The reason I say that, is it doesn't look like it's pushing either platform to it's limits, far from it.
I have to admit, though I like some JRPGs (Skies of Arcadia
Too on rails for my tastes, and too many cutscenes etc. It seems like those aspects have become even more pronounced as the series has "progressed".
(yes I know this is the FFXIII 360 topic, sorry to barge in, just wanted to share)
Looks more amazing than FFXI!
That is funny, I am the opposite. I try to buy all PS3.
I am not much for MMO's though I may try to play FF14, as long as there is no monthly charge...