Yes I love the gameplay, and no there's no negative impact.
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Graphics Tech: Red Dead Redemption 2
- Thread starter VFX_Veteran
- Start date
Yeah this completely pulls you out of the experience. I wonder if they can improve it with patches. It's one of the few blemishes in an almost perfect looking / animated game.
I think it's a trend. They have been using the same engine for a while and just improving on it, it just keeps getting better and better. Same goes for the ND engine, Decima, Unreal and others.
Definitely one of the most technically impressive games on the market, which is to be expected considering the game's budget and the talent that went into making it.
There are ways to do global illumination without light probes, like using reflective shadow maps. But considering the quality of radiosity we're looking at, my guess would be some kind of precomputed visibility global illumination solution like the following:
Where most of the bounced light comes from static geometry that the engine already knows is or isn't obstructed by other objects in the environment, and preculates the terms of the visibility based on that information and the known trajectory of the directional light source's path. All of this is done offline (because it is expensive). During runtime, the directional light corresponds to different lighmap pixels that contain visibility information in order to determine what colors of indirect light to use on different surfaces throughout the environment.
Now that's just one possible explanation, but they could be using a totally different solution. As for the contact hardening shadows, I imagine solving the visibility problem helps with indirect shadows as well. The renderer also has some nice variable fog density and inscatter, which is nice to see.
There are ways to do global illumination without light probes, like using reflective shadow maps. But considering the quality of radiosity we're looking at, my guess would be some kind of precomputed visibility global illumination solution like the following:
Where most of the bounced light comes from static geometry that the engine already knows is or isn't obstructed by other objects in the environment, and preculates the terms of the visibility based on that information and the known trajectory of the directional light source's path. All of this is done offline (because it is expensive). During runtime, the directional light corresponds to different lighmap pixels that contain visibility information in order to determine what colors of indirect light to use on different surfaces throughout the environment.
Now that's just one possible explanation, but they could be using a totally different solution. As for the contact hardening shadows, I imagine solving the visibility problem helps with indirect shadows as well. The renderer also has some nice variable fog density and inscatter, which is nice to see.
It would be interesting to see what the OP's take on that is. From a previous topic I saw from the OP, the OP does not accept the notion that a specific studio has more talent than any of the other studios.
The issues with Witcher 3 were tied more to my love of Witcher 2. I preferred the hub based design.
What kept me away was playing on console - performance was unstable and stuttering and animation felt jerky and unrefined.
I can definitely see how RDR2 wouldn't work for everyone either.
I mean once RDR 2 gets a PC port and people play at 60 then I'm sure there will be way less complaints about the controls and input lag.
Yup. But there is nothing saving that god awful last gen mission design.
It is indeed incredible. The only item which seemed sub par was rain. The environment looks incredible in rain, you can see water dripping off of buildings and puddles forming, but the actual rain itsekf just looked extremely bad to me.
Now I'm curious - what do you dislike about the missions?
I'm not even sure why I enjoyed this game since most open world games don't pull me in at all. I need to think about this one.
Dark1x your tastes, experiences and opinions routinely line up with mine. Agree with you or share your opinions on pretty much everything you've said in this thread, especially on RDR2, and how for whatever reason it managed to hold your attention more than most open world titles.
I have a similar issue with open world titles, but Rockstar games usually manage to keep me engaged to the very end. Something about their worlds, characters, dynamic events and narratives are just so captivating and immersive. The only other open world games that have kept me engrossed till they end, are ones that weren't particularly long or content heavy to begin with, eg Horizon Zero Dawn and Spider-Man, and also certain Final Fantasy titles etc too.
I have a similar issue with open world titles, but Rockstar games usually manage to keep me engaged to the very end. Something about their worlds, characters, dynamic events and narratives are just so captivating and immersive. The only other open world games that have kept me engrossed till they end, are ones that weren't particularly long or content heavy to begin with, eg Horizon Zero Dawn and Spider-Man, and also certain Final Fantasy titles etc too.
There's been a few threads already about this but the general complaints are that they are extremely linear to the point where it feels more like a glorified cutscene than playing an actual game. They feel incredibly curated and restrictive which is highlighted by the instances where the game literally fails you for falling behind a tiny radius or taking 10 seconds too long looting bodies/exploring the area.
Every mission boils down to following the virtually step by step guidelines the game gives you on the bottom right corner and most of the time you can't do anything else at all if you want to progress. You have to hide behind the exact rock the game tells you, you can't flank because there is often a set rigid path for laid out for you. You often hear your NPC buddies literally yelling at your to hirru up as soon as you take 2 seconds to loot a body.
Same boat here. People rave about Witcher 3 (which I loved) but the missions were basically the same. Kill X, retrieve Y, participate in Z minigame.
RDR2's presentation, VO/mocap, and writing is what stands it apart. I can't wait to play each story mission, some start off so mundane and I'm taken away by the dialogue. Last mission I played Act 3 spoiler
Should have ended with Hosea and I delivering moonshine, getting our money and done. Next thing is I'm Arthur is pretending to be a simpleton mute who killed his mother and pouring free drinks for a rowdy saloon. Another gang busts in and there's an awesome shootout and chase in a town you're told you have to be civil in.
Yet finding a NPC's pan is the pinnacle of open world story telling here.
+1 I see the game with my own eyes on a friend PS4 Peo and the lightning is the best by far. Don't know how they do with all light casting shadow.
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The linear/restrictive mission design is contextualized extremely well by the incredible presentation, so it didn't bother me whatsoever. Coming of AC Odyssey which basically gives way too much freedom making almost every quest feel same-y, it was a breath of fresh air.
You might have to start a particular gunfight behind a specific rock or piece of cover or whatever, but generally once the fighting starts, you're free to explore approach options. I generally always leave the spot after a short moment and end up running around flanking enemies.
Likewise, allies might shout at you to hurry up, but much of the time you don't actually have to listen. You can leisurely loot bodies even when they're yapping on, so long as the gunfight isn't still in progress. The general rule is to not start looting until there are no enemies in the immediate vicinity.
So yes, the single player campaign missions are more structured, but not necessarily to the extent some are making out. I think being so structured actually helps better curate more interesting, beautiful and entertaining scenarios, just not ones that are necessarily as free or sandboxy.
It largely works because the writing and production values are so high in general but it definitely becomes an issue for me in "filler" missions where nothing much happens and you literally just moving the stock forward mostly and pressing A or Y to get the next cutscene. You're right in that the most freedom you ever get is in the combat but even those feel like the equivalent to a really basic Gears of War scenario because they controls are balanced around cover shooting/dead eye.
I understand that Rockstar deisgn them that way to make it feel more like a controlled cinematic experience but at the same time I think they could easily achieve a better balance between that and actual player control. Right now it is way too rigid for me.
The game's mission design is terrible because it makes you aware that this is just a play and you are merely controlling a puppet. For example - Early on in the game you have to protect one of your allies from a big man who is choking him. I see him in a distance and run to him and try shooting him. He falls down and gets back up. I shoot him again and he falls down again and gets back up. I realize that the game wants me to end a fight with him in a fist fight and nothing else. No matter how many times I shoot him, he keeps getting back up.
Now what separates truly great linear designed games from fluff like the kind you find in RDR2 is that they communicate to the player clearly what tools you have to tackle a situation. A smarter game would have ensured that you lost your guns on the way or you are out of bullets and therefore funneled you to tackle the fight with your fist. So while that approach would have been linear as well it would have been a way to still maintain the illusion of agency.
Rockstar's painfully mediocre mission design however does these mistakes time and time again. The fact that you have to get back on your horse to move a couple of steps ahead just to trigger a cutscene of you getting down your horse again shows how archaic their systems are.
Mark Brown from Game Maker's toolkit summed up RDR2 perfectly imo
Wonderful review btw for people interested in hearing the other side - https://www.patreon.com/posts/22570692
It's shocking really, think ND level of graphics and attention to detail but spread out into a vast open world, with a lot of variety too. The weakest part is just the character models sometimes
Of course this thread being a graphics tech went to gameplay discussion, again
Of course this thread being a graphics tech went to gameplay discussion, again
Facial tech inc lip sync I find lacking, against some other open world titles the facial wuality and detail isn't as good, but the most immediete things that stick out are the insane draw distances coupled with the best LOD system i've ever seen, the lighting model which astounds, especially in towns at night, and just the attention to detail, how weathered and worn everything looks...like everythings been there for years...not something thats been dropped in by artists. Sensational stuff.
That might be one reason I enjoy it. The game bounces between open ended and linear. I enjoy those cinematic missions as they feel like a breath of fresh air after exploring the open world. It's that ebb and flow that I enjoy.
It isn't necessarily perfect in this regard, mind you, but I don't require or want full agency at all times.
Now THIS is interesting. The specific mission you're talking about did not work that way for me. I initially walked up, started a fist fight and lost. Then I reloaded my save and tried again. I walked up to him and shot him - he was dead. A nearby person saw this happen and I had to chase him down and either kill him, scare him or convince him via a small dialog tree that occurs if you physically stop him. You can also just shoot him, if you want.
I featured this exact scenario in my primary analysis video so you can watch it, if you like. Basically, I have no idea why he kept getting up after you shot him - that sounds more like a glitch which is odd.
https://youtu.be/Dnzuh6I8gnM?t=1429
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I don't think most people have an issue with linear missions in theory, it's just that Rockstar's extreme approach to it is too much for some. It's actually a testament to how good the actual presentation, writing and scenarios are in RDR 2 that it largely works for them. I can't imagine any other open world game going with this approach and not getting trashed for it because you would essentially just be playing an ugly/boring cutscene.
I can see that. Typical open world fans wouldn't enjoy this approach much but since I typically don't enjoy open world mission design, it works for me.
I do enjoy agency in games like Deus Ex but they offer a level of granularity that open world games typically lack.
I honestly haven't experienced anything nearly as glaring like this in my playthrough yet. There's so much more to good mission design than outright freedom of choice, which seems to be the key issue you have contention with or that you've highlighted.
Within the confines of the rules of the game and accepted structure, there are so many complimentary elements about or to the mission design that are of a very high quality or level, that imo keep it from feeling or being mediocre, eg things like their diversity, level design, visuals, build up, pacing, use of characters, locations or scenarios, the narrative, dialogue, set pieces, sense of progression, combat opportunities, AI, tactility and visceral feel of weapons, the animations, physics, encounter design and so on and so forth. All these other things more than compensate for any constraints on outright realism or open ended freedom, at least for me.
A little confused by your terminology here.
Screen-space shadows are commonly referred to as contact shadows, so you must be talking about something else. Believe Epic and others started calling them contact shadows in reference to one of their primary utilities, filling in contact regions that traditional shadow maps struggle with. Btw, RDR2 does use screen space shadows. It's a lot more subtle than say God of War, but it's there.
Perhaps what you are referring to is their ambient occlusion solution? Not the SSAO, but what they are doing in addition to it.
Speaking of SSAO, I actually find it to be one of the very few aspects of RDR2's presentation that doesn't gel with me. Know it's better on the X, but on my PS4 Pro the SSAO is just too overbearing in cinematics.
Hope this is the right place to ask. Only usually read on the forums,.getting my son an X for Christmas, should I get him
The first game before this one?
Off topic, just got me a Vita, really surprised how nice it feels in my hand !!! If anybody wants to give me a top 10 list of
my first must have games on it, I would appreciate it . Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving .
The first game before this one?
Off topic, just got me a Vita, really surprised how nice it feels in my hand !!! If anybody wants to give me a top 10 list of
my first must have games on it, I would appreciate it . Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving .
Lightmap is usually avoided for large open-world with noisy geometry like vegetation. A practical way is to project local visibility seen from light probe to SH and dynamically calculate bounced light using this compressed info. This is basically the idea of PRT and Ubisoft has been using this approach in most of their open-world titles with dynamic day night cycle. Though I don't really see any complex bounced light in RDR2 so they probably just dynamically relight cached light probes.Definitely one of the most technically impressive games on the market, which is to be expected considering the game's budget and the talent that went into making it.
There are ways to do global illumination without light probes, like using reflective shadow maps. But considering the quality of radiosity we're looking at, my guess would be some kind of precomputed visibility global illumination solution like the following:
Where most of the bounced light comes from static geometry that the engine already knows is or isn't obstructed by other objects in the environment, and preculates the terms of the visibility based on that information and the known trajectory of the directional light source's path. All of this is done offline (because it is expensive). During runtime, the directional light corresponds to different lighmap pixels that contain visibility information in order to determine what colors of indirect light to use on different surfaces throughout the environment.
Now that's just one possible explanation, but they could be using a totally different solution. As for the contact hardening shadows, I imagine solving the visibility problem helps with indirect shadows as well. The renderer also has some nice variable fog density and inscatter, which is nice to see.
As for contact shadow, if you have properly set up light probes with rendered color, there is solution to extract major indirect light direction from SH, then you can cone trace along this direction.
This is probably why you've created this thread. It's seems you always have to find a way to attack the normal 1st party titles. As a 3D "artist" you should know a lot of the lightinig is baked and is tied to ToD. Go into an interior, great indirect lighting right? Open the door and the interior lighting is not affected by the sun flooding the doorway. But here you say "how did they achieve indirect lighting???", knowing it's texture work and lightmaps?
My takeaway from the tech:
Poor NPC's
Overbearing SSS on skin
Lack of or poor implementation of SSS on foliage
Texture quality is low on most surfaces other than props
Clouds appear chunky like liquid and lack sufficient SSS
Engine does not generate enough particles for effects like rain, smoke, explosions
Particle lack overall physics interaction
Animations are glitchy as hell
Input latency is astronomical
Environmental polygonal detail is kind of low for an open world game
Poor water implementation
On the plus side their fog and volumetric light is bar-none. Truly a sight to behold. Shadows overall is a cut above other open world games, too.
Poor NPC's
Overbearing SSS on skin
Lack of or poor implementation of SSS on foliage
Texture quality is low on most surfaces other than props
Clouds appear chunky like liquid and lack sufficient SSS
Engine does not generate enough particles for effects like rain, smoke, explosions
Particle lack overall physics interaction
Animations are glitchy as hell
Input latency is astronomical
Environmental polygonal detail is kind of low for an open world game
Poor water implementation
On the plus side their fog and volumetric light is bar-none. Truly a sight to behold. Shadows overall is a cut above other open world games, too.
OP
OP
Not at all. You are making snide remarks for the purpose of what?
Their solution to indirect lighting is a glorious achievement. I'm specifically talking about how the indirect lighting gets it's shadows. It's not just a SSAO technique as every other game uses it and you still get the famous flat 'glowing' objects placed within shadow. Most games that don't have dynamic time of day just use lightmaps and it looks great. But this game is dynamic and yet, still able to achieve the look of games that use light maps.
This will be the best looking game for some years - Rockstar is the only one capable of surpassing Rockstar.
This is not most detailed tree or most grassy field. It's the infinite amount of details that sum up to something completely different from anything else.
This is not most detailed tree or most grassy field. It's the infinite amount of details that sum up to something completely different from anything else.
i agree on the bolded, but not really sure how you reached those other conclusions. the foliage lighting in particular is top notch and i'd easily put it up there with H:ZD
and to speak to the mission discussion above, i think when a game forces restrictions on you that are at odds with the rest of the experience (for example forcing your horse to be slower than it usually is while in a chase mission so that you can't catch the target before a specific moment) is really frustrating.
lol that is so close to my experience it's crazy. i wish more mainstream outlets pointed these issues out, rockstar really needs to evolve how they approach gameplay design to go with their incredible worlds.
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I'm simply suggesting how it would be possible to get this kind of indirect lighting quality without light probes/SH data. The lighmap pixels in my example look up the asset materials' albedo colors; they don't cache indirect lighting information. Of course, it's possible to cache light probe data and re-light the end result in real time, but that solution is patently outside of the criteria of an indirect lighting solution that doesn't use light probes.
So to be clear, I'm not saying that the solution in RDR2 never involved light probes, but I'm just answering the question of how it's possible to do real-time gi without them (that doesn't require path tracing).
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What did you expect? Their bias came into play the moment someone mentioned first party games doing the same thing or better with their rendering by asking if they are trolling or making joke posts.
Yes but that's usually impractical. For efficient look up you need complex preprocessing of your scene or some kind of hierarchical data structure, and anything requires a second UV is cumbersome to use in production.
It's the best version of gta 4 ever made or ever will be unless Rockstar makes the same game again
I just have a hard time playing that mission design in 2018
It's easier to play remaster of spyro or tetris
This is a prequel. You don't need the first game to enjoy it. Let him jump right into RDR2.
There's two other things I don't understand with the visuals though:
1. The "cinematic" black bars add nothing for me and just makes the game look disjointed. It literally looks like the same screen with black bars slapped in top of them though I might be wrong. Cinematic riding mode definitely is.
2. Vignetting that you can't disable. Just why?
1. The "cinematic" black bars add nothing for me and just makes the game look disjointed. It literally looks like the same screen with black bars slapped in top of them though I might be wrong. Cinematic riding mode definitely is.
2. Vignetting that you can't disable. Just why?
In movies, "black bars" actually indicate a specific aspect ratio that they shot and/or planned for. None of them just slap black bars on later and call it a day. Compositions, framing, blocking, etc. is planned around the aspect ratio.
Unfortunately, it's become a sloppy sort of shorthand in games, indicating cutscenes or "cinematic" moments.
It is a marvel.
I fully expect the PC version to absolutely blow people's minds again. Especially if they integrate RTX tech.
I fully expect the PC version to absolutely blow people's minds again. Especially if they integrate RTX tech.
That's what I mean, RDR 2 doesn't seem to actually change composition from what I can see but I don't see anyone complaining about it so I just assumed I was wrong. Like you can literally see the black bars just appearing when you enter into a quest so I can't see how it is any different.