11th December 2004, 5:42 PM
But these are not drawings, Ms. Jaguar.
These are showing realistic poly counts that the next gen can display. So, take out the motion bluring and the neat lighting effects and you'll have an idea. Prerendered lighting effects are always spectacular and never give you an idea of actual graphic quality. Think of the video that Nintendo showed with Waverace Blue Storm and Metroid Prime. It looked almost exactly like the real games minus motion blur and the extremely beautiful lighting. Also, real-time will never look as 'solid' as pre-rendered. All 3-D video games have a cartoony 'floaty' look to them, like everything is made out of plastic. To make it look like pre-rendered, you'd have to light the game as you would a film, which means EVERYTHING would have to be real time lighting, EVERYTHING would have to be ultra subtle and you would have very little left for your cpu to use on graphics.
Real time lighting is still photoshop quality. Spotlights facing in different directions at different variables in strength and diffusion but all of them at extremes, nothing in-game will ever be subtle because then it wont be seen, or that's the fear anyway. Those pre-rendered shots have dynamic lighting that only top end machines can do in animation but not in real time. Hopefully it'll change, but I doubt it. I think even the next gen stuff, even as real as it will try to be, will still end up looking like a really well produced, realistic cartoon.
I'd love to see lighting in a game with progressivley darkening hallways that reach a point of pitch black in to the distance, where everything isn't flately lit so you can see 1000 miles in to the diatance in perfect detail... but that'll never happen. Look at Metroid Echoes, you visit "Dark Aether" but you can still SEE way off in to the distance while inside a cave that has no lights inside of it. It would have been cool if the game player had to charge their gun in order to illuminate their immeadiate surroundings. But oh well, realistic lighting will happen someday when some developer takes the courage to try it and sacrifice graphics detail for lighting detail. Resident Evil 4 looks like it'll have some nice lighting though.
These are showing realistic poly counts that the next gen can display. So, take out the motion bluring and the neat lighting effects and you'll have an idea. Prerendered lighting effects are always spectacular and never give you an idea of actual graphic quality. Think of the video that Nintendo showed with Waverace Blue Storm and Metroid Prime. It looked almost exactly like the real games minus motion blur and the extremely beautiful lighting. Also, real-time will never look as 'solid' as pre-rendered. All 3-D video games have a cartoony 'floaty' look to them, like everything is made out of plastic. To make it look like pre-rendered, you'd have to light the game as you would a film, which means EVERYTHING would have to be real time lighting, EVERYTHING would have to be ultra subtle and you would have very little left for your cpu to use on graphics.
Real time lighting is still photoshop quality. Spotlights facing in different directions at different variables in strength and diffusion but all of them at extremes, nothing in-game will ever be subtle because then it wont be seen, or that's the fear anyway. Those pre-rendered shots have dynamic lighting that only top end machines can do in animation but not in real time. Hopefully it'll change, but I doubt it. I think even the next gen stuff, even as real as it will try to be, will still end up looking like a really well produced, realistic cartoon.
I'd love to see lighting in a game with progressivley darkening hallways that reach a point of pitch black in to the distance, where everything isn't flately lit so you can see 1000 miles in to the diatance in perfect detail... but that'll never happen. Look at Metroid Echoes, you visit "Dark Aether" but you can still SEE way off in to the distance while inside a cave that has no lights inside of it. It would have been cool if the game player had to charge their gun in order to illuminate their immeadiate surroundings. But oh well, realistic lighting will happen someday when some developer takes the courage to try it and sacrifice graphics detail for lighting detail. Resident Evil 4 looks like it'll have some nice lighting though.