Played the heck out of both games and never even noticed so I say good job on them!
Weirdest Graphical Compromises
- Thread starter kubev
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One thing that bugged me in some games was how distant 3d models would animate at half or a third of the usual frame rate. I think I noticed this in Bloodborne and Gran Turismo Sport.
Also, I guess because of color palette limitations, charging in classic Mega Man also changes the color of ammo and E tanks, which use the same colors as Mega Man's sprite.
Also, I guess because of color palette limitations, charging in classic Mega Man also changes the color of ammo and E tanks, which use the same colors as Mega Man's sprite.
There are some weird graphical compromises in Forza games that stand out to me. Particularly hood reflections lagging + some reflections running at lower framerates or resolutions depending on which type of material is reflecting (chrome vs glossy paint vs matte)
https://forums.forzamotorsport.net/turn10_postst80111_Hood-view-reflections-are-lagging.aspx
https://forums.forzamotorsport.net/turn10_postst80111_Hood-view-reflections-are-lagging.aspx
One I've mentioned before that I love is a compromise that sort of approaches things from the other direction; it's a compromise that uses graphics to alleviate another issue.
This is Exile on the BBC Micro; it's a great game, with an incredibly detailed physics and reaction model for 1988. It's using an unconventional bespoke graphical mode to save memory.
The Acorn Electron is a counterpart to the BBC Micro; largely the same family, but a weaker system. It doesn't have the capability to support unconventional bespoke graphical modes... so it doesn't.
This is the Acorn Electron version. That's not a decorative border: That's the portion of screen memory that has been co-opted to store game data
I wonder if they originally intended to block out parts of it to make other numbers, like a calculator display, but couldn't get it working.
This is Exile on the BBC Micro; it's a great game, with an incredibly detailed physics and reaction model for 1988. It's using an unconventional bespoke graphical mode to save memory.
The Acorn Electron is a counterpart to the BBC Micro; largely the same family, but a weaker system. It doesn't have the capability to support unconventional bespoke graphical modes... so it doesn't.
This is the Acorn Electron version. That's not a decorative border: That's the portion of screen memory that has been co-opted to store game data
I wonder if they originally intended to block out parts of it to make other numbers, like a calculator display, but couldn't get it working.
Yeah, it was the first game I used a pad for on PC. And I'm a pretty "mouse and keyboard only" guy.
One other I quite like - and the reasoning being simple expediency and cheapness makes a lot of sense - is how there's two sorts of cinematic in World of Warcraft. There's the major promotional ones - the utterly gorgeous trailers that show that Blizzard is arguably competitive with major hollywood studios in that regard:
...but also there are a number of ingame cinematics, which are still prerecorded but they're effectively machinama using mostly in-game assets rather than fully CG productions:
Some people find the disparity annoying, I get that, but I quite like the fact that because these are the cinematics that break up gameplay, I find it more engaging that they use the resources the player has been seeing through normal play. And, of course, it's rather cheaper as well!
...but also there are a number of ingame cinematics, which are still prerecorded but they're effectively machinama using mostly in-game assets rather than fully CG productions:
Some people find the disparity annoying, I get that, but I quite like the fact that because these are the cinematics that break up gameplay, I find it more engaging that they use the resources the player has been seeing through normal play. And, of course, it's rather cheaper as well!
Animating skeletal meshes or doing complex simulations can be quite taxing on the weak CPU's the current generation of consoles have, so running them at half the tick rate compared to the rest of the game allows them to spend CPU time on other tasks more important to the immediate gameplay at hand, i believe Halo 5 also used a similar approach to fit more visible enemies in the game world at the same time.
Reflection probes can be really expensive to render every frame since they rely on essentially rendering something like 256x256 pixels six times each tick. A method is to distribute the six surfaces over multiple frames, so instead of rendering an entire cubemap at once you could instead only render one surface each tick so it takes six ticks (frames) to refresh the cubemap. I could imagine the tick rate being lower for very reflective surfaces as they might be rendering a higher resolution cubemap for those compared to more matte surfaces that could retain a high quality with a low resolution cubemap.
The bathroom mirrors in mafia 3 has one of the strangest solutions i have ever seen, instead of having the classic cracked non functioning mirrors of many videogames, mafia 3 opted for a solution where the mirror takes a "screenshot" and compiles it into a texture that is applied to the mirrors surface, that sounds odd but fine until you realize that it takes three to five seconds for the mirror to update the image and that it only changes it once every 10 seconds, the end result is really absurd looking.
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I believe that was a setting that existed in Quake III Arena (and potentially some other games using the same engine) on PC as a means of making the game playable on less-powerful hardware in general. On the subject of games using that engine, I remember people who played competitively turning the graphical detail in the game down so much that stuff like trees and whatnot didn't even render properly in order to maximize enemy visibility. I believe that PunkBuster would detect a lot of these tweaks, as it's not as though you could use them on servers that used PunkBuster, but it was pretty interesting to see how ugly people would make the game in order to give themselves a competitive advantage. Does that even happen anymore?
You wouldn't necessarily sneak around a lot, but it *was* possible to sneak up on enemies in order to take them out before they could attack you. If you couldn't sneak in DOOM II, for example, then you'd immediately be getting attacked by two enemies upon starting the first level, since they're facing away from you and are completely unable to "see" you until you step into their line of sight or make noise by firing a weapon.
That's an interesting theory and would make some sense. I don't know how feasible that'd be if the 88 was part of the sprite, though, as opposed to a separate sprite overlaid on the player sprite.
Yeah its awesome, but it really does the opposite of making the game sharper though, which is what a lot of people want aparantly
Mass Effect 2 always had your character aiming their gun forward because apparently there wasn't enough memory to have an idle or passive gun animation pose... except that if you get close to a wall it automatically points the gun downward in a passive animation pose.
I don't understand why it couldn't be used if it was right there in the game already.
I don't understand why it couldn't be used if it was right there in the game already.
The damage control on this was fucking off the charts. "You're getting the resolution twice!!!"
This reminds me. AC Origins has this super hyper long draw distance, but due to memory limitations it animated "flying" cloth (flags etc) at like 15 fps unless you were like 2 meters in front of them. Why not cut the ridiculous draw distance a little bit then?
Yup yup, there were a handful of encounters designed assuming you could make a chain reaction of enemy friendly-fire, that you have to come at differently for that version.
I don't recall that being stated, but I might have missed it. What I do remember is ME3 segregating the game into distinct combat/non-combat areas because they claimed the memory for the extra character stances and drawing/holstering animations were not possible on the console versions (Might have been PS3 specifically).
In World of Warcraft you occasionally come across stacks of cannonballs near cannons and such. Upon closer inspection they are flat 2D sprites that face the same direction from all angles. Nothing too unusual in itself, but the weird thing is that they still have a lowpoly, slightly angular look when they could easily have been actual circles as mere sprites. If I hazard a guess I suppose this was a deliberate decision to keep the assets more in line with the optimized 3D environment and not make them stand out from everything else fidelity-wise.
If you want to check it out right now, I first noticed this by the cannon in Darkmoon Faire which is active this week.
If you want to check it out right now, I first noticed this by the cannon in Darkmoon Faire which is active this week.
I don't know how weird it is, but it always bugs me in games when water reflects a skybox or environment that isn't rendered or implied in the game world. A lot of early bump/normal maps had this problem, but it still happens in modern games. I can't think of specific examples off of the top of my head other than the OG Call of Duty on PC.
PS2/Wii to PSP ports often swapped out distinct character shadows for fake/blob shadows, Manhunt 2 for example. Others as well I just can't think of at the moment. It's not weird necessarily but I noticed it. Small compromise when moving to portable hardware and a little negligible on the smaller 480x272 display. I saw this employed with Saber Interactives Shaq Fu and NBA Playgrounds on Switch, fake shadows were used.
I feel like back in the CRT days it worked in it's favor more but these days on modern TVs it looks like utter ass.Don't know if this is what you're looking for but the N64 had a built-in implementation of anti-aliasing in the system that blurred every single game. Generally the sprite-based games look a lot better with the AA off while the polygonal ones are hit or miss/subjective really.
Haha the two separate frame buffers do not mean double the resolution. It's like people saying 3D is double the resolution (SMH). Although I think the sacrifice was worth it as I feel the lighting aesthetic Halo 3 ended up with was beautiful and worth the ~25% resolution sacrifice.
I remember in Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (PS2), they didn't give Lara full eyeballs, just half eyeballs. So if you got the camera a certain way, you can see through her and notice that they deliberately gave her half eyeballs. It was so weird and it's not like it did anything since the game ran pretty badly anyway.
Three things that I noticed especially in Bandai Namco fighting games.
1) Hair in Tekken 7 and Soul Calibur 6 on PS4 looks a lot cruder than the hair looked in Tekken6/TTT2 and Soul Calibur 4/5 on PS3. Unreal Engine 4 seems to have troubles with transparency on alphamaps?
2) Soul Calibur 6 characters got beautifully designed new costumes that were built completely new from scratch, the base character models are however the exact same of SC4 and SC5. Hands and faces are by this generation's standards very low-polygon with visible edges. I don't understand why they couldn't at least update very visible body parts like the faces and hands.
3) Where Tekken 7's and Soul Calibur 6's visuals shine the most are the atmospheric and very detailed stages. They are however ruined by tons of film grain, chromatic aberration and color filters in Tekken 7 and by a very strong depth of field blur in Soul Calibur 6. Why make the effort to create beautiful stages when you ruin them like that afterwards? In one interview developers even noted how much work and detail they put into SC6's backgrounds, and as they said that ironically the blur set in and all that work and detail was gone.
1) Hair in Tekken 7 and Soul Calibur 6 on PS4 looks a lot cruder than the hair looked in Tekken6/TTT2 and Soul Calibur 4/5 on PS3. Unreal Engine 4 seems to have troubles with transparency on alphamaps?
2) Soul Calibur 6 characters got beautifully designed new costumes that were built completely new from scratch, the base character models are however the exact same of SC4 and SC5. Hands and faces are by this generation's standards very low-polygon with visible edges. I don't understand why they couldn't at least update very visible body parts like the faces and hands.
3) Where Tekken 7's and Soul Calibur 6's visuals shine the most are the atmospheric and very detailed stages. They are however ruined by tons of film grain, chromatic aberration and color filters in Tekken 7 and by a very strong depth of field blur in Soul Calibur 6. Why make the effort to create beautiful stages when you ruin them like that afterwards? In one interview developers even noted how much work and detail they put into SC6's backgrounds, and as they said that ironically the blur set in and all that work and detail was gone.
Yep, Mario odyssey does this too.
I would change the 60fps for a better draw distance and normal animations in 30fps any day
That's not always true, it can be a pretty big hit in performance in certain scenarios. You don't notice on PC becauase GPUs have a lot more resources there, but on console it can actually be a big trade off.
Bart vs The Space Mutants NES.
Bart's shorts are purple in level 1 - the same color that everything alien, and thus, bad, was - I guess so they wouldn't blend with the sky, even though they use blue throughout the level. Then they're blue for the rest of the game, including for the blue sky Krustyland.
Then, of course, there's how bad they botched the title screen:
Bart's shorts are purple in level 1 - the same color that everything alien, and thus, bad, was - I guess so they wouldn't blend with the sky, even though they use blue throughout the level. Then they're blue for the rest of the game, including for the blue sky Krustyland.
Then, of course, there's how bad they botched the title screen:
Why do so many Switch games (or Nintendo games for that matter) lack anti-aliasing?
Most of them seem to have none at all, of any kind.
Most of them seem to have none at all, of any kind.
Probably because devs don't bother, even though post aa would work well.
PC GPUs typically have more bandwidth than equivalent consoles.
Texture filtering can have a dramatic impact on performance, but it depends if filtering units or bandwidth is the bottleneck. If it isn't, then boosting filter quality can appear to be 'free' because other things (compute, raster, etc) are still bottlenecking the GPU. GPUs do a lot of different things in parallel, so are typically only as fast as the slowest part of the process.
It's actually quite easy to set up a scene where changing filter quality can halve the frame rate (or worse).
Halo 2's decision to stream in textures during cutscenes. It result in horrible looking cutscenes that made the single player a joke.
Huh, I had no clue. Thanks for clarifying this.
I'll say the day/night cycle in Far Cry 4 (even still in 5 I've heard?!) that progresses only as the player physically moves. If you stand still, time stands still as well. If you move, sun + shadows will suddenly move. So incredibly stupid and irritating.
Also the stuttering "step by step" movement of shadows in Skyrim.
This is a good topic.
Also the stuttering "step by step" movement of shadows in Skyrim.
This is a good topic.
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Mostly because they want to deliver 60 fps, or so I think.
Their games look crisp (when the resolution is not low) but jaggy, but at the end Nintendo games use to have steady 60 fps on console, so it's worth IMO.
That is because the sun has discrete positions in the sky and or shadow maps aren't continuously re-rendered. You'll find that in most games the shadow maps tick on discrete positions. This also allows them to be cached, lowering the computational load. It is also most visible near the sun set or sun rise where angles are the most oblique.
Note that some games do it better, have more discrete steps, hiding the effect better, but it isn't like the real world where things operate on continuous time.
I never noticed it in any game besides Skyrim. Find it really irritating.
I have another one:
Every modern game that still runs in 30fps, which is half the optimal framerate.
This is weird, indeed, but unfortunately so common that most folks just accept it :(
Not purely graphically related but Crysis 2 really felt compromised when it released with worse graphics, smaller maps, smaller draw distance and less dynamic AI and gameplay than the original. Even 3 didn't match the original's scale... The sequels really killed that franchise IMO.
No mention of the Monorail Hat from Fallout 3?
From what I understand, it would have been too much work/space to animate an entirely new vehicle so they made the monorail a "helmet" for a human character and hid the body underground.
From what I understand, it would have been too much work/space to animate an entirely new vehicle so they made the monorail a "helmet" for a human character and hid the body underground.
This is the Acorn Electron version. That's not a decorative border: That's the portion of screen memory that has been co-opted to store game data
Holy shit! This is amazing, thanks for sharing!
This is creepy as fuck. Who thought this was a better solution than simply rendering the mirror texture at a much lower resolution (like Fountain of Dreams in Melee) or even having opaque mirrors?
I love everything about this solution. Kind of reminds me of Yar's Revenge, only more extreme. Here, the "neutral zone" (the vertical bar in the middle, you're safe from enemy fire here) is also made out of game code. But it's even explained in the game's story, so not quite on the same level as your example. And it looks rather cool.One I've mentioned before that I love is a compromise that sort of approaches things from the other direction; it's a compromise that uses graphics to alleviate another issue.
This is Exile on the BBC Micro; it's a great game, with an incredibly detailed physics and reaction model for 1988. It's using an unconventional bespoke graphical mode to save memory.
The Acorn Electron is a counterpart to the BBC Micro; largely the same family, but a weaker system. It doesn't have the capability to support unconventional bespoke graphical modes... so it doesn't.
This is the Acorn Electron version. That's not a decorative border: That's the portion of screen memory that has been co-opted to store game data
I wonder if they originally intended to block out parts of it to make other numbers, like a calculator display, but couldn't get it working.
No mention of the Monorail Hat from Fallout 3?
From what I understand, it would have been too much work/space to animate an entirely new vehicle so they made the monorail a "helmet" for a human character and hid the body underground.
That is the most Bethesda thing i have ever seen.
Somebody dug around in the code and came to the conclusion that it is not a bug, but the solution they chose for the mirrors, i really liked mafia 3 but man did that game have some grade a jank.
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60hz isn't optimal, unless that is the maximum update frequency of your display (if it isn't a VRR display).
This is super fun.No mention of the Monorail Hat from Fallout 3?
From what I understand, it would have been too much work/space to animate an entirely new vehicle so they made the monorail a "helmet" for a human character and hid the body underground.
MONORAIL
I am not sure if I consider it a graphical compromise, but both GTA IV and Quantum break not actually having real reload animations, but instead just having the character kinda playing with the gun or doing some weird hand motion always looked really strange. Especially since the games do other things so realistically / have such incredibly high production values elsewhere.
It happens in many games, exactly because it helps hiding the stuttering.