Depth of Field is hard to be done realistically in any game in my opinion … because then it would need to read your mind.
Bloom on the other hand is more forgiving.
The problem is that the eyes and the brain work extremely good together to mitigate DoF.
Your eyes do indeed have Depth of Field. But micro movement of the eye don’t only “Scan” areas of a Picture but also different depths.
For me Depth of Field is only noticeable when looking at a picture with something 20 cm in front and something 20 meters in the back. The instant (about a quarter of a second) I think about the trees outside of my window they are focused.
I would say try a very broad depth of field with smooth edges and a fast focus.
Bloom in video game graphics is simply an optical illusion to that allows more information to be given to the player in an intuitive manner. The reason that bloom is needed is that your monitor can only generate brightness in effects up to its own limitations. To fake a light that is brighter than the monitor can display you use bloom. This tells the player’s brain that the light is brighter than it really is because we associate blooming effects with very bright lights.
I wholeheartedly agree.
I simply cant stand motion blur.
Not only is it annoying to look at. In most cases it actually make mouse response slightly delayed.
If game doesn’t have way to disable it, i simply cant play it.
From the top of my head for instance AVP3 didn’t have this option. (at least the demo didn’t)
However what i can accept, was the way Volition did something like that in Freespace (or in sequel)
If you moved your ship fast enough some of the stars in background faded.
So the player would perceive important objects in more contrast. It was actually useful in hectic situations.
But it wasn’t really blur per se.
DoF ? Your eyes do that same thing. Why bother?
But its not that annoying.
It same issue like 3d movies.
In every motion picture you are forced to look what cameraman wanted you to look at. And in case of 3d movie this effect is even stronger.
Yeah its nice once in a while, but I prefer normal.
Now that you say that, there are some games that use DoF like that. For example, FPS where the weapon is unfocused in iron sight, or when you are focusing on the object at hand and the background is blurred (like when modifying weapons in Crysis, for example).
Using tracking to focus on what you are looking at - I wonder how well this would work.
AFAICT, my eyes’ bloom don’t look like the smooth, regular one we see in games. It is more like dozens of thin spikes (a bit like an ursine), who are not quite regular in brightness (a partial ‘dotted line’ effect), with a small splash right around the light itself, making its borders slightly irregular.
While we’re at it, red light doesn’t cause the eye to adapt. Would it be possible to make a HDR where the red colour isn’t taken into account for the light level adaptation? I can see a few applications in games where, like IRL, red light would be used in low-light environment for this reason.
As I mention in this blog article, and as @INovaeGene already mentions, bloom is caused naturally by a scene with a large range of luminances that are both within and outside of your eye’s current visible luminances. Therefore for us to naturally cause bloom in your eye you would have to use an HDR display that is capable of outputting a similar range of luminances. Since you, along with most everybody else, are using a crappy LDR display we have to fake the effect for you. As @Crayfish mentions the bloom effect subconsciously makes you think part of the image is brighter so while a generic bloom algorithm isn’t perfect it goes a long way toward creating convincing HDR scenes. Without bloom you would just have over-saturated parts of the image that look really weird. Perhaps at some point I’ll post a screen shot of what an HDR scene looks like without bloom, it looks kinda funny.
One thing i would beg you guys, by TotalBiscuit’s monocle, to include every single graphics option available as a slider and/or toggle in the options menu. Don’t assume “ah, it looks good anyway” and neglect to include. If the engine allows it please let us toggle it. Everything, like shadows, reflections, DOF, Bloom, Blur, Tessalation, texture quality, AF, AA, SSAO, FOV slider, HDR, mip level, render scale, render range, etc… I know it makes the game look worse but it is important to let us chose.
What if my PC is crappy and all i have is a knob that turns Low, Medium and High? What if it’s a beast and i want to set the render scale to 2 and everything else on Ultra? What about mods taking some options even further? This isn’t a console port, please include all available options, even if through an .ini line only.
We’ll do the best we can. Some things we may not make available for changing, outside of a mod, due to gameplay fairness issues however we will definitely be soliciting community feedback during alpha/beta to make the game as inclusive as possible.
“due to gameplay fairness issues”
I can’t possibly think of anything that affects fairness of play that has to do with graphics since all options are available to all? I guess we’ll have to wait for the alpha/beta to actually see how it works.
When there are graphical effects that can obstruct player view and one player has them turned off while another has them turned on that can introduce balance issues.
Fortunate, then, that the devs must have stated hundreds of times by now that cockpit view wont be in game at launch, if ever.
But yeah, while I’m a big fan of being able to turn off the stuff that blurs out details, I really hate how games like DayZ lets you turn off enough of the details themselves to give an advantage to players willing to let their game look terrible. Nothing quite so disruptive to immersion as the knowledge that what you’re seeing is most often only barely reminiscent of what other players see.
Yeah… discussions which I had not seen any official word no longer applied until just now.
Excellent.
EDIT: Turns out I had seen official word but simply not perceived it as such since it was part of a post mostly concerned with turning down an idea to replace landing gear with cockpit interiors. I read it as “no, landing legs rather than cockpits” while what it said was “no, both landing legs and cockpits”.
Even back then, the discussion was about the implementation of 3D modelled cockpits like in the 2010 tech demo.
I believe a 1st person ‘cockpit view’ has always been a definite.
Are you referring to just the periphery of a forward facing view, or a full cockpit interior like in this image?
Huh, I have yet to decide if I prefer cockpit view or third person, for space combat. I have to admit I love taking a look at my ship sometimes though, do you plan any kind of panoramic cam just for when we want to take a screenshot or such?
I’m not opposed to having a 3rd person camera since I also like to look at how cool my ship looks but it’s unlikely it’ll contain any cockpit instrumentation or other information so as to be primarily artistic. The exception to this may be large capital ships which will likely only have a 3rd person view.
