Idle Thumbs 151: A Fascinating Experience

[seamus2389]

  On 3/26/2014 at 8:58 PM, Flynn said:

Interesting to contrast Free to Play with The Smash Brothers here.  The Smash Brothers didn't have good footage of the original events and so relied mostly on interviews, and luckily there were some people who were could communicate the feels of those events amazingly (like Wife).

 

For anyone who somehow missed it, I think it captures a gaming subculture even better than Free to Play:

 

 

I  watched the two documentaries one day after another and Free to Play just didn't grab me like Smash Bros did. Watching Smash Bros has me wanting a similar treatment of the Street Fighter scene. I do wonder how much of that being down to being way more familiar with the pro video game competition than the more amateur/semi-pro Melee scene

[Nijhazer]

  On 3/27/2014 at 2:45 AM, Jake said:

We're the worst in all ways

 

No worries, man. What you guys are really the best at doing is talking about the things, and the people, that you really like. For example, your discussion of Quadrilateral Cowboy really hooked me on this episode-- previously, the game hasn't been on my radar even though you guys have talked about it before, but I'm definitely looking forward to it now.

[cowuponacow]

Very interesting discussion regarding the CGI in Free To Play. I'm of several minds on the issue.

 

My first reaction was, "This is lame. The game should speak for itself. Just use the in-game graphics."

 

Then I reconsidered. As mentioned elsewhere, the documentary is really about the players, not the game. If we compare Dota to chess, a documentary about chess should probably go into detail about different strategies and gambits, but a documentary about chess players could probably be forgiven if it simplified key moves with generic phrases like "Kasparov's testing him now, trying to find a chink in his armor..."

 

(It's also worth considering, that if a given sequence in a game of Dota is so high-level that even a decent player has trouble understanding its significance, then someone like me, who doesn't play Dota, is going to need a lot of help to even begin to understand it. It might be more time-efficient to show a custom-rendered sequence that communicated the salient, but non-technical, points.)

 

...But then I reconsidered again. And I think it would be better if they used in-game footage. The people who play Dota competitively don't do so (I imagine) because they love to watch elves and demons fight with sweet glowing swords. They're engaging with the mechanics of the game, not the aesthetic. To use the chess analogy again, I think it'd seem pretty juvenile for a documentary about chess to replace images of the board and pieces with a CGI sequence of a knight swordfighting a queen.

[eot]

  On 3/27/2014 at 10:31 PM, TychoCelchuuu said:

It is sparse and morose, for the most part: the atmosphere is very similar to the STALKER games, for instance. But if it's the color you're worried about, the "bring the color back" slider works super well.

I don't think that B&W looks good at all, it just looks like the most straightforward RGB -> BW conversion possible and that never looks good.

 

Compare with a random example like this:

If you're going to do B&W then take the time to do it right, because a sloppy version just looks like poo in my opinion.

[Problem Machine]

Okay. How would you approach writing the fragment shader code to procedurally generate a more optimized example?

[Roderick]

Whoa there, that sounds like the fallacy that a critic should be a creator of equal skill before he may criticize something. What eot wrote was strongly worded, but a fair point which he backed up with a clear example of what would be better.

[Problem Machine]

Except it wasn't a clear example at all. It doesn't have to be worded like a programmer, but if you can't state something as "this looks bad, it should look more like this" I don't think it's particularly valuable criticism. The fact is, it's way easier to tweak a single picture than it is to develop a procedural algorithm to do it in real-time, so unless eot can provide examples of another GAME that does it well it seems like needlessly harsh and, perhaps, ill-informed criticism. I may just be reacting a bit harshly, though, because it feels like people are taking Sean's problems with the game as excuse or encouragement to insult or dismiss it, which is pretty not cool.

[RubixsQube]

I don't know if I understand eot's argument based on the image provided. I don't have a strong opinion about the art style employed  by Betrayer, but trom the videos and images that I've seen from the game, it does look like they're going for an artistic bend that is different from the example image of that pond above. I think that they perhaps look different, in that the contrast is higher in the pond image than what was done in the game, but maybe I'm missing something entirely. 

[TychoCelchuuu]

I played Betrayer more or less entirely in black and white and I thought it looked gorgeous.

[BigJKO]

Alright.. Just purely technically I don't think the shader they're using is doing anything but putting a greyscale filter on each frame of the game as it's rendered, so effectively it's the same as manipulating a picture.

 

The difference between the Betrayal filter and the pond photo is the pond photo takes into account the Red, Green and Blue values when converting it to greyscale.  It basically gives a higher contrast to, for example, the Red channel, making select colors darker and brighter when it's converted, instead of treating them all the same.  

 

I can't imagine it would require some complex procedural algorithm.

 

Unity, for example, has a shader that allows you to desaturate but also control the curves of each channel, which I think would enable you to make it look more like the pond picture.

[ajr82]

Given Jake's professed love of historically-set genre works, I sure hope he's watching The Americans on FX.

[eot]

Apparently I came off as more of a dick than I intended, sorry about that.

  On 3/28/2014 at 11:22 AM, Problem Machine said:

Okay. How would you approach writing the fragment shader code to procedurally generate a more optimized example?

If I were to make a B&W game in 3D I probably wouldn't colour the assets to begin with because making a good colour -> B&W conversion is hard, but a) I'm not a professional game dev and I don't see how that matters.

 

  On 3/28/2014 at 1:50 PM, RubixsQube said:

I don't know if I understand eot's argument based on the image provided. I don't have a strong opinion about the art style employed  by Betrayer, but trom the videos and images that I've seen from the game, it does look like they're going for an artistic bend that is different from the example image of that pond above. I think that they perhaps look different, in that the contrast is higher in the pond image than what was done in the game, but maybe I'm missing something entirely. 

I guess I wasn't very clear. I just think (based on what I've seen of the game) that the B&W effect doesn't look very good, the dark areas get crushed and lose detail, and the brighter ones get even more washed out, as if they cut off part of the colour range. Maybe that's exactly what they were going for though. I'm not saying it should look just like the picture I posted, it's just an example of a B&W conversion preserves more of the detail in the image and I think that looks better. To my eye the game looks a bit too much like this.

[Problem Machine]

  On 3/28/2014 at 3:36 PM, BigJKO said:

Alright.. Just purely technically I don't think the shader they're using is doing anything but putting a greyscale filter on each frame of the game as it's rendered, so effectively it's the same as manipulating a picture.

The difference between the Betrayal filter and the pond photo is the pond photo takes into account the Red, Green and Blue values when converting it to greyscale. It basically gives a higher contrast to, for example, the Red channel, making select colors darker and brighter when it's converted, instead of treating them all the same.

I can't imagine it would require some complex procedural algorithm.

Unity, for example, has a shader that allows you to desaturate but also control the curves of each channel, which I think would enable you to make it look more like the pond picture.

I'm sure it's probably as easy as you say, since the algorithm shouldn't be especially difficult in any case, it's just that someone has to actually provide those values... and values that look good for an image of, say, a pond, may not be the same values that work well for an image of a burning building or a ghost eating a slice of pie. So, then, is it the level designer's job to place triggers that change the values based on the area? Should the programmer develop an algorithm to determine the best settings based on the color balance of the picture? All I'm saying is that solving problems like this for a still image isn't really the same field of endeavor as solving them, satisfactorily, as a general case.

 

  On 3/28/2014 at 4:05 PM, eot said:

I guess I wasn't very clear. I just think (based on what I've seen of the game) that the B&W effect doesn't look very good, the dark areas get crushed and lose detail, and the brighter ones get even more washed out, as if they cut off part of the colour range.

Frankly I think that's more of a problem with the other shaders, since it seems to favor the high-contrast low-saturation style that's in vogue and making everything look kind of shitty nowadays.

[RubixsQube]

  On 3/28/2014 at 4:05 PM, eot said:

I guess I wasn't very clear. I just think (based on what I've seen of the game) that the B&W effect doesn't look very good, the dark areas get crushed and lose detail, and the brighter ones get even more washed out, as if they cut off part of the colour range. Maybe that's exactly what they were going for though. I'm not saying it should look just like the picture I posted, it's just an example of a B&W conversion preserves more of the detail in the image and I think that looks better. To my eye the game looks a bit too much like this.

 

I think that the image you just showed is indeed closer to the look of the game, but I don't know if I would assume that the look was a result of poor B&W conversion. Instead, I think that they wanted to go with a stark, high-contrast look with some splashes of red. This is a "thing" at this point. 

[TychoCelchuuu]

  On 3/28/2014 at 4:05 PM, eot said:

I guess I wasn't very clear. I just think (based on what I've seen of the game) that the B&W effect doesn't look very good, the dark areas get crushed and lose detail, and the brighter ones get even more washed out, as if they cut off part of the colour range. Maybe that's exactly what they were going for though. I'm not saying it should look just like the picture I posted, it's just an example of a B&W conversion preserves more of the detail in the image and I think that looks better. To my eye the game looks a bit too much like this.

That effect is explicitly what they are going for. Here are the default settings for the color range:

Notice how both the dark and light intensity are cranked way up. Things are blown out and washed out on purpose. I think it looks tremendous (much more so in motion):

Especially compared to what would happen if they just did what you think they did, which is just straight up black and whiting a normal-colored picture. You can tell they didn't do this because if you turn the intensities down to nothing and turn on the color, you get this:

Notice how the sky isn't blue (and in fact there's nothing you can do to the sky to make it blue). The colors are built with an eye towards being turned black and white and blown out - if you don't blow it out, it just looks like this:

[sclpls]

Count me as a fan of the look of Betrayer. I like the high contrast, it reminds me of the look of the movie Dead Man. If it was just gray scale like the last picture TychoCelchuuu posted it might be more legible, but the tradeoff is it is more flat and uninteresting looking.

[eot]

  On 3/28/2014 at 4:23 PM, TychoCelchuuu said:

That effect is explicitly what they are going for. Here are the default settings for the color range:

Notice how both the dark and light intensity are cranked way up. Things are blown out and washed out on purpose. I think it looks tremendous (much more so in motion):

Especially compared to what would happen if they just did what you think they did, which is just straight up black and whiting a normal-colored picture. You can tell they didn't do this because if you turn the intensities down to nothing and turn on the color, you get this:

Notice how the sky isn't blue (and in fact there's nothing you can do to the sky to make it blue). The colors are built with an eye towards being turned black and white and blown out - if you don't blow it out, it just looks like this:

Fair enough. Personally I'd rather play with the settings in the last image.

[Problem Machine]

Yeah personally I don't find the high contrast look especially evocative because, as I said, it's becoming something of a cliche at this point. The low-contrast version goes a bit too far in the other direction, but I actually think I'd prefer it anyway... in black and white at least, the low-contrast color version looks pretty terrible. None of them really set my imagination on fire, though.

[BobbyBesar]

  On 3/28/2014 at 4:05 PM, eot said:

Apparently I came off as more of a dick than I intended, sorry about that.

If I were to make a B&W game in 3D I probably wouldn't colour the assets to begin with because making a good colour -> B&W conversion is hard, but a) I'm not a professional game dev and I don't see how that matters.

They apparently came to the decision to convert to B&W partway through development, so many assets had already been created. I imagine there would be some benefit to creating intentionally B&W assets vs. image-processing color assets, but I don't know enough artistically to guess what it would be.

[Jake]

  On 3/28/2014 at 3:48 PM, ajr82 said:

Given Jake's professed love of historically-set genre works, I sure hope he's watching The Americans on FX.

I am, and like it a lot. I think Chris also watches it.

[sclpls]

I'm really interested in the controlling multiple characters aspect of the game. That makes it sound like Signal Ops, which had awkward controls that made the game difficult to get into initially, but was a really fun immersive stealth type game once you got the hang of it.

[feelthedarkness]

The combination of Betrayer being a little janky, impenetrable, and like Stalker is like a siren's call to me. 

[SecretAsianMan]

RE: Pole dancing robots

 

 

RE: Google glass

 

[CaptainFish]

Is that the robot video they were referring to on the cast? It's what I saw when I looked it up, but I thought they said something about heels and a mirror. I wanna be horrified too!

 

Edit: Oh, no! I found it on cnet! I take it all back.

[SecretAsianMan]

No, it's probably not the same video they were referring to.  I'm not sure which one they were talking about, but I posted the one above in the Big Dog thread.