The next idiotic pseudo-realism: Motion Blur

[0roo0roo]

Turn your head to the side, did you see motion blur?
Go run as fast as you can, did you see motion blur?

What exactly is realistic about it?

you can't turn your head to control games

If you want realistic everything outside the center of your vision would be out of focus, and only the point in distance you choose to look at would be in focus.

 

[Genx87]

Turn your head to the side, did you see motion blur?
Go run as fast as you can, did you see motion blur?

What exactly is realistic about it?

Honestly if you spin your head around and manage not to have your eyes auto focus on a point you will see a blur. Now go running and get tired and tell me you see everything in perfect clarity

 

[SirPauly]

It's still early, and one desires to have cinematic realism; it's going to take more time to master the effects.

Consider them just tools and features to try to make things more realistic and improve upon story-telling, art and direction.

 

[Borealis7]

play RPGs.

/thread

 

[taltamir]

I would personally take a "less real" look over a "brown" look though.
heck, some of the best games I have played don't have any shadows, period! this brown everything to hide the lack of radiosity is a mistaken approach IMAO (because video cards weren't fast enough to render it in real time... not because the technique was unknown)

 

[taltamir]

you can't turn your head to control games

If you want realistic everything outside the center of your vision would be out of focus, and only the point in distance you choose to look at would be in focus.

The monitor is perfectly within our focused vision area though... you need a hemispheric surround to go into our peripheral vision (which AMD says is their eventual goal with eyefinity, which is way cool)

It's still early, and one desires to have cinematic realism; it's going to take more time to master the effects.

Consider them just tools and features to try to make things more realistic and improve upon story-telling, art and direction.

The thing is, they get so excited about the effects that they overuse them where they are obviously wrong to implement and cause a decrease in quality rather then an increase.
I am all for a blur effect... when you are riding a train in a game the terrain a few feet away from it should be blurred out, while the further out terrain should be perfectly visible. (like IRL)... and that is about the only time you need blur effect. . Instead you get it when your character runs, turns his head, etc...

you know what, I almost forgot another of my passionate hates... 3D positioning sound... also known as "100% volume from one speaker and 0% from the other... with the speakers flipping when you move the cursor across a 1 pixel boundary and absolutely no transition"
boy oh boy do I hate that... also, that is often in top down view games as well... ugh!
Mono sounds way better than that... Now, you can have realistic positional sound and that is pure awesomeness... but the vast majority of games don't.

 

[Dribble]

This stupidity started well before now. The first real instance of "forced realism" that I can recall was dynamic crosshairs. The idea being of course a person would be less accurate if they are moving so let's force their weapon to spray all over the damn place. Well guess what, if I'm moving I'm going to be less accurate anyway by the very nature of being in motion....just make my damn bullets go exactly where the crosshairs are. Now if you want to add some realistic recoil I'm fine with that, but my bullets should still hit the exact mark of the crosshair at the time I fired them.

The cone of fire is a design choice - they could go without it but it makes the game much more twitch skill oriented. This doesn't sell as many games as people don't like getting repeatedly pwned by teenagers with razer sharp reactions. Same with advanced movement (wall jumps and the like).

e.g. ut2004 - it was basically near impossible for a lesser skilled player to kill a skilled one in that game, because they couldn't do a thing as the leet player bounced off the walls and then headshotted them from the far side of the map without even slowing.

Any game with cone of fire hitscan weapons needs much less accuracy as perfect aim is less important. This leads to game play being more tactical which suits older gamers.

As to turning all the effects off. There is a subset of players for whom winning > all. They will adjust all settings to win - this normally means making the game look s**t as you turn off every bit of detail to try and make the enemies stand out as much as you can. I prefer to play games the way they were meant to be played, not live in the 90's forever.

 

[Barfo]

Motion blur I can live with (though I don't like it), but depth of field makes me want to punch grannies in the face.

 

[Dranoche]

I personally do not mind any of the effects that have been complained about here, they usually add a bit of visual flair to set a game apart from others. Though in multiplayer they can occaisionally be irritating. I have to agree a little about the motion blur, but only because its fairly extreme in most cases. It surely looks cool sometimes, but in the turn-your-head case in games it would probably be better to just slightly decrease focus instead, maybe only add in a tiny bit of blur, or at least keep it at the edges of the screen. We don't get really get motion blur like we see in games when we turn our heads quickly IRL, but we do lose some focus. However I think this would be difficult to implement properly ingame without irritating some people just like motion blur does. Anyways, the settings files almost always allow you to turn on/off any special effect or even tune down or make more extreme than the default.

I had forgotten about poor implementation of 3D sound positioning. Can't think of any examples right now, but every time it comes up I sit there and play with it for a minute, listening to the sound switch completely back and forth between two speakers.

Realism, or attempted realism, can be really cool. But I think its usually better to have intentionally unrealistic aspects and good overall art direction.

 

[nitromullet]

Motion blur looks terrible in crysis and it was one of the more difficult ones to disable (had to get modified files)

...or you could just move the slider to the left...

 

[Dranoche]

What games do you guys think have the most extreme examples of these effects?

I would say Crysis for the motion blur, even though I have to admit that I sorta like it.

COD4 gave me serious issues in multiplayer sometimes with the depth of field; kept focusing on 2 blades of grass I was trying to look between.

 

[Barfo]

What games do you guys think have the most extreme examples of these effects?

I would say Crysis for the motion blur, even though I have to admit that I sorta like it.

COD4 gave me serious issues in multiplayer sometimes with the depth of field; kept focusing on 2 blades of grass I was trying to look between.

DoF made Medal of Honor: Airborne unplayable for me.

 

[taltamir]

...or you could just move the slider to the left...

must have confused it with another game, been a while since I played it.

 

[smackababy]

The cone of fire is a design choice - they could go without it but it makes the game much more twitch skill oriented. This doesn't sell as many games as people don't like getting repeatedly pwned by teenagers with razer sharp reactions. Same with advanced movement (wall jumps and the like).

e.g. ut2004 - it was basically near impossible for a lesser skilled player to kill a skilled one in that game, because they couldn't do a thing as the leet player bounced off the walls and then headshotted them from the far side of the map without even slowing.

Any game with cone of fire hitscan weapons needs much less accuracy as perfect aim is less important. This leads to game play being more tactical which suits older gamers.

As to turning all the effects off. There is a subset of players for whom winning > all. They will adjust all settings to win - this normally means making the game look s**t as you turn off every bit of detail to try and make the enemies stand out as much as you can. I prefer to play games the way they were meant to be played, not live in the 90's forever.

But that makes no sense in a realistic world. The gun will shoot wherever you aim it to. If you don't aim in the right spot, you miss. If people can't grasp this, they are bad.

 

[taltamir]

But that makes no sense in a realistic world. The gun will shoot wherever you aim it to. If you don't aim in the right spot, you miss. If people can't grasp this, they are bad.

and its not like there aren't well known alternatives such as sight wobble (the sight moves around, the bullets go where the sight is aimed at the time you fire)...

IRL bullets are effected by a variety of factors such as gravity and wind... but with rifled guns (anything newer then a flintlock pistol) and modern bullet speeds this only matters in very long distances. (aka, snipers)

 

[Lean L]

But that makes no sense in a realistic world. The gun will shoot wherever you aim it to. If you don't aim in the right spot, you miss. If people can't grasp this, they are bad.

Have you shot a real gun? To suggest that you can even aim while moving/running is far fetched.

 

[smackababy]

Have you shot a real gun? To suggest that you can even aim while moving/running is far fetched.

Aiming a gun and having the gun shoot in the direction it is pointed are not the same thing. And yes, I've shot many guns. I am in the military.

 

[pmv]

Absolute truth.

Personally I view the blur they artificially create in games as actually being anti-realism because excepting for those very rare moments (or the persistent kind like your "looking at the trees nearest the road while driving at 80mph" example) blurred vision is not a routine feature I experience from my ocular cortex in daily life.

Why stop there? Why not decide everyone wants to play their games as if they were legally blind and had 20/200 vision? The list of ways to cripple the visual experience need look no further than a standard medical journey on vision deterioration.

I can't wait to plunk down $60 for the next release of Rainbow Six only to find that my character has a case of extreme nearsightedness.

Now that's role-playing!

I've heard that in the first scene of Half Life Episode 3, Gordon Freeman breaks his glasses. The rest of the game is just a blur, apparently.

(Certainly if I were working for the combine I'd be shouting "aim for his glasses!". Speccy geek deserves it)

 

[Lean L]

Aiming a gun and having the gun shoot in the direction it is pointed are not the same thing. And yes, I've shot many guns. I am in the military.

Games have built in aim by the way they are made. Even without crosshairs, the pointed direction of the gun is in the center of the screen. It makes sense that they would try to scatter the bullets somewhat to try to get rid of this little cheat. I've never seen it made so that the direction changes completely, at most, it's off by a couple of degrees when moving.

 

[ViRGE]

I'm not sure on which day it happened - it was probably some sunny day where I was distracted - but some day not too far in the past I woke up in a world where 3dfx's T-Buffer threat became reality.

Everyone is in such a rush to capture the cinematic experience that they never bothered to stop and ask if they should. The world doesn't move at 24fps, but this seems to be what developers have their hearts set on emulating. The real world is fluid and bright, and anything right in front of your face (a monitor) is in focus. At one point we had that in games, but now it seems lost. Now we emulate the cinema, even the bad parts.

T-Buffer was a terrible idea in 1999, and it's still a terrible idea now.

 

[Idontcare]

I've heard that in the first scene of Half Life Episode 3, Gordon Freeman breaks his glasses. The rest of the game is just a blur, apparently.

(Certainly if I were working for the combine I'd be shouting "aim for his glasses!". Speccy geek deserves it)

Ha! and he'll be running with a limp no thanks to his sudden onset of type 2 diabetes resulting in an ulcerated foot that is in need of amputation.

Like a life-time nascar driver poor Gordon will habitually drift to the left while attempting to run straight ahead.

Can't wait for the realism to go to the next level!

 

[pmv]

I'm not sure on which day it happened - it was probably some sunny day where I was distracted - but some day not too far in the past I woke up in a world where 3dfx's T-Buffer threat became reality.

Everyone is in such a rush to capture the cinematic experience that they never bothered to stop and ask if they should. The world doesn't move at 24fps, but this seems to be what developers have their hearts set on emulating. The real world is fluid and bright, and anything right in front of your face (a monitor) is in focus. At one point we had that in games, but now it seems lost. Now we emulate the cinema, even the bad parts.

T-Buffer was a terrible idea in 1999, and it's still a terrible idea now.

For some reason I associate the obsession with a 'cinematic' look with consolisation. Perhaps because consoles use the living room TVs that you watch movies on. Its linked in my mind to dumbing down and a reduction in interaction. More gloss, less depth.

On the other hand, we've long had Hollywood-style 'bad acting emulation' in games. Most computer game characters have all the animation and charisma of Kevin Costner combined with the subtlety of expression of Sylvester Stallone or Keaneu Reeves.

It's possible at some point though that the computer game actors will overtake the real ones in thespian talents (then we'll need special artificial stupidity software in order to create the true cinematic experience).

 

[0roo0roo]

The monitor is perfectly within our focused vision area though... you need a hemispheric surround to go into our peripheral vision (which AMD says is their eventual goal with eyefinity, which is way cool)

wrong try again
cut a hole in your monitor and look through it, the focus area comes into play again, unless everything in a game is at supposed monitor distance it just doesn't work as "realistic"

 

[pmv]

wrong try again
cut a hole in your monitor and look through it, the focus area comes into play again, unless everything in a game is at supposed monitor distance it just doesn't work as "realistic"

Yeah but in real life your eyes adjust to bring into focus whatever it is in the scene that you are looking at. As the game doesn't know which part of the scene your eyes are focused on it can't adjust the focus correctly.

 

[smackababy]

Games have built in aim by the way they are made. Even without crosshairs, the pointed direction of the gun is in the center of the screen. It makes sense that they would try to scatter the bullets somewhat to try to get rid of this little cheat. I've never seen it made so that the direction changes completely, at most, it's off by a couple of degrees when moving.

They are adding handicaps for people able to run and aim. You don't play some average Joe in an FPS. 99% of the time you're a special forces guy able to sprint full speed carrying an M60 in addition to the 60lbs of gear. Running while shooting isn't something hard to do. Hitting your target, however, depends on how well you aim.