Valve approach to Realism - L4Dead and Half Life 2
polycounter lvl 8
Hi guys, I've been always a Valve fun, since the first Haf-Life came out. I really love the realism they accomplish without the need of brutal "normal mapping" force, I mean, their titles Like L4Dead and Hl2 seems to balance the photosource material, env lighting and normal mapping intensity in a perfect way. (Probably the art direction is the main actor here)
Anyway, I'd lik to know what you think about it. Do we really need parallax and bumped out brick walls to make better games?
I'd like also to know something about the tech/art choiches behind this titles, any polycounter from Valve?
Useful info :
http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2008/MIGS08_ConnectingVisualsToGameplay.pdf
Anyway, I'd lik to know what you think about it. Do we really need parallax and bumped out brick walls to make better games?
I'd like also to know something about the tech/art choiches behind this titles, any polycounter from Valve?
Useful info :
http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2008/MIGS08_ConnectingVisualsToGameplay.pdf
Replies
It's all a matter of perspective really.
Crysis1 has more tech than any of the mentioned games merged together, and it's the most photo-realistic game ever made. (imo)
I really beg to differ when you say L42 is realistic, it looks dull, flat and outdated with alot of 'photoslaped' textures.
HL2 on the other hand when it got released back in '04, was probably the most realistic game ever made, graphics wise. Radiosity helped a lot on those lightmaps, and most of their textures were also mainly photosourced.
And every single game by valve has normal maps, (even tf2) they just use it differently than other games do. Most of their normal maps are used to give high frequency detail to textures.
It all comes down to art direction, I for once am getting tired of photo-realistic games. I think the topic is definitely overrated and I prefer art directions from the likes of Uncharted, call it stylized-realism.
Either way ive always liked what Valve have done.
Honestly I agree with all you wrote here
Anyway I still think that Valve's way of doing realism has something appealing and unique, different from other games that take the "photoreal" road. I think has something to do with their use of lighting.
look at portal and tell me people are not hungry for robots singing about cakes.
tech is not everything.
Personally the one gripe I have with games, and often times normal mapped ones, are games that constantly use a fuck ton of black shadows and games that don't make good use of shaders on characters.
The l4d2 characters are the best of the best right now, at least for me. There is an article about their creation, in Cgsociety if i recall well.
And if we want stylized character, Tera, the new FFXIV and Vindictus has a nice art for characters.
As Rollin said, Tech is not everyting. You can have the best technology, and you could not be making a good use of it.
And another thing is that a game should be played at maximum specs in the actual machines with mid-range videocards of less than 100 bucks. To make games for computers that normal people can't afford is bad. Crisis is a good example, a very cool appealing game that goes slow with the latest technology in videocards. We see poeple needing SLIs of very expensive videocards, or Tri-Sli to get a good perfomance ¬¬
It's the same, but they do not depend on BSP alone. For example, you might make a corridor out of BSP brushes, but then you'd cover the flat walls with meshes. That way, you can have the benefits of a BSP tree with the beauty of your static models
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/rsrc/Three/ModularLevelDesign/ModularLevelDesign.pdf
TF2 aside I've never really been impressed with Valve's art direction, I absolutely loved playing L4D but (aside from the 4 main characters) it's probably one of the worst looking games I've played in recent memory and the biggest thing to HL2's credit in my opinion is that it ran really well when it came out, even on bad hardware.
Really? I'm a huge graphics whore and I thought both L4D games look great.
To me the game just looks like half-life 2 a lot more fog and zombines instead of combine. Everything is flat and boxy and full of hard edge transitions and texture seams in the environment.
http://img212.imageshack.us/img212/4557/smokeratthewindowwplj7.jpg
I'd like to think we've reached a point in in rendering where we can afford to spare a few dozen polygons to build out a window frame.
It's a game that is so well paced that it works visually when being played but isn't something you'd want to stop to look at.
The thing is, it's made to be played, not to stop and look at. Anyway tiny details like a window not being 3D don't bother me. The quality of the way the environments are organized and laid out is much more important to me than if it's at a high level of detail. You can easily believe that their environments are real places which is something I haven't been able to say for many games and something that I really love about Valve's environments.
Did you even read the rest of my post or just that first sentence?
I dont need to be fancy graphic whore with custom made super computer to actually
run the game nicely.
thats what i call good graphic engine.
also their character is not typical generic FPS character
it has personality. shape, interesting to look at.
not genering bald marine/special forces .....
You basically prefaced an opinion with a rationalization, essentially "It's not supposed to look great... but I think it does because x" Which is wonderful and my issue is not that you think it achieved both great gameplay and great graphics but the fact that you seemed to be implying that they should have only set out to achieve one goal, gameplay. Whether or not you think it had both is great but really irrelevant to the point I was making which is why I didn't include it in my quote.
Edit: Again my goal here is not to be hostile, I'm just trying to clarify what I meant so I'm sorry if my initial response wasn't clear.
i just read the first starter post and reply ..
*
I never said that how it looks doesn't matter and I didn't mean to imply that. What I was saying is that gameplay is what matters the most, not modeling out every window frame and adding tons of unnecessary detail that wastes performance. Valve is very good at creating environments that are believable and have the perfect amount of detail to be interesting yet run on many types of hardware.
Anyway arguing over this is pointless. It's all personal opinion in the end.
That's the point
seriously though, with the constant improvements to the lighting engine and the way they use the fog and enviro effects, the atmosphere alone is better than half the games out there.
This will probably come to pass in Ep3.
Take their assets individually and they can riddled with lowres textures, seams, lack of geometry and odd weighting. However as a whole, the visuals are fantastic at giving you a feeling of a real place and human characters.
Their art is all about feel and flow rather than look and sometimes that can be hard to convey in screenshots.
We can consider the thread completed with this
Thats not really an argument now is it, what does that even mean?
And its quite irrelevant too, since I'm pretty sure you can do stuff look photo realistic with a limited amount of tech, it just depends on the aproach you take.
I think L4D2 realism lies more within the character models/textures and some of the lighting situations though, I wouldn't say it's photo realistic.
their games look good, and the artwork is evocative of real life and immersive. Bam, mission accomplished, no reason to quibble over cubemaps or vertex shading or some bullshit.
Touch
A stupid example: two years ago I lived in the city suburbs, often during the cloudy days of december, leaving home in the morning and looking at the pale sun, It came to my mind the feel of City 17, thinking to be there, not joking guys. I mean, in my opinion HL2 has really one of the most realistic and suggestive urban env ever seen. I played many games, many awesome but honestly the lighting+color palette and atmosphere of City 17 really made it real.
I know, I am a Valve fan and maybe not a good judge
For those who don't know him :
http://www.vulkanbros.com/intro.html
exactly, I agree with that.
And I second, and underline: It all comes down to art direction!
Peace!