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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 b
by 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 agoRegarding clouds, have you seen videos of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020?
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoI 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.
- jakear 6y agoRight, like I said I don’t think a game needs to be lifelike to be good, but I also don’t think any are. 10-20 years out, who knows.
- renjimen 6y agoA good list, though I think human faces and general animation are okay when you compare with foliage, which is downright awful. A lot of the improvement in human features has to do with motion capture and 3D scanning, but getting transitions between movements is where progress needs to be made. Foliage seems like something that will be difficult to get realistic for any close inspect, at least from a layperson's point of view.