6 ms·

Oh man - the same here with me - when I first got Morrowind there was an option you could enable in ATI (now AMD) cards at the time that made water look "real".

Oh man - the same here with me - when I first got Morrowind there was an option you could enable in ATI (now AMD) cards at the time that made water look "real". I was able to enable that and was blown away - I was like "well that's it - doesn't get any more real than this". Having loaded Morrowind recently I could not believe had bad it looked lol. Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now?

johnwheeler 6y ago
> "well that's it - doesn't get any more real than this" > Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now? Yes - well said. That's what I was trying to convey in my comment.
- lwansbrough 6y ago
  I think Epic’s UE5 demo is really really close to reality in terms of lighting and geometry. Next 10-20 years will probably see the same technology being brought into larger and larger environments with more moving parts. Then there’s the more obvious stuff that isn’t done well even today: skeletal animation is still lacking and feels unnatural, physics systems are still very approximate and constrained - often times most things are indestructible in games, fluid dynamics are still very slow/limited. Human models still don’t look real though, and the voice acting never quite matches the mouth movement or body language. I do really feel like we’ve crossed the uncanny valley when it comes to natural scenery rendering. But a lot of what makes things feel real are still missing from games.
  - heipei 6y ago
    I agree, it's so close that it's actually being used as an interactive movie background with a big-ass 360-degree screen for dynamic scene and lighting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjb-AqMD-a4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjb-AqMD-a4
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      IMHO it looks fake. The lighting is way off, it quite literally looks like they're standing directly below a big diffuser - which they are. The background looks like a poster with one of these diffraction parallax effects. It's very cool tech. But it doesn't look real.
      - jiggawatts 6y ago
        The camera angles in that demo were off axis. Take a look at The Mandalorian series, almost all of the outdoor scenes were shot using the video wall technology. I've worked in computer graphics and I didn't realise the sets were fake until after I finished the whole series.
      - manigandham 6y ago
        The behind-the-scenes context is making it visible to you, but you've probably already seen films and TV using it without even noticing.
pvg 6y ago
Maybe the water stood out since Morrowind was an ugly game even in its day. All the Elder Scrolls games have a well-earned reputation of looking like they're populated by cardboard mutants. Reminds me a bit of the old Infocom ad: http://www.retroadv.it/images/03082019/Home_Computer_Magazine_Vol4_01_0017.jpg http://www.retroadv.it/images/03082019/Home_Computer_Magazin...
- int_19h 6y ago
  Morrowind was complicated. The characters were ugly, and animations especially horrible. But the landscapes were considered very beautiful by the standards of the day.
noja 6y ago
When you compared it recently did you use the same monitor, cable (analog or digital), and resolution?
int_19h 6y ago
It was one of the first prominent uses of pixel shaders in the game, coinciding with NVidia (not ATI) releasing GeForce models that supported them. It was so noticeable because it was such a huge increase in quality compared to what passed for water in games before - usually some kind of blue-grey translucent texture. For the first time, pixel shaders produced water that was clearly an attempt to imitate water IRL, not the cartoonish representation of it.
Budabellly 6y ago
For me, it's fidelity of human facial animation that has a long way to come. There are teams doing a great job of it [1], but the labor/skill required to bring one high hyperreal facial rig to a game or movie seems insane. I think companies pursuing AR/VR applications will lead here. ML creative tools stand to automate a lot of this imo. [1] random example: https://snapperstech.com/ https://snapperstech.com/
formerly_proven 6y ago
Hm. Many people here share their sentiments of perceiving older games (or current games) as being close to photorealistic. Personally it never felt that way to me. All games have obvious problems where they don't behave/look anywhere close to reality. If you remove the interactive element and only use somewhat massaged screenshots, then, sure certain elements are basically photorealistic and have been for a while. For example, landscapes look pretty darn realistic. Anything alive or even most man-made artefacts, not so much. Apart from graphics most stuff in games is pretty rough. Animations are generally bad and ways before reaching the uncanny valley of "getting close"; they're still in the "abstract representation of concept" detail level. AI is dumb (largely for [perceived] player-acceptance reasons). Sound is generally poor; some games still don't use 3D sound. Physics are "abstract representation" level again, some games still have fly-through walls and vibrating items. etc. etc.
- KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
  Yeah... these comments are kinda weird. Hate to say it but maybe they should go outside more lol, computer graphics always looked pretty bad at me, even the clips in today's nvidia presentation looks really unnatural. That's not to take anything away from the technology and the massive advances it represents, just compared to reality it's still really far from fooling a human brain.
  - wiz21c 6y ago
    interestingly many of us feel that there's a huge gap between the past and now. But how many of us can actually verbalize what will change in the rendering of pictures in, say 3 years. For example, I can clearly see that ray tracing produces better results. But it's a bit harder to tell how better it is, to find the words that describes how better it is. Of course, one can say that, for example, photon tracing is more physically accurate. But still, what words can we use to describe how real (or not real) a still image is ("more realistic" doesn't count :-))
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      Game graphics look sterile, too clean, sharp, plasticky. The real world is messier with less clear separation between objects, things blend together more, subtle shadows, surfaces are less uniform, there is more clutter, dirt, wrinkles, details.
lacker 6y ago
The biggest thing to me is that video games do not have very many independent objects, compared to reality. Go outside and look at the real world and you will see the ground has little pebbles and bits of mud and all this stuff that gets kicked around. No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will. Or for indoor scenes, there is no video game that accurately captures the experience of "picking up a living room with a bunch of toys strewn about".
- makapuf 6y ago
  > No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will. Why not? With procedural generation and LOD rendering it's not impossible. Not that it's easy, but not impossible?
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    Presumably you're not a native English speaker. "will" here does not refer to the future, this is a subtle grammatical thing that I can't explain well, but it refers to presently existing games.
    - cyberlurker 6y ago
      Still, there is no reason I can think of that the game described couldn’t be created right now besides it not being a very fun/Marketable game.
      - bonoboTP 6y ago
        But that's theoretical, the point is more how current games actually look, not what people could make potentially with today's tech. Also, some games are intentionally cartoonish as an artistic choice so photorealism isn't always the goal.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Everything has a cost, either computational or human. We've probably reached the point where human cost exceeds computational cost, which is to say that developing and QA testing such a feature would probably cost more money than it's worth. How many users of software would gain from such minutiae?
Yajirobe 6y ago
> Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now? How about ray tracing?. If we get real-time 60fps+ ray-traced computer graphics in games, that would blow what we have now out of the water
outworlder 6y ago
YES! Morrowind was my 'shader benchmark' for some time.
jakear 6y ago
As someone who is most definitely not a gamer but with coworkers and friends that get big into high cost gaming systems, here’s where I see the biggest deltas between real life and the screen: - Hair. Up until very recently hair was downright awful. Nowadays it’s acceptable-ish, but there’s still lots of room for improvement, in particular in natural motion of long hair. - Water. I spend a big chunk of my time on the water, so I’m probably more attuned to how it moves than most. Games just don’t have it down. In particular, I think a lot could be gained by embracing it’s fractal nature: in my experience, at every human scale (mm to dam and everything in between) very similar wave patterns exist, but games tend to have just a small fixed number of “wave-layers” at various scales stacked together. - Clouds. I can easily spend hours just observing clouds, looking at things like their shape, overall motion, internal motion, composition, edge behaviors, etc, and how they change over time. Game clouds are lacking in all these regards, particularly the time-sensitive nature of a cloud. - Foliage. In games I’ve seen, individual plants/etc. in isolation generally look really quite decent. But the second an physical object interacts with them, they very clearly don’t respond in the right ways. There’s a lot about how branches bend and leaves rustle and more that is lost. Additionally, in groups of plants it’s often clear that some small number of models are being reused, possibly with some generated randomness added. But the variety doesn’t come close to matching what one would really see. - Human faces and expressions. These are generally really bad, especially in normal gameplay (cut-scenes are sometimes better) Again, this is probably all just really weird stuff I notice because I spend the vast majority of my time outdoors and only see “HiFi” games being played very infrequently. I don’t think games are worse for not implementing these, but I am very interested in what they’ll look like 10-20 years down the road.
- vimy 6y ago
  Regarding clouds, have you seen videos of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020?
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  I think these days it mostly comes down to human effort in development and not hardware limitations. You could spend hundreds of hours modelling faces or putting accurate physics on a fern but it doesn't add too much to the game and costs too much to develop. What I think will be a huge boost is proper raytracing. You can see animated movies and blender renders look stunning but they take minutes per frame.
0xffff2 6y ago
>Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now? My vote would be cloth simulation and clothing clipping. I've yet to see a game that comes even close to doing this realistically. Imagine what happens to your sleeves when you lift your arms above your head for example, or how the plates of a suit of armor naturally slide over each other. In every game I can think of, clothing is rigidly attached to the underlying skeleton and it just stretches/clips as the character moves. I guess fidelity of everything else has gotten much better, because I recently started noticing this and now I find it very distracting in any game that has in-engine cut scenes involving character closeups.
0-_-0 6y ago
Game physics are still absolutely horrible

johnwheeler 6y ago

> "well that's it - doesn't get any more real than this" > Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now? Yes - well said. That's what I was trying to convey in my comment.

lwansbrough 6y ago
I think Epic’s UE5 demo is really really close to reality in terms of lighting and geometry. Next 10-20 years will probably see the same technology being brought into larger and larger environments with more moving parts. Then there’s the more obvious stuff that isn’t done well even today: skeletal animation is still lacking and feels unnatural, physics systems are still very approximate and constrained - often times most things are indestructible in games, fluid dynamics are still very slow/limited. Human models still don’t look real though, and the voice acting never quite matches the mouth movement or body language. I do really feel like we’ve crossed the uncanny valley when it comes to natural scenery rendering. But a lot of what makes things feel real are still missing from games.
- heipei 6y ago
  I agree, it's so close that it's actually being used as an interactive movie background with a big-ass 360-degree screen for dynamic scene and lighting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjb-AqMD-a4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjb-AqMD-a4
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    IMHO it looks fake. The lighting is way off, it quite literally looks like they're standing directly below a big diffuser - which they are. The background looks like a poster with one of these diffraction parallax effects. It's very cool tech. But it doesn't look real.
    - jiggawatts 6y ago
      The camera angles in that demo were off axis. Take a look at The Mandalorian series, almost all of the outdoor scenes were shot using the video wall technology. I've worked in computer graphics and I didn't realise the sets were fake until after I finished the whole series.
    - manigandham 6y ago
      The behind-the-scenes context is making it visible to you, but you've probably already seen films and TV using it without even noticing.

pvg 6y ago

Maybe the water stood out since Morrowind was an ugly game even in its day. All the Elder Scrolls games have a well-earned reputation of looking like they're populated by cardboard mutants. Reminds me a bit of the old Infocom ad: http://www.retroadv.it/images/03082019/Home_Computer_Magazine_Vol4_01_0017.jpg http://www.retroadv.it/images/03082019/Home_Computer_Magazin...

int_19h 6y ago
Morrowind was complicated. The characters were ugly, and animations especially horrible. But the landscapes were considered very beautiful by the standards of the day.

noja 6y ago

When you compared it recently did you use the same monitor, cable (analog or digital), and resolution?

int_19h 6y ago

It was one of the first prominent uses of pixel shaders in the game, coinciding with NVidia (not ATI) releasing GeForce models that supported them. It was so noticeable because it was such a huge increase in quality compared to what passed for water in games before - usually some kind of blue-grey translucent texture. For the first time, pixel shaders produced water that was clearly an attempt to imitate water IRL, not the cartoonish representation of it.

Budabellly 6y ago

For me, it's fidelity of human facial animation that has a long way to come. There are teams doing a great job of it [1], but the labor/skill required to bring one high hyperreal facial rig to a game or movie seems insane. I think companies pursuing AR/VR applications will lead here. ML creative tools stand to automate a lot of this imo. [1] random example: https://snapperstech.com/ https://snapperstech.com/

formerly_proven 6y ago

Hm. Many people here share their sentiments of perceiving older games (or current games) as being close to photorealistic. Personally it never felt that way to me. All games have obvious problems where they don't behave/look anywhere close to reality. If you remove the interactive element and only use somewhat massaged screenshots, then, sure certain elements are basically photorealistic and have been for a while. For example, landscapes look pretty darn realistic. Anything alive or even most man-made artefacts, not so much. Apart from graphics most stuff in games is pretty rough. Animations are generally bad and ways before reaching the uncanny valley of "getting close"; they're still in the "abstract representation of concept" detail level. AI is dumb (largely for [perceived] player-acceptance reasons). Sound is generally poor; some games still don't use 3D sound. Physics are "abstract representation" level again, some games still have fly-through walls and vibrating items. etc. etc.

KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
Yeah... these comments are kinda weird. Hate to say it but maybe they should go outside more lol, computer graphics always looked pretty bad at me, even the clips in today's nvidia presentation looks really unnatural. That's not to take anything away from the technology and the massive advances it represents, just compared to reality it's still really far from fooling a human brain.
- wiz21c 6y ago
  interestingly many of us feel that there's a huge gap between the past and now. But how many of us can actually verbalize what will change in the rendering of pictures in, say 3 years. For example, I can clearly see that ray tracing produces better results. But it's a bit harder to tell how better it is, to find the words that describes how better it is. Of course, one can say that, for example, photon tracing is more physically accurate. But still, what words can we use to describe how real (or not real) a still image is ("more realistic" doesn't count :-))
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    Game graphics look sterile, too clean, sharp, plasticky. The real world is messier with less clear separation between objects, things blend together more, subtle shadows, surfaces are less uniform, there is more clutter, dirt, wrinkles, details.

lacker 6y ago

The biggest thing to me is that video games do not have very many independent objects, compared to reality. Go outside and look at the real world and you will see the ground has little pebbles and bits of mud and all this stuff that gets kicked around. No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will. Or for indoor scenes, there is no video game that accurately captures the experience of "picking up a living room with a bunch of toys strewn about".

makapuf 6y ago
> No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will. Why not? With procedural generation and LOD rendering it's not impossible. Not that it's easy, but not impossible?
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  Presumably you're not a native English speaker. "will" here does not refer to the future, this is a subtle grammatical thing that I can't explain well, but it refers to presently existing games.
  - cyberlurker 6y ago
    Still, there is no reason I can think of that the game described couldn’t be created right now besides it not being a very fun/Marketable game.
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      But that's theoretical, the point is more how current games actually look, not what people could make potentially with today's tech. Also, some games are intentionally cartoonish as an artistic choice so photorealism isn't always the goal.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Everything has a cost, either computational or human. We've probably reached the point where human cost exceeds computational cost, which is to say that developing and QA testing such a feature would probably cost more money than it's worth. How many users of software would gain from such minutiae?

Yajirobe 6y ago

> Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now? How about ray tracing?. If we get real-time 60fps+ ray-traced computer graphics in games, that would blow what we have now out of the water

outworlder 6y ago

YES! Morrowind was my 'shader benchmark' for some time.

jakear 6y ago

As someone who is most definitely not a gamer but with coworkers and friends that get big into high cost gaming systems, here’s where I see the biggest deltas between real life and the screen: - Hair. Up until very recently hair was downright awful. Nowadays it’s acceptable-ish, but there’s still lots of room for improvement, in particular in natural motion of long hair. - Water. I spend a big chunk of my time on the water, so I’m probably more attuned to how it moves than most. Games just don’t have it down. In particular, I think a lot could be gained by embracing it’s fractal nature: in my experience, at every human scale (mm to dam and everything in between) very similar wave patterns exist, but games tend to have just a small fixed number of “wave-layers” at various scales stacked together. - Clouds. I can easily spend hours just observing clouds, looking at things like their shape, overall motion, internal motion, composition, edge behaviors, etc, and how they change over time. Game clouds are lacking in all these regards, particularly the time-sensitive nature of a cloud. - Foliage. In games I’ve seen, individual plants/etc. in isolation generally look really quite decent. But the second an physical object interacts with them, they very clearly don’t respond in the right ways. There’s a lot about how branches bend and leaves rustle and more that is lost. Additionally, in groups of plants it’s often clear that some small number of models are being reused, possibly with some generated randomness added. But the variety doesn’t come close to matching what one would really see. - Human faces and expressions. These are generally really bad, especially in normal gameplay (cut-scenes are sometimes better) Again, this is probably all just really weird stuff I notice because I spend the vast majority of my time outdoors and only see “HiFi” games being played very infrequently. I don’t think games are worse for not implementing these, but I am very interested in what they’ll look like 10-20 years down the road.

vimy 6y ago
Regarding clouds, have you seen videos of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020?
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
I think these days it mostly comes down to human effort in development and not hardware limitations. You could spend hundreds of hours modelling faces or putting accurate physics on a fern but it doesn't add too much to the game and costs too much to develop. What I think will be a huge boost is proper raytracing. You can see animated movies and blender renders look stunning but they take minutes per frame.

0xffff2 6y ago

>Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now? My vote would be cloth simulation and clothing clipping. I've yet to see a game that comes even close to doing this realistically. Imagine what happens to your sleeves when you lift your arms above your head for example, or how the plates of a suit of armor naturally slide over each other. In every game I can think of, clothing is rigidly attached to the underlying skeleton and it just stretches/clips as the character moves. I guess fidelity of everything else has gotten much better, because I recently started noticing this and now I find it very distracting in any game that has in-engine cut scenes involving character closeups.

0-_-0 6y ago

Game physics are still absolutely horrible