next »

[Danmark]

It's my general philosophy that putting extra love into each of 30 (or 25!) frames is a more worthy pursuit than making sacrifices to achieve 60 or more.  As a last analog, the Nintendo Wii is 480p.  (480p!)  There are some damn nice looking Wii games out there -- they tend use high-quality antialiasing, as compared to 1080p with jagged edges and pixel sparkle as seen in a baffling proportion of high-profile 360 games.  Crisper is not always better.

Back when I played games on shitboxes, I'd crank the settings (minus AA/AF) up to max, even if it led to 12 FPS. Agreed that the beauty of images is more important than framerate, but frame limiting around 30 FPS is only appropriate on consoles, where min and max framerates for a game are known. Practically all games will still be more pleasant at a higher framerate.

As for Wii games, I think it has little to do with antialiasing. Games with timeless aesthetics look better at 1080p with no AA than at 480p with 16x MSAA. As resolution increases, the need for AA diminishes, and beyond 1080p hardly any in-game images have aliasing so severe as to pull you out of the game (of course 360 games seldom render at anything close to 1080p).

Conversely, no AA could even begin to redeem the modern big-name game aesthetic. When legions of artists max out detail in every single laboriously produced texture and model, the result is a screen saturated in localized nuance, but with no bold substance. Also, everything must be gritty, grimy, dirty, or broken, because otherwise, an opportunity for detail is lost. Everything melds together to a grainy gruel. Just look at this shit.

BTW what do you mean by 'pixel sparkle'?

[Trevor Dunbar]

Anyways, I think a good way of doing this motion blur thing might not be to smear everything on the screen going fast

Nothing beats the Nintendo 64 for Vaseline Vision (tm)

Oh, yeah, definitely. Also known for Real-Time Hardware Accelerated Fog Technology™

9 out of 10 levels in any game foggier than washington.

[rivon]

Human eyes capture imagery at 5-10 hz

Oh please

[PompiPompi]

I made a more correct motion blur instead of the "good enough" hack I had until now.
I think it looks a lot better now.

http://youtu.be/jEOBVm6q_Rw

[Polly]

I think it looks a lot better now.

You might want to render a screen-space velocity map and subtract it from your camera velocity to control the smear amount. That way you can prevent for example the gun shadow ( which moves at the same velocity as the camera when you're strafing ) to appear blurred.

[bluescrn]

60 hz was expected of a console game 25 years ago. It would be awful if half that became standard now.

I'm not really arguing against motion blur, I'm arguing against low framerate (the lower it is, the more intrusive the blur is).

If you can't run at 60fps, you shouldn't even be considering motion smear shaders.

Real motion blur (from a camera) is temporal antialiasing - it's the average image seen between the two frames. Shader-based motion smear effects are bad approximations which rarely look good. And they never compensate for a lack of framerate.

(This is completely unrelated to artificial motion trails, as seen in hand-drawn animation, which do work very nicely if done well)

As an older developer, It's painful to watch this new generation of 30hz game developers - that simply haven't experienced 'arcade-quality' 60fps (vsynced) gaming, as they've grown up in a post-arcade world, where 30fps, bad touchscreen controls, and pay-to-win are the accepted norms...  Why did we allow gaming to become so crap?

Every one of you that says '30fps is just fine' (when it so clearly isn't) are in part responsible for the decline of gaming!

[PompiPompi]

I think it looks a lot better now.

You might want to render a screen-space velocity map and subtract it from your camera velocity to control the smear amount. That way you can prevent for example the gun shadow ( which moves at the same velocity as the camera when you're strafing ) to appear blurred.

You are right about the shaodw, but what you suggested won't solve it.
The problem is that the shadow is projected on the floor. So the floor is moving but the shadow isn't.
I would have to render the shadows seperatly if I wanted to deal with their motion blur, but that is a bit too much for me right now.

Edit: Just so there won't be any doubt, this motion blur runs at 60 FPS.

[Polly]

You are right about the shaodw, but what you suggested won't solve it.
The problem is that the shadow is projected on the floor. So the floor is moving but the shadow isn't.
I would have to render the shadows seperatly if I wanted to deal with their motion blur, but that is a bit too much for me right now.

When rendering your shadow maps, also render the velocity map to your target buffer. Then when rendering the screen-space velocity map, use those values instead of the "default" shadow map result.

[PompiPompi]

That won't look good. Because the floor does move.
Think of shadows moving in one direction while the wall moves in the other direction, not so simple right?

[Evan Balster]

Real motion blur (from a camera) is temporal antialiasing - it's the average image seen between the two frames. Shader-based motion smear effects are bad approximations which rarely look good. And they never compensate for a lack of framerate.

So extending the temporal aliasing analogy -- let's talk about raster aliasing.  I prefer a visual that uses a lower resolution (600p) and good AA algorithms to one that uses a higher resolution (1280p) and no AA whatsoever.  The extra detail is more than my eyes can generally notice, but the crawling pixels on near-vertical and near-horizontal lines are extremely obvious.

The human eye picks up details at 5-10 hz, so anything above that is done in service of the illusion of continuous motion.  The way I see it, the same principles can apply:  worry less about resolution of aliased samples (frames or pixels) and put the abundance of saved processing power towards greater continuity of motion.  Motion blur tends to look bad because it's implemented poorly or applied without subtlety.  At least, such is my opinion.

[Schoq]

A game running at 30 hz will look some combination of blurry and choppy in motion, there's no way around that. I don't get why you'd advocate settling for worse than we were used to in 1990.

Having a method of faking higher resolution isn't a reason to stop aspiring for better quality.
It's like saying you shouldn't bother with higher than 320*240 if you have AA, or beyond 8 bits of colour/sound if you have dithering.

And I have no idea what you're talking about with the human eye and the 5-10 hz thing (sources?), but I know that when I look at something it shouldn't become smeared just because the camera is moving.

IMO, motion blur is an OK method of making the game more fluid, but should only be used after you've made the game run as fast as the display can draw.