M
Misty
Guest
So yesterday I played Halo 5 online for the first time. I am poor but thats not the main reason I never played it online. Mainly, I never played it online due to depression, I just did not feel motivated to.
But when I played it online yesterday I did not feel depressed. I thought it was the best Halo ever made. I played it on a Japanese level and it looked really cool.
But then, the next room I was in there was extreme lag. Could not hardly get 1 kill, the enemy team was constantly teleporting and meleeing me from 50 feet away, my bullets were not hitting, my grenades had a 3 second lag before they appeared, when I meleed an enemy in the back it did not damage and then I just teleported to him and died, and then I raged and quit, almost literally slamming my controller onto the bed.
The next match was not much better, I had a sucky team, my bullets seemed to register but for some reason, my grenades still had a 2 second lag. The enemy won 100 to 19. Long story short, the game started to make me sick to my stomach and I lost interest in the game. The final game I played I had a mongoose, and I would run into people at full speed and they would not die, it was stupid. By the way, my connection fluctuates between 2 MB and 5MB, and yet the game ran like I had dialup at times.
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So then I played Banjo Kazooie, and I had a realization that lofi graphics are inherently better. But I don't actually know the scientific reason why. My other arguments was that high-polygon graphics overwhelms the artist with too many options. But I don't know if that is actually the main reason. I think that lowfi graphics are just inherently better, it doesn't matter what artist it is.
I am not totally sure why, but I have formulated a new scientific hypothesis. Firstly, lets examine games like Yooka and Laylee and Perfect Dark Zero. Those games were based upon the same idea of earlier low-poly games, but the graphics are less compelling than the original low-poly games they were based on.
So we should look at the difference between textures:
So why does picture 2 seem more fun than picture 1? The first thing I notice is that the road in Picture 1 is just too bright. It looks like bright sand on a beach. But then, in the shadow, it just gets suddenly muted and bland.
Second, I notice the road in picture 2 has a longer blend and gradient. The road in picture 1 has a sharper, less subtle gradient.
I also notice the low-poly edges in picture 2, seem to make the world "Pop out". Did you see the tree in the background in picture 1? Probably not because, color of the tree texture is almost the same as the grass itself.
(Also, one thing to note, I did feel sick to my stomach this morning while playing Banjo Kazooie, but I think it was because the sound was turned down low, for some reason when I can't hear audio at a proper volume it makes me sick to my stomach.)
Now my main hypothesis is, the main flaw of hifi textures is they do not leave much to the imagination, that is, they cannot actually convey depth. I first noticed this in the Perfect Dark XBLA remake for Xbox 360. Originally playing Perfect Dark on PC, I noticed that the graphics of Perfect Dark 64 were horrible, but not inherently horrible. The only reason the graphics of Perfect Dark 64 were horrible, was because of the low screen resolution. They were actually inherently more pleasant than the Perfeck Dark remake.
This is because, they redid the textures and made them more HD. They used photoshop tricks to put in shadows around the parts of the texture that were supposed to have depth. And it just looked totally off and fake, like a flat illusion. The worlds did not look 3D at all. Had they used the lofi textures of the original, our mind would have put in the depth inherently, thanks to the lofi textures.
Sorry, I couldn't find good pics of XBLA Temple. Google sucks and people suck, all I could find was lame 144p videos showing it.
So I took this pic of XBLA multiplayer, to compare it to Goldeneye. You can see the issues.
The uzi looks like plastic, and the textures are so HD that it removes the depth from the level.
Here is the original goldeneye, I couldn't find the exact picture because everyone only uploads crappy 240p videos, this is the closest 720p video I could find:
As you can see, the picture 2 looks slightly better. But again, the videos can only show so much, when you play the game, the scene in picture 1 looks even worse. The picture of 1 has anti-aliasing applied to it from the video, making it look not as bad as it is in realtime.
So my conclusion is that Hifi graphics look worse for 5 major reasons.
1. It requires much higher technical skill to create, and better quality machinery. This may alienate many artists from ever attempting to make hifi graphics, and encourage only artists who have a dominant technical mind, rather than artists who have a dominant artistic mind. Thus, law of averages would just produce on average, lower quality Hifi works. Or, in other cases, Concept artists, who have to "translate" instructions to computer artists, and often stuff is lost in translation.
2. Hifi graphics do not "pop out" as much as low poly graphics. There aren't as many sharp edges to define the scene.
3. The amount of polys is just too much work to edit, even for talented artist. Thus it is harder to "tweak" the polys and get them just right. Since there are so many polys, you don't know which one's to tweak or how. So the focus of the piece is less focused and becomes more global, treating the mesh as a conglomerate rather than focusing on each individual vertex placement.
4. With hifi textures, many artists only make medium poly scenes. Quite simply, to make a scene hifi, the first step should be to increase the polygon count, not to first increase the texture size. Early artists, could get away with low-poly scenes because, the low poly textures created a sense of fake-depth to make the scene really "pop" in 3d.
But if you have a medium or low-poly scene, you should not increase the texture size, because increasing the texture size will expose the flat wall graphics. High resolution textures will shatter the illusion of depth. Modern artists try to counter this, by adding cheap techniques like bumpmapping. But they overdo it and it just looks bad. Bumpmapping should only be applied to rocks or bumpy surfaces like old metal. But they apply it everywhere, where it shouldn't belong, like on cracks in walls, sci-fi doors, and on the ground. And it gives this lumpy, rounded effect that sharp surfaces, like cracks in walls, or sci-fi doors, should not have.
Once the textures reach a certain detail level, there is no way around it, you must begin to make the level more hi poly to add depth to the scene. You must either use low polygon textures and have a low polygon level, or have a high polygon level with either low or high detail textures. You cannot make a low polygon level, and put high detail textures on it.
5. So after reading this, an artist decides to take my advice, and make a high polygon level for their high detail textures. But then it presents another problem: Visual overload. When levels are so high detail, it makes all enemies seemed camouflage, and it is hard for the brain to analayze the scene. It is hard to analyze because you are looking at a 2d TV. In reallife, your brain has depth perception, so it is easier. With low polygon, it is easier, because even though there is no 3d depth perception, everything is more clearly defined and pops out of the screen. With high poly, it overloads your brain and you cannot create a virtual depth perception with it, so it just seems chaotic, and harder to locate enemies. And then, as if some joke, they put in tiny fonts in all the xbox games nowdays, so you have to squint and move close to the screen just to read everything, it feels like the game industry is ran by amateurs who don't know what they are doing, kind of like those websites made in 1995 that had those fuchsia backgrounds with the yellow fonts, like they could care less about studying color theory or art theory, how the eyes works, user comfort or ergonomics.
So here are my rules. I don't want my thread closed so no insulting one-liners. If you dont have anything to discuss I don't want you derailing my thread. I would rather not be bullied today so if all you have for me is one-liner insults then just go away and bother someone else. This is meant to be a serious discussion about art theory in games.
But when I played it online yesterday I did not feel depressed. I thought it was the best Halo ever made. I played it on a Japanese level and it looked really cool.
But then, the next room I was in there was extreme lag. Could not hardly get 1 kill, the enemy team was constantly teleporting and meleeing me from 50 feet away, my bullets were not hitting, my grenades had a 3 second lag before they appeared, when I meleed an enemy in the back it did not damage and then I just teleported to him and died, and then I raged and quit, almost literally slamming my controller onto the bed.
The next match was not much better, I had a sucky team, my bullets seemed to register but for some reason, my grenades still had a 2 second lag. The enemy won 100 to 19. Long story short, the game started to make me sick to my stomach and I lost interest in the game. The final game I played I had a mongoose, and I would run into people at full speed and they would not die, it was stupid. By the way, my connection fluctuates between 2 MB and 5MB, and yet the game ran like I had dialup at times.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So then I played Banjo Kazooie, and I had a realization that lofi graphics are inherently better. But I don't actually know the scientific reason why. My other arguments was that high-polygon graphics overwhelms the artist with too many options. But I don't know if that is actually the main reason. I think that lowfi graphics are just inherently better, it doesn't matter what artist it is.
I am not totally sure why, but I have formulated a new scientific hypothesis. Firstly, lets examine games like Yooka and Laylee and Perfect Dark Zero. Those games were based upon the same idea of earlier low-poly games, but the graphics are less compelling than the original low-poly games they were based on.
So we should look at the difference between textures:
So why does picture 2 seem more fun than picture 1? The first thing I notice is that the road in Picture 1 is just too bright. It looks like bright sand on a beach. But then, in the shadow, it just gets suddenly muted and bland.
Second, I notice the road in picture 2 has a longer blend and gradient. The road in picture 1 has a sharper, less subtle gradient.
I also notice the low-poly edges in picture 2, seem to make the world "Pop out". Did you see the tree in the background in picture 1? Probably not because, color of the tree texture is almost the same as the grass itself.
(Also, one thing to note, I did feel sick to my stomach this morning while playing Banjo Kazooie, but I think it was because the sound was turned down low, for some reason when I can't hear audio at a proper volume it makes me sick to my stomach.)
Now my main hypothesis is, the main flaw of hifi textures is they do not leave much to the imagination, that is, they cannot actually convey depth. I first noticed this in the Perfect Dark XBLA remake for Xbox 360. Originally playing Perfect Dark on PC, I noticed that the graphics of Perfect Dark 64 were horrible, but not inherently horrible. The only reason the graphics of Perfect Dark 64 were horrible, was because of the low screen resolution. They were actually inherently more pleasant than the Perfeck Dark remake.
This is because, they redid the textures and made them more HD. They used photoshop tricks to put in shadows around the parts of the texture that were supposed to have depth. And it just looked totally off and fake, like a flat illusion. The worlds did not look 3D at all. Had they used the lofi textures of the original, our mind would have put in the depth inherently, thanks to the lofi textures.
Sorry, I couldn't find good pics of XBLA Temple. Google sucks and people suck, all I could find was lame 144p videos showing it.
So I took this pic of XBLA multiplayer, to compare it to Goldeneye. You can see the issues.
The uzi looks like plastic, and the textures are so HD that it removes the depth from the level.
Here is the original goldeneye, I couldn't find the exact picture because everyone only uploads crappy 240p videos, this is the closest 720p video I could find:
As you can see, the picture 2 looks slightly better. But again, the videos can only show so much, when you play the game, the scene in picture 1 looks even worse. The picture of 1 has anti-aliasing applied to it from the video, making it look not as bad as it is in realtime.
So my conclusion is that Hifi graphics look worse for 5 major reasons.
1. It requires much higher technical skill to create, and better quality machinery. This may alienate many artists from ever attempting to make hifi graphics, and encourage only artists who have a dominant technical mind, rather than artists who have a dominant artistic mind. Thus, law of averages would just produce on average, lower quality Hifi works. Or, in other cases, Concept artists, who have to "translate" instructions to computer artists, and often stuff is lost in translation.
2. Hifi graphics do not "pop out" as much as low poly graphics. There aren't as many sharp edges to define the scene.
3. The amount of polys is just too much work to edit, even for talented artist. Thus it is harder to "tweak" the polys and get them just right. Since there are so many polys, you don't know which one's to tweak or how. So the focus of the piece is less focused and becomes more global, treating the mesh as a conglomerate rather than focusing on each individual vertex placement.
4. With hifi textures, many artists only make medium poly scenes. Quite simply, to make a scene hifi, the first step should be to increase the polygon count, not to first increase the texture size. Early artists, could get away with low-poly scenes because, the low poly textures created a sense of fake-depth to make the scene really "pop" in 3d.
But if you have a medium or low-poly scene, you should not increase the texture size, because increasing the texture size will expose the flat wall graphics. High resolution textures will shatter the illusion of depth. Modern artists try to counter this, by adding cheap techniques like bumpmapping. But they overdo it and it just looks bad. Bumpmapping should only be applied to rocks or bumpy surfaces like old metal. But they apply it everywhere, where it shouldn't belong, like on cracks in walls, sci-fi doors, and on the ground. And it gives this lumpy, rounded effect that sharp surfaces, like cracks in walls, or sci-fi doors, should not have.
Once the textures reach a certain detail level, there is no way around it, you must begin to make the level more hi poly to add depth to the scene. You must either use low polygon textures and have a low polygon level, or have a high polygon level with either low or high detail textures. You cannot make a low polygon level, and put high detail textures on it.
5. So after reading this, an artist decides to take my advice, and make a high polygon level for their high detail textures. But then it presents another problem: Visual overload. When levels are so high detail, it makes all enemies seemed camouflage, and it is hard for the brain to analayze the scene. It is hard to analyze because you are looking at a 2d TV. In reallife, your brain has depth perception, so it is easier. With low polygon, it is easier, because even though there is no 3d depth perception, everything is more clearly defined and pops out of the screen. With high poly, it overloads your brain and you cannot create a virtual depth perception with it, so it just seems chaotic, and harder to locate enemies. And then, as if some joke, they put in tiny fonts in all the xbox games nowdays, so you have to squint and move close to the screen just to read everything, it feels like the game industry is ran by amateurs who don't know what they are doing, kind of like those websites made in 1995 that had those fuchsia backgrounds with the yellow fonts, like they could care less about studying color theory or art theory, how the eyes works, user comfort or ergonomics.
So here are my rules. I don't want my thread closed so no insulting one-liners. If you dont have anything to discuss I don't want you derailing my thread. I would rather not be bullied today so if all you have for me is one-liner insults then just go away and bother someone else. This is meant to be a serious discussion about art theory in games.