What are you playing now?

[entrerix]

3D tech really took a poop on what an RPG could visually convey, scope wise.

 

 

this. very very much this.

[Purkake]

Tried a bit Commandos 3 today. The tutorial feels like shizzle already. Doubt that I will play it anymore.

It's all about Desperados, brah.

 

Speaking of which.

 

I'm thinking about buying Helldorado. Is it any good?

No idea, the second one wasn't so hot, so I wouldn't put too much faith into this.

[Hurlshort]

This is sadly not even subjective as my thoughts on this are actually based upon my professional analysis...

So you think your opinion is worth more because of your job? How conceited can one get?

 

Please, tell us, how long have you worked in this field to gain this awesome knowledge that none of us plebeians can touch? Ten years? 20?

 

I think you're a ****ing programmer with less than 5 years in the industry. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not interested in taking art advice from you.

 

I value the opinion of a mechanic on cars more than someone who drives them. That sounds pretty reasonable.

[Nightshape]

This is sadly not even subjective as my thoughts on this are actually based upon my professional analysis...

So you think your opinion is worth more because of your job? How conceited can one get?

 

Please, tell us, how long have you worked in this field to gain this awesome knowledge that none of us plebeians can touch? Ten years? 20?

 

I think you're a ****ing programmer with less than 5 years in the industry. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not interested in taking art advice from you.

 

*sigh*, I take it that this has bothered you? I am for the most part looking at technical facts - I'm sorry if you don't like that, but I'm certainly NOT an artist.

 

Sure, I'm critical - I've held the same view point about AP since its release. Its a visual nightmare, I'm aware that there could be a personal preference for the look in a said game, but that doesn't change the fact that even I a "****ing programmer", can see that it is lacking in a technical sense... Funny that.

 

Just for the record, when I'm being all "it sucks, but I can't be arsed to explain why", its because its time consuming explaining everything, and I'm not actually fishing for an argument, because for me there isn't an argument to be had - I've looked at it, I've obviously noticed something badly done, hell I may have even talked to an artist or two about it. I'm sorry if you find it conceited, its never how I intend to come off... I can see how you could get that opinion of me though, but I'll forgive you for it.

 

My comments are mostly critisims revolving around technical areas. Anything else I deferred to a conversation Art Director/Technical Artists/Environment Artists/Creative Directors etc... I have spoken with about AP. Yep, I spoke about the game because I was blown away by the assualt of yellow in the early levels, and how that clashed with the HUD - That's a bit of a no, no, aparently.

 

Now I can't help the fact AP has spangley textures, the DXT compression is essencially causing artifacts within the textures, it can be a tough problem but it always exists to some extent when you compress textures. I'm pointing that out as a flaw, there are ways to solve it, but in all honesty, it doesn't seem that the AP even tried to solve the issue, it proud to be spangley and it don't care who see it. All I am saying is that this effects the final result. Now do you really want me to start talking about how DXT compression works because I really don't see any point? Lets just say its bit related, and some colour channels have more bits than others.

 

Also, one of the major flaws I think that they actually made is with the opening sequences of the game, I don't know why they chose to go with such narrow colour bandings, but if you look closely, you've a very small colour range within the games levels, I don't have the game with me at the moment, and I don't know what exactly was the driving force behind taking this approach - its oddly consistant, and it isn't the only place where this is applied (this doesn't appear everywhere)... But the early levels are the best example. The pre-baked lighting as a result mostly looks weird, simply put there just aren't enough colours present.

 

Perhaps some people out there like this, it certainly appears to be so. I don't think its good it smells and looks cheap to me, but at the end of the day... You're allowed to like what you like, but that doesn't make it "technically" good.

 

I don't see an arguement, because it is a fact that the texture compression is poorly executed. It is a fact that some of the environments have tight colour ranges. These are just facts, now, I think that's bad because I find it bad in a professional sense, if the look appeals to and pleases you, so be it, but the facts are against you.

[Malcador]

Just for the record, when I'm being all "it sucks, but I can't be arsed to explain why", its because its time consuming explaining everything, and I'm not actually fishing for an argument, because for me there isn't an argument to be had - I've looked at it, I've obviously noticed something badly done, hell I may have even talked to an artist or two about it. I'm sorry if you find it conceited, its never how I intend to come off... I can see how you could get that opinion of me though, but I'll forgive you for it.

 

Haha.

[Hell Kitty]

This is sadly not even subjective as my thoughts on this are actually based upon my professional analysis...

So you think your opinion is worth more because of your job? How conceited can one get?

 

Please, tell us, how long have you worked in this field to gain this awesome knowledge that none of us plebeians can touch? Ten years? 20?

 

I think you're a ****ing programmer with less than 5 years in the industry. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not interested in taking art advice from you.

 

I value the opinion of a mechanic on cars more than someone who drives them. That sounds pretty reasonable.

 

Sure, but would you take interior decoration advice from a builder who tells you your home looks like ****? He can't tell you why but he is a professional who might have spoken to a number a interior decorators so just trust him okay.

[Calax]

Dragon Age 1. I feel like I'm just bumbling my way through it given how badly i get owned in some spots.

[Hurlshort]

This is sadly not even subjective as my thoughts on this are actually based upon my professional analysis...

So you think your opinion is worth more because of your job? How conceited can one get?

 

Please, tell us, how long have you worked in this field to gain this awesome knowledge that none of us plebeians can touch? Ten years? 20?

 

I think you're a ****ing programmer with less than 5 years in the industry. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not interested in taking art advice from you.

 

I value the opinion of a mechanic on cars more than someone who drives them. That sounds pretty reasonable.

 

Sure, but would you take interior decoration advice from a builder who tells you your home looks like ****? He can't tell you why but he is a professional who might have spoken to a number a interior decorators so just trust him okay.

 

I would value their opinion more than someone who doesn't work on houses at all.

 

It doesn't mean I have to agree with it or anything, but there is a certain amount of logic to it.

[Hell Kitty]

I would value their opinion more than someone who doesn't work on houses at all.

 

Why? Being a builder, plumber, or electrician doesn't mean you a know more about interior decoration than a doctor, hair dresser or truck driver. There is little logic to it.

 

As a graphic designer I've worked for magazines, but that doesn't mean I know more about writing then anyone else.

[Hurlshort]

You didn't say a plumber or an electrician, you said a builder, who has a pretty large role in the construction of the house and is going to have a decent understanding of how to use space and such. I think we can move away from the analogy, it really isn't the point here.

 

I just don't get the need to jump all over Nightshape about it. It seemed like a grossly overblown reaction. Sure, Nightshape comes across as a bit pompous, but so does mkreku, so what's the big deal?

 

I actually disagree with Nightshape on the whole thing too. But I'm not really looking at the game from a technical standpoint, so I'm not going to get all aggro about it.

[Wrath of Dagon]

This is sadly not even subjective as my thoughts on this are actually based upon my professional analysis...

So you think your opinion is worth more because of your job? How conceited can one get?

 

Please, tell us, how long have you worked in this field to gain this awesome knowledge that none of us plebeians can touch? Ten years? 20?

 

I think you're a ****ing programmer with less than 5 years in the industry. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not interested in taking art advice from you.

 

I value the opinion of a mechanic on cars more than someone who drives them. That sounds pretty reasonable.

You would take the opinion of a mechanic over that of a race car driver?

[Calax]

This is sadly not even subjective as my thoughts on this are actually based upon my professional analysis...

So you think your opinion is worth more because of your job? How conceited can one get?

 

Please, tell us, how long have you worked in this field to gain this awesome knowledge that none of us plebeians can touch? Ten years? 20?

 

I think you're a ****ing programmer with less than 5 years in the industry. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not interested in taking art advice from you.

 

I value the opinion of a mechanic on cars more than someone who drives them. That sounds pretty reasonable.

You would take the opinion of a mechanic over that of a race car driver?

If I'm staring at a vehicle engine and wondering about reliability and usability? Yeah.

If I'm trying to go really really fast in a circular path with 100 other cars? No.

Edited April 12, 2011 by Calax

[Hell Kitty]

You didn't say a plumber or an electrician, you said a builder, who has a pretty large role in the construction of the house and is going to have a decent understanding of how to use space and such.

 

A builder could also put together a canvas and an easel, but that doesn't mean they could paint a picture worth ****.

 

I think we can move away from the analogy, it really isn't the point here.

 

Actually it is the point, mkreku called Nightshape out on claiming to offer an objective professional analysis. Except he's a programmer, not an art director.

 

As a graphic designer if I claim to have greater insight into writing because I've worked with and talked to writers, I can expect people to call me out on offering my opinions on writing as objective professional analysis that I can't be bothered explaining but trust me I know more about these things than you.

 

And when the professional analysis you've offered is "yellow is ****" then you really can't claim to be offering up anything better the standard internet forum dweller.

[WDeranged]

I've been playing lots of Quake Live and Counter Strike Source, I'm pretty glad to find that the ten year break hasn't dulled my reactions *that* much, I got four railgun gibs in a row last night

 

Maybe the modern hardware his helping a bit, last time I played these games my mouse had a ball in it and my screen was 14".

 

I forgot how insanely simple these games are, there's no bull****, just precision and speed.

Edited April 12, 2011 by WDeranged

[Lexx]

How can you motivate yourself playing it, without ranks and achievements and arrows that point you to where you have to move.

 

 

Still playing PS:T in the little free time I have over the week. Sadly, it's just not enough time.

[WDeranged]

How can you motivate yourself playing it, without ranks and achievements and arrows that point you to where you have to move.

 

 

Still playing PS:T in the little free time I have over the week. Sadly, it's just not enough time.

 

 

Counter Strike has Steam achievements now and Quake Live has it's own system of leaderboards, there is no escape from them, I still think it's pretty damn cool that you can play Quake in a browser though, I'm tempted to sign up.

 

What path are you taking in PS:T?

 

I only ever played it once, I went with a fighter character, mostly good, I've heard that playing the game as an evil mage opens up a huge amount of extra back story.

[Lexx]

I am keeping it as a normal fighter. Not much a fan of magic and I somehow think that a thief character isn't really fitting for the nameless one.

 

Last time I checked, my character has been lawful good. Somehow I always end up in that direction... in every game.

[Nightshape]

This is out of hand.

 

Yes, I shouldn't have been so dismissive. I hold my hand up, I shouldn't say "this is how it is, so deal with it", but the alternative really is me spending ages putting togeather a post which explains exactly why I've come to a conclusion - I'm not even saying people shouldn't have a personal preference for it, I'm just saying that the result is, well wrong, or atleast a poor representation of the source artwork, due to technical reasons.

 

Hell kitty if I may try and explain this is some way which should make it clear to everyone. I'm not fond of these analogies that are being used, because they don't touch on the reality that the graphics programmer actually needs to know something about colours - this doesn't mean they know anything about art, in that respect I only have opinion to go on. I'm woefully aware that people on these forums aren't idiots.

 

Disclaimer: This may effect your future enjoyment of games.

 

 

 

I'm going to talk a little about how art gets into game engines, I'm not trying to be condescending, it may be you all know this stuff already, I'll try and keep it basic.

 

The artist works in a 3D package(Obsidian, I think, use XSI), and a paint package (Photoshop). The artist generates three sets of data - textures, material data, and mesh data. How that data is represented depends on formats which are used, the textures are likely TGA's, the material and mesh information may be combined, or may be seperate we'll treat the seperately for the sake of clarity.

 

What texture and material information we have is directly related to what shader we're using to calculate how the material react to light, I'm going to go with a pretty standard, diffuse, specular, and normal mapping.

 

The diffuse textures represents an unlit colour map, they actually tend to look very washed out because the texture should represent no shadowing.

 

The specular texture represents the specular intensity when the surface reacts to light, how shiney the pixel is.

 

The normal map is a representation of the direction of which a pixel is facing.

 

The shader, a portion of code which runs on the gpu. It calculates how these textures work with lighting information, and produces a final colour result. This result is also influenced by the material data, the material data allows the artist to control certain parameters within the shader, perhaps representing specular power (how shiney the surface is), or fresnel, it really depends on the mathmatics within the shader.

 

The mesh is just a representation of vertex information, this could be(Cartesian coordinates)xyz, normals, uv data(how the texture us mapped to the surface) and so on, in essence we call these vertex streams.

 

All this data when an asset is exported from XSI and photoshop isn't ready for consumption by a game engine - we hit the pipeline, this is an area of the codebase which processes the artists data, into game ready data.

 

During the pipeline phase the data which the artists have created gets transformed, specifically - we're interested in what happends to the textures, material and mesh data also gets processed, it's not really a lossy transformation, but the vertex streams will see some optimization, and compression as will the material data.

 

We generate other texture information such as mip-map chains, and bake the data in a fashion as to prepare it for the GPU, which is different for different consoles.

 

The texture data depending upon which texture we're compressing will be compressed with a different DXT format, textures may also be combined into different channels, RGBA need not actually represent RGBA, infact textures are often swizzled(channels are switched RGBA -> GARB for example) to preserve as much data a possible through the compress, the texture itself my also be altered or compinsated for to help alleviate the compression spanking the actual colour information, this process is changing the source art, in AP's case it makes for a bad result. This is all realated to which type of DXT compression we choose to use 1-5 depending upon what we choose to do, the influence is mostly felt upon the how the Alpha channel is stored, but the formats also effect the bits per pixel of the RGB channels, but this compression process generates artifacts, altering the quality of the data. Its a trade off between space(memory usage) and quality.

 

This is an example of the artifacts for a DXT1 compressed texture:

 

In Alpha Protocol, the artifacts are certainly more noticeable than in most games. Go load up Alpha Protocol and see for youself, then go load up another title, like say CoD or GoW... Some big budget game which sold loads.

 

I'm not sure if the Obsidian guys actually used colour grading(basically one colour maps to another colour) to get their results, or just some filter I'm unsure, but the compression artifacts are exaggerated by this colouration process couple this with the fact that the range of colours is decreased, effecting the end result.

 

 

 

At the end of the day, if you like the result, you like it. End of story.

Edited April 12, 2011 by Nightshape

[Nightshape]

This is sadly not even subjective as my thoughts on this are actually based upon my professional analysis...

So you think your opinion is worth more because of your job? How conceited can one get?

 

Please, tell us, how long have you worked in this field to gain this awesome knowledge that none of us plebeians can touch? Ten years? 20?

 

I think you're a ****ing programmer with less than 5 years in the industry. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not interested in taking art advice from you.

 

I value the opinion of a mechanic on cars more than someone who drives them. That sounds pretty reasonable.

You would take the opinion of a mechanic over that of a race car driver?

 

The race car driver is actually the gamer.

 

The mechanic is somewhat like the programmer.

 

The artist is more like the engineer which makes the parts of the engine.

 

It's not actually a very good analogy.

[Labadal]

Anyway, I'm still playing more Vagrant Story. The graphics doesn't hold up very well anymore, but I still enjoy the story. Reached the first workshop in the game, but had to save and quit there.

[Nightshape]

Anyway, I'm still playing more Vagrant Story. The graphics doesn't hold up very well anymore, but I still enjoy the story. Reached the first workshop in the game, but had to save and quit there.

 

Any chance of a more indepth overview, I've had the game sat on my PSP for a while, but never been too sure that it would be worth the time investment, whats the combat, and story like?

[Wrath of Dagon]

I'm not sure if the Obsidian guys actually used colour grading(basically one colour maps to another colour) to get their results, or just some filter I'm unsure, but the compression artifacts are exaggerated by this colouration process couple this with the fact that the range of colours is decreased, effecting the end result.

 

At the end of the day, if you like the result, you like it. End of story.

If you said that to start with, instead of something like "the graphics are crap", I don't think anyone would've argued with you.

[Labadal]

The combat isn't that great( or bad) to be honest. The first time I played it, I didn't know about affinity and other things for combat. Rapiers are good versus zombies, swords versus humans, spears versus dragons and so on. The more you use them against the respective enemy, the better tvey become. You can infuse weapons and shields with enchantments, you can also forge your own weapons. I had no clue about this the first time. You move around freely, but the combat is turn based when you initiate it. When you are in combat mode, you can target different body parts, left/right leg and arm, body and head(human enemies). Each time you attack, your RISK meter fills up. You don't want your RISK meter to fill up too much. Why? The damage you deal goes up, but your accuracy goes down, so you want to finish battles off quickly. I haven't played any other game with a similar combat system in my 20 years of gaming, so explaining it is not easy for me(sorry). You also get spells at your disposal. There are four different "schools". Damage dealing, buffs, debuffs and healing based. Some spells gets stronger as you use them. Some spells can target multiple body parts. Then we have break arts, wich can one hit kill enemies, but you consume hp, so you want to be careful about that. What else... When you defeat a boss, you will randomly gain one better stat (str, int, hp, mp and so on). Remember that combat is menu based, but you later gain Defensive abilities and Chain abilities. You have to time a button press for these. When someone attacks you a "!" will pop up, time it and you perform your defensive ability. When you attack, you can again see a "!" and that is your chance to do a chain attack. You can assign 3 defensive and 3 chain abilities at a time. You can access your spells, abilities, break arts and items by pressing L2, (lol, PSP?).

Your limbs get hurt(can be healed with the heal spell) when fighting. Injured head, can't use magic or weaker magic. Injured feet mean slower walk/run speed.

 

Outside of combat, you progress through "rooms". Clear one and move on to another one. Some rooms have puzzles for you to solve for gaining access to optional areas or sometimes to progress the game. Some rooms have traps in them, the healing traps being a gift from above.

 

(I am betting that my explanation is confusing the hell out you, it confuses even me, but this is how the game works. )

Watching a few youtube vids is adviced.

 

If you have played other games by the "Matsuno" team, you can expect a story with many twist and turns. I'm not very good on giving story details without spoiling stuff.

[Mera]

This is an example of the artifacts for a DXT1 compressed texture:

http://www.malcolm341.com/misc/tgavsdxt_01.jpg

DXT1 doesn't look this badly, what have you done?

[Nightshape]

This is an example of the artifacts for a DXT1 compressed texture:

http://www.malcolm341.com/misc/tgavsdxt_01.jpg

DXT1 doesn't look this badly, what have you done?

 

I haven't done anything, and yes, it can look that bad, it depends on what colour you actually have as your source colour, grey and black are specifically very bad when it comes to dxt compression.

 

edit: Alot of the AP textures look worse than this.

Edited April 12, 2011 by Nightshape