Official Off-Topic Thread

[#36005A]

I don't care about Samus, who is Samus, even? When I play Super Metroid, *I* am the person going around on the planet, not some Samus.

So my problem isn't that they misrepresent Samus's personality in the newer game, it's that Samus even has a voice and a face. I don't care about that stuff, the meta-plot inf these games is vapid at best. I just want to go around a well-crafted platform game at my own pace, in my solitude. Super Metroid is like a sensory deprivation tank for me, I think about different shit when I go around it, I don't think about Samus's personality. And if I want people around, I'll invite my friends and we'll swap the controller around and talk about the game.

Thank you, I have been trying to figure out what exactly is the "different experience" of Metroid Prime. For some reason it just didn't have any sort of impact on me, unlike Super Metroid which had a major one (and still does whenever I pick it up). You hit the nail on the head here.

[Conzeit]

Awesome new skin my mia.

I don't think we've reached photorealism yet. Not by a long shot.

That shot can't be that long if you ask me.
Soon some new 3d mumbo jumbo will allow for an arbitrary amount of scalable detail and bam, we're almost there.
Like hardware tesselation.
From there on, it's just a matter of convincing animations which is a whole different thing.

I LOVE the wireframe view of that....it feels much more alluring and engaging than same old detail we see every day, the wireframe seems to me like a representation of how our perceptions picks up new relationships betwen things the more we look at them, like a matrix code of perception. Much more interesting.

[Helm]

That doesn't look photorealistic at all to me but it might just be my brain as opposed to other people's brain

[9_6]

Probably not but it's only a tech demo anyway.
Screenshots of some games look like photos already. Not much is missing.

[Helm]

Oh yeah sure I've been tricked by small stills from tech demos and whatever thinking they're photos, but in motion, and in the context of realistic, human motion and animation, these fall apart very fast. We have decades in front of us before there is a real-time 3d experience that is indistinguishable from scenes from a movie.

[9_6]

Sure, that's why I said convincing animations is a whole different thing.
You can have all the details in the world, models made up of millions of tris but it all falls apart if you move them wrongly.
For reference look at, well, almost any movie with cgi characters in it.

The motions are either so snappy that no weight is being conveyed at all or so uniform that it just looks artificial.
Then there's those terrible cliches that monsters always have to roar towards the camera and that stuff just has to move in a blur at some point which we'll probably never see the end of.
It's tiny immersion-breakers like this.

I have not yet seen anything cgi that looks 'real', no matter how 'realistic' it looks. If that made any sense.

[Rydin]

I have not yet seen anything cgi that looks 'real', no matter how 'realistic' it looks. If that made any sense.

This is because of the "uncanny valley." (fun name!)  There is a point when something human-looking approaches realism where human empathy for the object drops severely and starts to evoke emotions of fear, death, and morbidity. This happens with wax models, 3d models, human-looking Japanese robots, etc.

For example:

Jarring isn't it?  Uncanny valley is why this picture is utterly disturbing.

They (scientists and professional guessers) say that this uncanny valley response is a built in emotional response.  Humans naturally want to avoid the sickly and diseased for survival.  The corpse appearance also reminds us that we will too die some day.  So pile all this up together and you've got Uncanny Valley.

On that note, here's cgi animation that claims to surpass the uncanny valley: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF_NFmtw89g

[9_6]

Oh wow, there is a term for it?
That's interesting.

It also happens to be the perfect term to describe the latest final fantasy games then.
There's probably no other game series out there that puts as much emphasis on perfecting its visuals.
No matter how perfect they look, they're still kinda awkward and waxy. It's not just minor facial expressions though, the strange acting of the characters adds a big deal to it.
They're the uncanny valley games.


And now for something completely different, tinypic.com just decided to spontaneously combust so is there any other free image hosting site that isn't slow (imageshack) and doesn't require you to make a profile (photobucket) worth checking out?
I got a lot of suddenly dead picture links to replace it seems. Bugger.

[Conzeit]

That doesn't look photorealistic at all to me but it might just be my brain as opposed to other people's brain

I think the point here was that with generative systems we will eventually reach a point where we can make enviroments that look photo realistic. I do think that's the only way we're gonna get there....SPORE was a start.

[Helm]

I think people will want to achieve that and will work to achieve that for the next ten years or so, yes.