Literal generations of video games have been lost to shitty Unreal and Unity lighting The best looking games are still the ones that had to invent their own lighting solutions and rely on artistry rather than engine light
>>730629787>lostLol wtf are you talking about
>>730629787This image immediately makes me want to play.All the super realistic crap ruined games.
>>730629971They're lit like shit forever
>>730630095tekken is in the top right.
>>730629787The context of the bottom right image is also pretty based
>>730630095Those were considered realistic at the time except sly
>>730631250Lol and that affects the gameplay, how?
>>730631991No one mentioned gameplay retard, you have brain problems or something
>>730629787PS1 and PS2 era Tekken is so cool.
>>730629787true, this point isn't talked about enough unreal isn't only bad performance, it's awful visuals
>>730632060You're saying games are lost due to fucking lighting lolYOU got the brain problems homie!
>>730632981They look like shit and they didn't need to, that's a loss retard
>>730629787Now compare it to rdr2
What is top left?
>>730634105It looks like Grandia I dunno, alot of PS2 RPGs looked like that, if it is Grandia play the PS1 games first as those are essential af.
>>730629787Sigh, yet against this unsightly conservative impulse.
>>730629787Do you really think top right looks better than this?
>>730637442yes and if you don't you're everything that is wrong with the world
>>730629787Now you understand how 2d pixel art patricians felt with 3d
>>730637442Yes. And I'm tired of pretending it doesnt
>>730637442>soulless
>>730637442Yes
>>730637651thats reasonable, except there was clearly a point in the early-mid 2000s where 3D games were in their prime and the visuals were comparitavely as impressive as the best 2D games of their own time
Yes baked lighting is a lost art form and Unity and UE games with default lighting look pretty bad.This isn't really news.The thing is you can bake lighting super easily in Blender or what have you so there's no REASON games on these engines look bad. Amateur devs are just not artistically talented. And why would they be? Anyone who knows how to do environment lighting is working at a studio.So this is another problem solved by waiting for the industry to collapse.
>>730629787The problem isn't Unreal or Unity, problem is 9th gen consoles, they're not a step up from 8th gen consoles. The same for the upcoming 10th gen consoles. Moore's Law is dead.
You guys are the past, and you are not able to die so that you can be reborn. Sad to see, but that is the way of the world.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7m_qmr7KYA
>>730637651Some games you simply cannot do in 2D
>>730637965that doesn't even make sense. If games looked better on older consoles then future consoles having stronger hardware or not should be irrelevant. Game visual quality doesn't scale linearly with hardware, that's nigger-tier thinking.
>>730637625>>730637651>>730637736>>730637759>>730637872Let me guess, you hate AI too
>>730638135No AI is based because its going to kill so many fucking entertainment industries it hopefully destroys the entire entertainment ecosystem and triggers real life physical violence over copyright concerns.
>>730638135If its good its goodIf its bad its badYour post is bad. Simple as.
>>730637878I don't wanna write off all of 3d as bad but what happened was 3d graphics at its worst killed off 2d art at its peak. You can still have stylized 3d art today but the kind of 2d animation with industry pros at their height of skill with proper production is like catching lightning in a bottle
>>730629787maybe if devs realized that you can achieve good art direction using basic diffuse and lighting with lightmaps or vertex colors instead of PBR everything and being too lazy to bake lightmaps instead of we'd get more of itI still sometimes wonder about the timeline where square kept iterating on the art direction they did with ff13 optimizing their pipeline where they would've gonegame from 2009
>>730638858>maybe if devs realized they could work harder for results that look the same to the faggots in the boardroom they'd choose to work harderAre you dumb
>>730638929yeah im saying if the devs gave a shit about art direction games could look bettersorry thats a hard concept to grasp
>>730629787>The best looking games are still the ones that had to invent their own lighting solutions and rely on artistry rather than engine lightWhat the fuck is "engine light" vs "non-engine light?" You have literally no clue what the fuck you're talking about. Most of older games have really basic lighting and the differences in looks are due mainly to shading and art direction. You just need devs who actually understand how to make things look a certain way.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD79f8axHxM
>>730639042devs have little reason to give a shit about art direction>>730639054real-time universal rendering vs bespoke lighting solutions for the exact effect the devs want or even just baking the lighting. And no, most older games prior to the last 5 years or so could not do runtime dynamic lighting for every scene without enormous performance hitches, its a very new thing.Dynamic lighting will NEVER be able to make things look lit consistently in a way intended by the devs, because it's dynamic.
>>730638858>I still sometimes wonder about the timeline where square kept iterating on the art direction they did with ff13 optimizing their pipeline where they would've gone>game from 2009this is not a slight, but bankrupt probablyI remember some anon dumping a lot of info about how much developing crystal tools engine fucked over SE
>>730639054while OP phrased it poorly I think he meant more the idea that most devs nowadays dont tweak the rendering to produce good visuals which lead to the UE4 look sorta speak.it's like how every UE3 game look washed out because by default that was a de-saturation filter applied that devs had to learn exist and go out of their way to disable
>>730639332FF13 sold well enough to get two sequels so I really doubt if they had kept going in that direction art wise it would have bankrupted them. XV was a fucking fiasco after all.I also remember the FFXIII promo renders looking sick as fuck.
>>730638498Wow what a fag
>>730639326>devs have little reason to give a shit about art directionyeah its why most games look like shit nowadays>>730639332oh yeah crystal tool was an absolute dumpster fire, I find it amusing their reaction to crystal tools being "this didnt work lets try again" and they fucked up AGAIN with luminous is bafflingI guess them fucking around with luminous meant all their artists learned PBR for when square made them switch to Unreal so not total time waste I guess
Also something worth noting, realtime dynamic lighting cannot handle making washed-out or high bloom lighting without destroying visibility. Baked lighting can accomplish an HDR effect with very soft, washed out lighting without it actually ruining visual clarity because baked lighting doesn't actually have to crush the whites out. So realtime lighting ironically needs to be much flatter in order to be visually clear.
>>730639523you misunderstand, they had churn out 2 sequels because they were not able to use the engine on literally anything else, it was the only way to try and crawl back their sunk costdon't get me wrong, the game looks amazing especially played today with upscaled textures and modelsanyway, I wish I could find that info dump thread, sadly it was a few years ago
>>730639731>when square made them switch to Unrealthis sentence is genuinely fucking disgusting to read>>730639815>the bespoke engine can only produce games it was designed to produceImagine my shock.Unless you go out of your way to produce an engine that handles a large variety of use cases you will run into this problem (and then you get FOX engine'd).I need to sit down and actually play FFXIII some time, maybe after I finish XII. The promo renders and concept art for that game activated my neurons as a kid, and XIII-2 looked good too.
>>730629787>had to invent their own lighting solutionsyou are a retard
>>730639919>the bespoke engine can only produce games it was designed to produceI mean yeah, that was kind of the problem. The bespoke FF13 engine could not even handle their following title, Versus XIII / FF15. And then there's FF14 1.0.
>>730639326> And no, most older games prior to the last 5 years or so could not do runtime dynamic lighting for every scene without enormous performance hitches, its a very new thing.older games usually just used basic point lights or a universal directional light with maybe some baking, which you can still do with pretty much any game engine today, and many games still do. Any "bespoke" things were more likely to do with the shading used than the lighting.>Dynamic lighting will NEVER be able to make things look lit consistently in a way intended by the devs, because it's dynamic.I mean it can if the lights themselves are static but then there's not much point in using dynamic GI.
>>730629971Like cum down the drain
>>730640027Because versus XIII/FFXV was an overdesigned pile of shit chasing open world trends.>>730640056And static/point lights are... not dynamic.Nobody is under the delusion that modern engines CAN'T do baked lighting or simple lighting setups. They just choose not to because universalized lighting and rendering practices have made actually lighting your scene competently irrelevant.Do you get hard from pretending to be a fucking idiot who doesn't know what words mean, or?
>>730638498based voice of reason
>>730639919>I need to sit down and actually play FFXIII some timeXIII is where the series really went to shit. It's a visually pretty game with a great OST but the game itself is pretty ass.
>>730639969See the light on the floor in the Tekken screenshot in the OP? How did it get there
>>730640252I'm aware. I just like PEAK 7th gen visuals. The pre-rendered cutscenes from FFXII have got me in the mood for more.
>>730640254The sun. dumbass
>>730631991>>730632981if spyro just had generic realistic lighting, it would not be thought of as fondly. even the remakes didn't get it right, and they actually tried.
>>730640376stop trying to explain to people on /v/ that videogames are largely a visual medium
>>730640254I guess they invented textures, just like how kojima invented the camera
>>730638135At least make it fun
>>730640214>And static/point lights are... not dynamic.point lights can be dynamic.>They just choose not toPlenty of games still have baked lighting. Look at any of the Horizon zero dawn games or Spider-Man or God of War or anything from Naughty Dog. >they just choose not to because universalized lighting and rendering practicesThe point is that lighting in games has basically always been just about as universalized as it is now if not moreso. It was just more limited>have made actually lighting your scene competently irrelevant.No they haven't. You can see plenty of indie slop on the steam store that uses unreal but looks like shit because they don't understand lighting.
>>730638027True, but the thing then was that developers had limitations they were forced to work with, 9th gen consoles eliminated those limitations and those devs got lazy.
>>730637736>le and I'm le tired of le pretending le it doesn't
>>730640376>and they actually triedNot really. They didn't really try to preserve the style much at all. To see what a Spyro game made in Unreal looks like here's a fan game.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA11LERdXFs
>>730640662>there are plenty of games that don't use generic built-in global illumination and dynamic lightingAnd we're not fucking talking about them.However, even games that stray away from GI and dynamic lighting as their main lighting setup cannot achieve what pure vertex or baked lighting could do in terms of control over the lighting of a scene.
>>730641007this is not "preserving the style" retard that's just ripping the exact ps1 models and textures and reusing themdid you expect the remake to look like that?
>>730640254to give an actual answer it looks like the floor is rendered twice, once without a highlight and one withsome ps2 multi texturing magic looks like
>>730641053>And we're not fucking talking about them.well then what games are we talking about? Because loads of AAA games still use baked lighting, way more than I think you realize.>However, even games that stray away from GIGI just means indirect bounce lighting. GI can be baked or dynamic depending on what lighting solution you're using.> cannot achieve what pure vertex or baked lighting could do in terms of control over the lighting of a scene.In what way? The devs are still controlling where the lights are and what the properties of the lights are.
Games used to look so interesting :(
>>730637442Notice how the games that actually look good are the ones that don't look realistic and don't try to push beyond what they're capable of (webm related), games that try to be shitty movies or open world all end up blending together because the devs are lazy shits. Of course, devs being lazy was always a problem. Those bastards need to be limited forever.
>>730641993>The devs are still controlling where the lights are and what the properties of the lights are.And the player controls where the camera is in relation to the light source. Bounce lighting on dynamic light sources means the player is not seeing the lit textures/materials in a single, controlled lighting environment. Dynamically lit scenes are visually inconsistent as a result, that's the price you pay for letting the renderer do the lighting simulation. You can set up the lights all you want but unless you control where the camera is at all times, you effectively have no control over how the player actually sees the scene.What games do right now with lighting is like animating a perfect frame of traditional animation and then taking a picture of it in random outdoor light conditions instead of just lighting it correctly. Simulated, realtime lighting looks super cool in practice but it makes the viewing experience of the actual content worse most of the time.
>>730641724Baked lighting is still a thing you know
>>730642257>And the player controls where the camera is in relation to the light source.Like literally every game with a non-fixed 3D cam>Bounce lighting on dynamic light sourcesso your issue is just with light sources that move?>Dynamically lit scenes are visually inconsistent as a resultI mean if you have the lights moving all over the place sure.>What games do right now with lighting is like animating a perfect frame of traditional animation and then taking a picture of it in random outdoor light conditions instead of just lighting it correctlyNot really. Games still have lighting artists manually placing and fine tuning the positions of every light in the scene to make sure it looks as good as possible, even lights you likely don't even notice are there. You act as if most devs are just putting in a single directional light, turning on lumen, and that's it, but that's not really the case except maybe in steam shovelware.
>>730642818>Games still have lighting artists manually placing and fine tuning the positions of every light in the scene to make sure it looks as good as possible>We paid a guy to professionally replicate every visibility and lighting issue and distraction that happens with real-world lightingAmazing. It's like we went back in time to when movies added screen flare effects so they could actively look WORSE.I can't stand looking at the visual noise and garbage that comes from having lighting effects like HDR or ambient occlusion. Games unironically looked better when you just set that shit on fullbright and painted the parts of the scene you want to look darker with a darker color.
>>730637442>the visual bloat
