[HN Gopher] Amsterdam looks incredibly realistic in the new Call...
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Amsterdam looks incredibly realistic in the new Call of Duty
Author : doener
Score : 433 points
Date : 2022-10-22 05:51 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| anthk wrote:
| No. Not even close to the raytraced images from 2003 with PovRay.
| This is nothing close. Even an RTX GPU in not enough to what
| we've seen as photorealistic.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Not a gamer, and I've never been impressed beyond the "whoa, cool
| tech" thing in game videos. But this is good enough that I'd
| watch a feature movie rendered like this, no problem. It draws me
| in.
|
| Someone once said that virtual reality will never look right
| "until you put some dirt in it". And that's just it. They've
| recreated the irrelevant clutter that goes along with real life
| and that's what makes it look right.
| 3qz wrote:
| It looks very good but in 10 years everyone will think it looks
| awful. Remember when people thought Skyrim on Xbox 360 was good
| looking? lmao
| muhammadusman wrote:
| I was in Amseterdam last week and seeing this in the game really
| impressed me!
| etempleton wrote:
| Call of Duty is interesting because, despite how you might feel
| about the gameplay at this point, it is one of the few games
| really pushing things forward graphically. Games that operate at
| this budget level have just become incredibly rare. Sony first-
| party games, CoD, CD Projekt, Rockstar, and honestly not much
| else.
|
| The visual fidelity here is really incredible. Some elements,
| such as animations and water look bad by comparison, but it is
| still impressive.
| grogenaut wrote:
| the water decals from the boat are totally out of place for a
| boat moving at that speed and are obviously decals landing on the
| water texture... the people look soft focus and rounder than
| normal folks. The skin texture is really flat/matte. And that's
| from watching for 10 seconds and typing. It looks really good
| from the postage stamp sized video on the twitter feed. It looked
| like a game when I went full screen. Still not bad. Is the story
| still terrible and just mini-game after mini-game with endless
| waves of baddies till you push a volume trigger like their last
| well every single game?
| Timja wrote:
| How much freedom does the player have in this type of game?
|
| From watching these videos it seems like the player does not
| influence the story at all?
|
| What if you jump into the river for example? Would you be able to
| swim around in it? Would bystanders be worried about you, call
| the police, the police would come and get you out of the water
| etc?
|
| Or would a magic hand keep you from jumping into the water and
| you have to stay very closely on track to the scripted story?
| zarzavat wrote:
| It's Call of Duty so there is a linear singleplayer that is
| like an interactive movie, and then an online multiplayer which
| is the part that people actually play.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| about zero in CoD
| capableweb wrote:
| The campaign in Call of Duty is not a open world campaign where
| you get to do whatever you want and the environment reacts
| appropriately in most situations. It's basically a interactive
| movie where you get to practice sneaking and shooting
| sometimes, in the style of a Michael Bay movie.
|
| Expecting what you write about in the third paragraph is a
| misunderstanding of what the game is trying to be.
| rogual wrote:
| This is exactly as realistic as I remember Half-Life 2 looking
| when it was first shown. There definitely seems to be a "hedonic
| treadmill"-style effect for realism.
|
| Also, I gather Call of Duty is a shootyman game so players will
| presumably be murdering these realistic people in great detail?
| nnopepe wrote:
| kinda weird to see US demographics superimposed over amsterdam.
| Couldn't spot a single blonde/redhead
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| The area in question is super touristy so that's not too weird
| :)
|
| The lack of cyclists passing through is weirder IMO.
| [deleted]
| cloudking wrote:
| You think that's cool? Try the Matrix UE5 demo on PS5
| https://youtu.be/WU0gvPcc3jQ
| ricardobayes wrote:
| That's insane
| tgv wrote:
| That's really levels beyond that CoD trailer. The characters
| are much more realistic, too. Neo's face has a bit of a
| photoshoppy look, and the black girl's gait looks a bit
| stiff, but the rest is phenomenal.
| vl wrote:
| The most interesting part is at the end, where they show
| engine features, but at the same time they character is
| walking through the streets and you can see character
| animation and lighting is off. My guess faces/motion in the
| middle of the demo are pre-animated.
| trgn wrote:
| Looks fantastic.
|
| Dumb question, but this is an intro it seems. It's not going to
| have gamers shoot machine guns FPS-style through these street
| right? Right?
| hazebooth wrote:
| [spoilers ahead]
|
| Thankfully, this is not like the "No Russian" mission in the
| original Modern Warfare 2. Instead, you're tasked with
| intercepting a known terrorist, and have to protect yourself
| against the cartel. You will be punished for harming anyone
| that isn't part of the cartel.
| trgn wrote:
| Thank you, that's a relief indeed :)
| smcleod wrote:
| It looks really fake to me. Flat looking textures, poor lighting,
| awkward looking characters?
| Bakary wrote:
| I find this amazing, but I wouldn't want to play a game with
| graphics that are too realistic because reality has an ugly tinge
| abraxas wrote:
| Yes, those games with realistic graphics mostly resemble
| American gang violence movies. Not sure who enjoys this kind of
| ambiance.
|
| I'm glad the indie game scene is as vibrant as ever because in
| the early 2000s the urban ghetto simulators was all that there
| was.
| Bakary wrote:
| One analogy I could make is photorealistic pencil drawings of
| the Joker or other pop culture characters. It takes
| astounding skill, and you sound like a dick for being
| critical of the author, but the end result seems...
| pointless, somehow?
| rafaelBG wrote:
| Was it done using Unreal Engine 5?
| Narishma wrote:
| No, they have their own engine.
| mmzeeman wrote:
| It looks incredible. But there is one really big omission. Where
| are the cyclists? Where they to difficult to model?
| haxorito wrote:
| I don't see anything super impressive that could be attributed to
| CoD developers. I think most of this really advances in hardware
| that allows more lighting, higher quality textures and more
| polygons. But even with all of that, this isn't looking
| incredibly realistic. There are games and engines that done it
| little more convincing
| TheAngush wrote:
| > I don't see anything super impressive that could be
| attributed to CoD developers. I think most of this really
| advances in hardware that allows more lighting, higher quality
| textures and more polygons.
|
| Who do you think is making the lighting, textures, and
| polygons? Who do you think is coding the engine for it?
| denysvitali wrote:
| Compare it with Zuckerberg's Metaverse:
| https://i0.wp.com/mustanid.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Ma...
| charcircuit wrote:
| What is the point of comparing it with Horizon Worlds? The
| games have a different art style, have access to a different
| amount of compute power, and are targeting different frame
| rates and resolutions.
| synu wrote:
| This looks like a 2002 Nintendo GameCube release called like
| "World Baby"
|
| (Credit
| https://twitter.com/cd_hooks/status/1559665074868031490)
| dash2 wrote:
| Very realistic. Unfortunately Price's English accent is not so
| realistic, being more from chim-chim-churree/Big Vern territory
| [1]. Not shoer people talk lahk vat in Sarf Lahndahn any mawwah,
| squire bruv guvnah.
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/byramb/status/1326098732501381120?lang=z...
| m348e912 wrote:
| Seems like game developers have gotten car racing and general
| environmental rendering figured out. There has been times where I
| truly couldn't tell whether game play footage it was real video
| or rendered. That all ends when characters enter the picture.
| Anything "living" just seems off, whether it's a human or even a
| dog.
|
| Why can't video game use actors to model movement and looks and
| then extrapolate from there? Maybe they do already, it's just not
| very convincing.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Because it's cheaper to make bad dolls than do motion capture
| for everything
| mastax wrote:
| I feel for all those game devs, making something realistic is a
| lot of work but it's hard to be impressed. Something has to be
| hyper-real to compete with reality; it's why over-saturated
| images are so common, a more realistic rendition just doesn't
| capture it.
|
| I just finished Horizon: Forbidden West, and the more fantastical
| setting let the devs stretch their legs. (Coincidentally,
| Guerilla Games are from Amsterdam). Few moments of that game
| aren't jaw-droppingly beautiful. I frequently heard my companions
| "can we go now" dialog lines because I was crouched down staring
| at the moss. And I played half the game at 720p30 MPEG compressed
| with PS Remote Play because I didn't want to take over the TV.
| When I moved the ps5 to my desk it was like seeing it again for
| the first time.
| freecodyx wrote:
| Everything is perfect even better than real life. But still
| humans are still far from being looking natural, they always look
| like a balloon to me. Something is always off when it comes to
| simulating humans, the eyes movements, body
| mysterydip wrote:
| "Well boss, looks like the team will need another couple weeks
| vaca-- er, research in Amsterdam. We don't have everything quite
| realistic enough yet."
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Considering they picked the red light district I assume they
| are not done with their 'research' :)
| fit2rule wrote:
| denysvitali wrote:
| I've submitted the video yesterday here on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33292230
|
| Sadly it was ignored. The graphics are really impressive!
| achow wrote:
| Thanks this is much better link, gives more footage.
|
| Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_LlSR6-ibA
| replygirl wrote:
| :cookie:
| seydor wrote:
| Pity that most games are not available as open social worlds that
| you can use in VR
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Unfortunately this level of fidelity relies on the user having
| effectively zero agency or ability to do anything or move
| anywhere outside of the tight boundaries of this area.
|
| Still impressive! But probably not terribly compelling for
| anything other than pure looks.
| tsol wrote:
| Yep. Making this environment fully interactive would be an
| entirely new task to accomplish. The game only allows you to
| stick to the script, which for CoD is appropriate. But
| developing a MMORPG like a Skyrim, where the environment is
| meant to be fully interactive, would be exponentially more
| complex. I'm sure it's just a matter of time though
| endisneigh wrote:
| Though it does look great, i wish more games focused on actually
| being fun to play instead of having long cut scenes and micro
| transactions.
|
| Ironically other than the fact that you have to pay per game and
| that you're often forced to die, I prefer arcade games. They
| generally minimize friction to play
|
| edit: to clarify, I mean games with good graphics specifically.
| There are many great games (especially indie) out there.
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| Play some soulsborne games. They look great (even if they
| aren't the very best graphics possible) and play great. Very
| rewarding. I just finished my first Elden Ring run @ 200 hours
| play time and I'm back playing Dark Souls 3 (yet again).
| wongarsu wrote:
| Gameplay innovation is risky. But if you spend a lot of money
| on looking good you don't want to risk that investment, so you
| just copy the gameplay of your last popular game, maybe with a
| new gameplay element from a competitors game
| unicornmama wrote:
| We live in the golden age of gameplay innovation. It's never
| been easier to develop and distribute a game. There is an
| vast ocean of indie game developers with new games coming out
| every week! There were 10394 new steam games listed in 2021.
| That's over 28 new games per day! In 2010 only 349 games came
| out on the platform.
| [deleted]
| wongarsu wrote:
| Exactly. There is tons of gameplay innovation. But from
| cheap(ish) to produce games, not those that pour millions
| into looking good.
| Retric wrote:
| Fun has less to do with individual gameplay elements than
| execution. The balance between weapon types makes a huge
| difference in FPS games. Chip damage vs recovery mechanics,
| cover systems vs stealth vs run and gun etc.
|
| Similarly there have been so many health systems in FPS games
| you don't need to invent something particularly new, but you
| do need to pick something appropriate to the gameplay. For
| example in PvE players need to be able to fight waves of
| enemies but in PvP games nobody wants to stand for 30 seconds
| firing at a bullet sponge.
|
| Puzzle games need interesting puzzles, racing games need
| appropriate tracks, and so forth.
| Rimintil wrote:
| The campaign for MWII is quite fun, if not one of the best of
| the series. And the ending cutscene is incredible!
| Semaphor wrote:
| > I wish more games focused on actually being fun to play
| instead of having long cut scenes and micro transactions.
|
| IME games do. But then I also don't play any shooters.
| lossolo wrote:
| Have you played Detroit: Become Human? Graphics there is mind
| blowing on ultra settings in 4k and story is great, one of the
| best games I've played in the last few years and I'm super
| picky and don't play games without good story.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KV-RNmFuLw
| lghh wrote:
| How many do you want? There are plying and tons of games like
| that on steam that release every day.
|
| Paying for lives was the first micro transaction!
| Tade0 wrote:
| It appears that the easiest way to making micro transactions
| work and be cost-effective is some kind of vending machine
| with coupons.
| farias0 wrote:
| Nowadays there are games for all tastes being released weekly,
| the biggest game of the year, Elden Ring, seems exactly what
| you're looking for. Also try indies like Slay the Spire, Into
| the Breach and Rollerdrome
| dreen wrote:
| Well, this is Call of Duty, the Micheal Bay of video games.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| That is an excellent way of characterizing COD. I play the
| campaigns pretty much because it's like participating in an
| action movie and you just kinda get to go along with the ride
| of it. It's not too tough or defeating (looking at you elden
| ring.)
|
| I don't really have time for really long games anymore and
| these are as entertaining as movies IMO.
| dreen wrote:
| Absolutely, and theres nothing bad or wrong about playing
| it or watching a Micheal Bay movie. If you like it then
| great.
|
| Many games seem to transition into more movie-like
| experience. Assassins Creed games for example, I found at
| some point I prefer to watch someone play it who cuts out
| the filler (while providing limited & entertaining
| commentary) and its just like a movie.
| [deleted]
| kingkawn wrote:
| These games get more and more detailed yet still feel utterly
| lifeless.
| ggm wrote:
| I wish more games, any even, simply provided a "walk around as a
| tourist" mode. At this fidelity, it's enjoyable. I spent 6 months
| living in Amsterdam, it brought back memories. A short walk down
| from here is the back of the Hotel Grand Kraznopolsky. I can
| smell the weed from "the British bulldog" Cafe as I type.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I liked The Division 2 for it's pretty close version of DC for
| this same reason. Obviously sans societal collapse etc.
| dijit wrote:
| Woo! I worked on that game.
|
| We actually took GIS data from the real DC and modelled the
| world. So the map should be very close to accurate.
|
| The Division 1 was handcrafted, so we cut a lot of the world
| away that wasn't interesting, small alley ways and such.
|
| I can't tell you how happy it makes me to hear that you
| enjoyed the work that went in.
| [deleted]
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| My friends and I spent a good chunk of time playing that
| game right after we all finished college and moved away for
| jobs. One of us actually moved to DC and playing The
| Division 2 actually helped him learn the area! Really fun
| game, your work is much appreciated!
| solardev wrote:
| Really enjoyed Division 2! Having visited DC during the
| Last Administration, your apocalypse was much nicer :)
|
| On the GIS side of things, didn't Ubi team up with some
| European nonprofit to make other real world locale into
| games for educational purposes? Can't remember the details,
| but I used to work for a museum and my boss wanted us to do
| something like that. And I was like that'd be nice, but
| we're not Ubi.
|
| It would be awesome to read about your production pipeline,
| like did you go from drone footage to photogrammetry to
| dozens of artists manually fixing things, or? Was there
| much ML involved?
| callahad wrote:
| > _didn 't Ubi team up with some European nonprofit to
| make other real world locale into games for educational
| purposes?_
|
| You're likely thinking of the Discovery Tour line derived
| from Assassin's Creed. https://www.ubisoft.com/en-
| gb/game/assassins-creed/discovery...
|
| "[F]reely roam Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the
| Viking Age to learn more about their history and daily
| life. Students, teachers, non-gamers, and players can
| discover these eras at their own pace, or embark on
| guided tours and stories curated by historians and
| experts."
| dijit wrote:
| No ML. We templated some common architecture patterns and
| placed things in the world.
|
| I wish I could show you our internal demonstrations of
| it. Basically we would plot the map in snowdrop using
| GIS, then raise cuboids from the shapes on the map. Then
| we would manually try to match google street view with
| something in our template library, and modify the object
| to match reality.
|
| It was a very manual process, but we based the map on the
| real thing so distances should be 1:1.
| cronix wrote:
| I've recently taken up photogrammetry mapping with my
| drone. I'm quite amazed at the textured 3d output you can
| get from that by capturing buildings just by flying
| around them. I imagine it won't be too long that we just
| fly a drone over a city and entirely map it in 3d with
| very high resolution and detail. It's accurate to within
| a few feet unless you use RTK and ground stations which
| can bring you within centimeter accuracy. Lidar is also
| making things easier/cheaper.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vrpKFV0odg
| solardev wrote:
| Why does every YouTube video start with a loud "WHAT'S
| GOING ON GUYS!!!" lol
| solardev wrote:
| That's awesome. The results were terrific and fun. Thanks
| for your work on that!
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Why are small alleyways not interesting in a shooter? Many
| area to hide. Though perhaps it would stimulate camping,
| but I wouldn't call them 'not interesting' :)
|
| I didn't find The Division too interesting, just couldn't
| get into it. I also don't really understand why they keep
| going on with that Tom Clancy label. The guy's been dead
| for almost a decade. If they feel the need to badge his
| name all over it, it feels like it's just B-content and
| they need to stick such labels on it to sell it.
|
| I think his early books were pretty good but the later
| series were just drivel IMO. I don't think he even wrote
| them himself.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| I live downtown in Manhattan: the "Gangs of New York" update
| on that title was interesting to play... First thing I did
| was go find my condo building with a mountain of trash piled
| up against the door.
|
| Some of the geography has been futzed with for gameplay
| purposes, which was incredibly confusing as someone who could
| navigate the area without a map!
| okasaki wrote:
| I thought Watch Dogs Legion did a pretty good job with London
| ealexhudson wrote:
| It did an excellent job, and considering the amount that was
| cut out it was still extremely easy to navigate from the east
| to west end along entirely recognisable roads.
|
| The pub over the road from Parliament was a bit jarring but
| understandable.
| prox wrote:
| I wonder if it can be used in VR mode for people with
| agoraphobia or social anxiety.
| Sateeshm wrote:
| Wouldn't simulated environment cause similar anxiety effects?
| Like I'm very scared of snakes IRL, I'm confident i won't
| enjoy looking at them in VR either
| prox wrote:
| The idea is to do this in session with a therapist, or at
| least under guidance. By exposing yourself safely to a
| trigger reducing the effects (like a fight or flight
| response for example)
| revenga99 wrote:
| I think the purpose is to overcome that anxiety which
| requires you to be to be exposed. Maybe looking at vr
| snakes could help you :)
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| If anyone is interested I put a list together last year for
| someone who was looking at VR for public speaking coaching
| due to social anxiety and not sure what the current state of
| the art is or where these folks are now other than the web
| sites are all still up. In no particular order:
|
| https://www.ovationvr.com/ https://virtualspeech.com/
| https://virtualorator.com/ http://presentationsimulator.com/
| prox wrote:
| Thank you!
| [deleted]
| polio wrote:
| GTA IV was my favorite for this. I'd expect this to be hard to
| achieve since verisimilitude is expensive, but manageable if
| your character is only going to go down a fixed path.
| TheSmoke wrote:
| i loved midtown madness because i was able to drive around san
| francisco. ten years later when i first visited, i was able to
| recognize many of the landmarks because of the game.
| RunSet wrote:
| Angel Studios, the developers of Midtown Madness, would
| eventually be renamed Rockstar San Diego. You might've heard
| of em.
| jonnybgood wrote:
| I felt the same with Watch Dogs 2.
| jrimbault wrote:
| That mode was especially enjoyable in Assassin's Creed Odyssey,
| walking around a simulation of antique Athene is (for lack of a
| better word) _something_.
| pr0zac wrote:
| The natural history museum in Montreal (where ACO was
| developed) had a mummy/Egypt exhibit and they actually had
| computers setup with that sim running (pretty sure Ubisoft
| sponsored the exhibit).
| sph wrote:
| There's the "walking simulator" genre for that. I didn't care
| for the story, but I recently played Dear Esther, it's
| absolutely stunning on a 4K screen.
| dinvlad wrote:
| Death Stranding is another great example, such a poetic game
| sph wrote:
| Another one with a terrible story that I absolutely loved.
| I don't know whether Kojima is a genius or a lunatic, but
| I'm glad I played his game.
| hairofadog wrote:
| Good one. Also _Everyone's Gone to the Rapture_ by the same
| producers.
|
| Not walking simulators but low-key "just sorta look around"
| games I like: _Gone Home_ and _What Remains of Edith Finch_.
|
| Edit: Corrected the Finch title, thank you!
| mintplant wrote:
| *What Remains of Edith Finch
| sp332 wrote:
| The photogrammetry of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is also
| impressive to just look at.
| vl wrote:
| Ironically one of the earlier CoDs had a great semi-stealth
| mission in Pripyat (Chernobyl). City was modeled so well with
| all the iconic eyesights, really gave you a feeling of being in
| an abandoned post-nuclear town.
| grogenaut wrote:
| You're likely referring to COD4:MW, aka the one that made the
| franchise what it is. That game was outstanding for the time.
| Real cool locations, renderings like from the spectre gunship
| camera system, etc, made it special. The gameplay hasn't aged
| that well tho, it's easy to see the cracks now.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Maybe I'm jaded being around graphics for too long, but every few
| years we have a bit of an advancement and proclamations of "wow,
| this looks real!". Probably since early 90's. Only theb, a couple
| of years down the road, same material suddenly looks funky
| compared to new material.
| Kudos wrote:
| It's just relativism in action, no?
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| An environment this rich with detail will affect senses other
| than sight. The smells, temperature, ambient sounds and things
| all contribute to making it real. Peripheral vision and the
| combination of all these other senses make the experience.
|
| Seeing the whole thing on 2D screen, i feel, makes it less
| realistic as the graphics improve. The difference between reality
| and the screen becomes more stark.
|
| If it were liken cartoon, i think I'd suspend reality better just
| to be in it. This leaps away from artificial into reality and
| doesn't get there thereby raising my expectations and then
| disappointing me.
|
| Great technological achievements though.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Human mind doesn't (can't) process the entirety of perceivable
| space-time in all of its detail, far from that. Rather we treat
| it more as a symbolic interface, superfluous accidental detail
| is simplified away whenever possible (sometimes excessively so:
| the Invisible Gorilla effect, optical illusions, and so on).
|
| This is why I don't see inherent value in increasing realism of
| film and videogame visuals (I do think contrasting degrees of
| realism could be used to achieve an artistic effect, but am yet
| to see this technique employed) and incidentally why I start to
| find unstaged photography frustrating and consider learning to
| draw (the technique employed by many illustrators, where a
| photo of an actual scene is taken as a reference and then
| traced over to leave out unnecessary detail and focus on shapes
| and colors of interest, is appealing).
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| I agree. I consider games as a modern form of art and simply
| trying to get them photorealistic doesn't seem to be the most
| interesting thing that can be done with the medium.
| tester756 wrote:
| Still I hate that games like call of duty are expensive, are
| somewhat decent but short as fuck.
|
| Just playing it randomly, without some tryharding you can
| complete it in something like less than 10 hours, it sucks.
| Bakary wrote:
| I've always been surprised by this metric. True, if the game is
| only a couple of hours it can be a bad investment. However, I
| can think of at least half a dozen ten hour games that have
| left me with a more memorable impression than some games I've
| played for ten times as long.
|
| To my teenage self it would make sense, though. Enough time but
| not enough money, which makes long (sometimes artificially
| long) games a necessity.
| tester756 wrote:
| The problem is that the story is short.
|
| Compare those CoDs to e.g Cyberpunk which I needed like 40
| hours to complete
|
| it was way better
| Bakary wrote:
| Personally, I see it as an equation of Story/atmosphere
| quality x mechanical pleasure x length where story is the
| trump card.
|
| A game like SOMA has low mechanical pleasure (it's a
| walking simulator, essentially) and a short length, but the
| story and atmosphere are so high that I will forever
| remember the experience.
|
| Cyberpunk has decent length, decent story/atmosphere
| (obviously this is subjective) and decent mechanical
| pleasure so it's a great game.
|
| CoD has a short length, decent to high mechanical pleasure
| (well at least I hope so for their sake since it's supposed
| to be about the multiplayer shooter replayability) and low
| story/atmosphere because it's just a string of action movie
| cliches. I think that's what makes it sound very mediocre
| compared to Cyberpunk.
|
| Other gamers might see mechanical pleasure as the trump
| card, and I can definitely understand their POV (Portal 1
| for instance). I'd venture a guess that length is rarely a
| trump card except if you are stuck with the games you do
| have. Usually for length to be the most important factor,
| you need at least a decent degree of the two other factors
| to go with it. For example, what people love about Skyrim
| is that the basic gameplay of walking around and doing
| things is fun and you can just pick up the game everyday
| for months and still have things to do. The story is
| nothing special, but the atmosphere is comfy enough. You
| know the game is there for you when you come back from
| work.
| Rimintil wrote:
| I'd guess most of the player base is there for MP. Some of the
| more well known content creators on YT said they never played
| the CoD campaign as they jumped straight to MP. With the week
| of time between the SP release and MP release, along with MP
| rewards, there's a reason to actually complete SP this time.
| FpUser wrote:
| 1) Graphics is totally amazing
|
| 2) Yet I can see that it is fake the second I look at it. No need
| to analyze. I am not trying to diminish the work done in any way
| as it shines.
| okramcivokram wrote:
| Looks very realistic, here's the same location in Google Street
| View https://goo.gl/maps/q2qrUGSoFEouq3Kj6
| gus_massa wrote:
| Does the game have too few bikes compared to Google Street
| View?
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| The scale seems off.
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| It's more claustrophobic than Amsterdam generally appears to
| be IRL, and my guess is that this level of detail requires
| such environments, as it always has traditionally, since in
| large open spaces you have to compromise.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It honestly would pass for a recorded video at twitter's
| resolution... if it wasn't for the character animations looking
| decidedly average and robotic.
| rcarr wrote:
| Comparing the photo and the game the other thing I'd say is
| that the game actually looks too clean in comparison to
| reality.
| matwood wrote:
| It does look great. The water, particularly with the boat
| going through it, is what I noticed first. I spend a lot of
| time in boats and around water, so it's always one of the
| first things I see in graphical simulations.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| I thought it looked like some characters and animations
| superimposed on google street view
| krangfu wrote:
| nope chars to slow
| thih9 wrote:
| No cyclists though?
| krangfu wrote:
| The place is but the characters respond slow and grand theft auto
| Loveaway wrote:
| Call of Duty and realistic should not be allowed in the same
| sentence. Utter non sense narrative glorifying war and conflict.
| Many kids these days are stupid enough to get themselves
| recruited, after growing up with these games and having been fed
| a twisted picture of reality.
|
| Shows you how our moral compass is based on nothing but thin air,
| when society thinks shit like that is fun and cool, while games
| depicting a naked human for example is completely unacceptable.
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| adesanmi wrote:
| Bro there are anime skins on the guns that shoot purple tracer
| rounds...
| pornel wrote:
| I guess the next frontier for realism is character animation. To
| me their robotic movements and moonwalking feet break the
| illusion. There were very neat demos of ML-generated
| postures/movement, so it may be possible to nail it.
| jayflux wrote:
| 100%
|
| It feels like character movements haven't changed much in the
| last 20 years. Which is a shame because the visuals are great,
| but let down by 2006 style animation.
| sfvisser wrote:
| Lol, looks pretty realistic to me. This is very much like how
| most tourist in the city behave!
| ufmace wrote:
| That's what I was thinking. Some people are complaining about
| very subtle details not being quite right. But to me, what
| really stands out as video-game-y is the way the character and
| camera and other people move. It's hard to describe, but they
| just don't move like actual people do. Gotta watch some bodycam
| videos for comparison.
|
| Don't get me wrong, the visual clarity is a great achievement.
| But if they're gonna spend more effort on making it more
| convincingly real, that's a better target IMO than reflections
| and wave patterns.
| Bakary wrote:
| I'd be interested in hearing the perspective of a video game
| programmer, because from my own intuition as a layman, it
| sounds as though making realistic model movement is an order
| of magnitude harder than working on the environment alone.
|
| At least, the fact that this game has familiar human movement
| tropes that resembles decade old games sounds like a
| testament to that.
| cmehdy wrote:
| For characters animations don't blend too well with each
| others as some things reset between postures, and the walking
| animation doesn't translate too well to crowded spaces as
| people would turn their bodies to maximize the distance
| between body and objects (up to a point), sometimes even
| opting to take a different path depending on people.
|
| And the camera is very smooth, which filters out the little
| balance shifts we all do (even typing something here I notice
| the subtle changes to vision oscillating in complex patterns
| which head-bobbing would be a simplified first-order approach
| to).
|
| I assume it's still very difficult to do all these things
| with current computing power, and in the case of the camera
| I'm not sure it will ever be possible for something
| interactive to feel quite perfect unless you switch to a VR
| headset and carry your own balance into it.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Wow, looking at my computer screen felt like a static
| webcam view until you pointed this out and I noticed my
| head bobbing around every two seconds.
| ufmace wrote:
| Regarding camera movement, not completely sure what would
| be required for a VR-like experience. But I can watch
| bodycam videos like https://youtu.be/0RGLSTXu7Ws?t=75
| (police action, end of a high-speed chase) and never think
| that it seems artificial. The camera body movement is
| fairly subtle, but feels aligned with the way I expect the
| carriers' body to move.
| Eduard wrote:
| I agree. This game is in the cerebral palsy category of
| character animation (e.g. the NPC tourists on the canal's other
| side).
|
| GTA 3/4/5 are in the megalotesticle category (characters moving
| like wavering boats).
| presentation wrote:
| Just played Yakuza: Like a Dragon and the NPC animation there
| as well as the animation and art style in general looked better
| in that game than in this clip.
| fabian2k wrote:
| There are games with very realistic character animation like
| e.g. The Last of Us Part 2. But that is a lot of effort,
| requires a lot of expertise and is likely very expensive.
| Correct animations can also conflict with fast and responsive
| movement, and most games will prefer responsiveness to
| realistic animations. Having both requires advanced approaches
| that can blend different animations well, which seems to be
| rather difficult.
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| This is an interesting video about how hard it is to
| effectively animate just one small aspect of human motion:
| walking through a door: https://youtu.be/AYEWsLdLmcc
| antegamisou wrote:
| It's funny, I remember reading somewhere that research on
| Computer Graphics, rendering specifically, is 'solved'
| because photorealism had been accomplished.
|
| What had been omitted though was that _efficient_
| photorealistic rendering, as well as the visual elements that
| human perception instantly picks up on such as material(s)
| translucency, lighting /shadows, and as you've already
| mentioned animations (and the bigger challenge of facial
| expressions!) is what everyone's after.
|
| And what we have at the OP is indeed impressive work, which
| still looks artificial. Contrary to the critique of the
| comments so far, and outside the graphics research
| interpretation, this isn't something necessarily negative
| imo. I like video games that preserve a few elements of non-
| photorealism.
| mudrockbestgirl wrote:
| It's interesting we can create amazing graphics like this, but at
| the same time we can't model humans walking naturally. It looks
| quite realistic if you take out the humans.
| jowsie wrote:
| We can model humans walking naturally, they just don't bother
| for CoD.
| jk_ra_el wrote:
| I've been in computer graphics 30 years. This satisfies me. If
| the young generation wants to take it further, more power to you
| as well. Maybe the uncanny valley is even bridge-able in my
| lifetime.
|
| PCVR support when?
| mromanuk wrote:
| This amazement is not one I share. Yes, it appears more polished
| than GTA type graphics. In particular, the NPC movements. To
| describe it as "incredibly realistic" is a stretch.
| Narishma wrote:
| What? The NPC animations are the least realistic thing in this.
| They move like robots.
| rcarr wrote:
| The main things I noticed as being off:
|
| - The wave breaks/spray from the boat doesn't look right
|
| - NPC motion is still janky and robotic.
|
| - Lack of wind. All vegetation is motionless as is the hanging
| sign. Even on windless days vegetation still tends to sway
| minutely.
|
| - Lack of squelch. The ground is wet and has leaves and puddles
| all over it but everyone sounds like they're walking on dry
| ground. Some NPCs don't seem to have audible footsteps at all.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| And it's odd because by Far Cry 2, released in 2008, realistic
| wind effects and contextual sound effects were solved problems
| so it's like the gaming industry has spent 14 years moving
| backwards in these areas.
| [deleted]
| skohan wrote:
| A lot of games have wind effects, with moving vegetation,
| particles and fabrics for example.
|
| Whether or not it appears in a game will usually be dictated
| by budget: both hardware budget (usually dictated by the
| current console generation) and budget for content creation.
|
| A scene like this probably leaves it out because they felt
| like they could use that budget better elsewhere. There are a
| ton of characters walking around this scene, and also a ton
| of geometric detail and texture detail. I am guessing the
| directors for this scene felt that was more important to
| allocate budget to, for wow factor in those areas, rather
| than subtle wind effects which would probably go unnoticed in
| a game where you spend very little time stopping to
| appreciate the trees and flowers.
|
| edit: I have to take that back: actually if you look at the
| full resolution video it's clear they included subtle wind
| effects, as well as details like falling leaves
| rcarr wrote:
| I did notice the falling leaves which I thought was a nice
| touch. I didn't notice any wind but I did watch the video
| on a iPhone screen so it's possible that the wind effects
| are so subtle as to not be noticeable at small screen
| sizes.
| skohan wrote:
| If you watch the YouTube version which is longer linked
| elsewhere in the comments you can see the trees moving,
| as well as things like awnings
| mastax wrote:
| Just because someone does something doesn't mean everyone
| else gets it for free. It takes effort to implement in every
| single game.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Far Cry 2 did a lot of specific things to accomplish its
| vision and those have been abandoned as out of line with
| other games'vision. The fire mechanics, minimap, and healing
| mechanic are the ones that jump out at me
| too_big_to_fail wrote:
| I would argue that major studios largely have, or at least
| stagnated. Cards and skins are now the priorities and
| everything else is designed to support that.
| synu wrote:
| The crowd/background sound in general sounds nothing like
| walking around in Amsterdam. Small thing but it really stood
| out to me.
| rcarr wrote:
| I watched a documentary over a decade ago which followed
| Gareth Edwards as he was making the film Monsters. It was
| pretty revolutionary at the time as he was one of the first
| people to take advantage of DSLRs being able to shoot HD
| video and MacBook Pros getting to the level of computing
| power where you could do your own VFX. He managed to make a
| film that looked like it came out of Hollywood on equipment
| that in total cost less than $15,000. The on-set crew
| consisted of only seven people: Edwards himself, the two lead
| actors, a sound operator, a line producer, a fixer and a
| driver.
|
| One of the documentary makers asked him why he had a
| dedicated sound guy; the rest of the production was so
| stripped back, there was no lighting guy, why a sound guy?
| Edwards responded that, as long as you've got a good story
| that keeps them hooked, the audience will forgive bad visuals
| but they won't forgive bad sound. It's a sentiment that I
| believe was also echoed by Robert Rodriguez in his low budget
| filmmaking days. Good sound is essential to keeping people
| tuned in and immersed in your video. It's why the number one
| thing recommended to any YouTuber starting out is "get a good
| microphone".
|
| The graphics are 80% of the way there now. Weather and
| character animation still needs work but the most bang for
| the buck might now have swung round to sound design.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| NPC motion is where I think graphics technology should be
| focused. Environmental detail is more than sufficient. It's
| actually now an uncanny valley because the environment looks so
| realistic, and it is jarring to see unrealistic human movement.
| It pops out a lot more and looks way out of place.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| I don't think I want to be able to shoot at what my brain
| would perceive as real people.
| notart666 wrote:
| Yeah, I noticed that too. I think it's tied to the frame rate
| of the animations. Kinda weird
| vintermann wrote:
| The water is too pretty and un-dirty in general.
| billythemaniam wrote:
| Animation is the hardest and will be the long pole of visual
| realism in games. I've seen better water than that, but it's
| still hard to make Pixar-quality water in video games.
| Paradoxically, the more realistic the graphics, the easier it
| is to notice flaws. Regardless, still impressive video.
| [deleted]
| sgt wrote:
| I think they should rather fix those things before trying to
| make everything so photo-realistic. But maybe that's just my
| taste.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Level design, engine development and animation happen in
| parallel. Waiting for one to get better before you continue
| with another serves no point.
| wildzzz wrote:
| I'm sure it's the engine. Call of Duty water has always
| looked like that.
| LightG wrote:
| - Lack of aroma of waffles being cooked from an opened bakery
| window ...
| ddalex wrote:
| Also Lack of aroma of weed being cooked from an open
| coffeeshop window...
| singularity2001 wrote:
| All this robotic look will disappear one neural scene creation
| enters the mix
| crote wrote:
| - The bikes don't have locks
|
| - No people actually _riding_ bikes
|
| - The guards are casually standing in the middle of the road
|
| - The curb doesn't drop properly where the pedestrian area
| starts
| pennaMan wrote:
| You missed the part where the main character regenerates
| faster than Wolverine after taking a bullet
| joelhaasnoot wrote:
| Plenty of American tourists standing on roads ;)
| skohan wrote:
| That part is realistic - the only part which is not is the
| lack of people shouting at them to move
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| And there's far too few of them :)
| kqr wrote:
| > - No people actually riding bikes.
|
| This is a common trope in media where nobody in the
| production uses a bike for transport. There are bikes there
| for setting, but people never use them as intended. They
| either just stand around them, or do this weird thing where
| they take their bikes out for a walk.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| There is of course the iconic bicycle scene from Turks
| Fruit (1973) starring a very young Rutger Hauer and
| directed by Paul Verhoeven.
|
| https://youtu.be/ze_Ncdy_igw
| practice9 wrote:
| Except Stranger Things, but you could say bikes are
| essential to the plot
| jimbokun wrote:
| Maybe there are technical challenges shooting actors
| sharing dialog while in motion on bicycles?
|
| For cars this is a solved problem, and walking people are
| moving slowly enough for cameras to easily keep pace.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Grand Theft Auto San Andreas had a lot of bikes and were
| included in several plot lines
| codetrotter wrote:
| If we are listing games with bikes in them I feel that we
| should also mention the 1985 arcade game Paperboy ;)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperboy_(video_game)
| jbverschoor wrote:
| There aren't many bikes in that area in reality.
|
| The alley wasn't correct. It's not a dead-end street.. :-)
| vinkelhake wrote:
| I love it. These set pieces are like wonderful dioramas you can
| walk into. CoD Black Ops Cold War (2020) had a bunch of these and
| my favorite was where you infiltrate the KGB headquarters. So
| much detail and so much to look at.
|
| Take it for what it is people. It's not the next GTA, nor is it
| minecraft. These levels are basically highly scripted walking
| simulators.
| replygirl wrote:
| remember... no dutch
| he0001 wrote:
| I don't understand all the nitpicking done here. I'd say it's
| extremely fun to what how tech progresses! Great work all
| involved!
| spoonjim wrote:
| Eventually people are going to just disappear into these amazing
| worlds and spend as little time in meatspace as possible.
| k__ wrote:
| I was there in April and this video really throws me back. I
| can't count how often I had to go over one of these tiny bridges.
| holoduke wrote:
| The graphics are stunning, but the animations are not. I would
| prefer a game with less polished graphics, but super realistic
| animations/physics of everything. NPC's , cars, boats, fluids
| etc. But still an amazing next generation graphics scene.
| [deleted]
| joshspankit wrote:
| I wish there was more budget available for virtual tourism. I may
| just buy this CoD so I can (eventually) mod it and walk around
| Amsterdam in VR.
| smusamashah wrote:
| It's the lighting which is amazingly realistic. The contrast
| between shadows and sunlit area. There are so many details which
| are off. It's the lighting which is so crazy good that it looks
| real on the first sight. Games don't have that very often.
| breck wrote:
| And yet it's not even close.
| yboris wrote:
| For another ultra-realistic feel in a computer game:
| https://twitter.com/esankiy/status/1580225720361832448
|
| The trick here is you have a very POV camera-mounted-on-head
| effect with lens distortions (in I think VR) and the environment
| is very deteriorated, making me doubt it was a game in the first
| place!
| speedgoose wrote:
| The video is full or reflection artefacts because it uses screen
| space reflections, in 2022. It would be so much better to use
| raytraced reflections like RTX games.
|
| It also has transparency bugs. You see the boat through the
| reflection on the windshield of the car right at the beginning.
|
| Walking animations are a bit clumsy with the path finding that is
| a bit unrealistic.
|
| The water effects around the boat look bad.
|
| This isn't very much better in terms of technology than a AAA
| from about ten years ago. The artists did a great work.
| R0flcopt3r wrote:
| It's also a blurry mess with tons of tearing at low frame rate.
| Might be down to the encoding that twitter does.
| franciscop wrote:
| Looking at the original youtube video, tearing seems to be
| from Twitter:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_LlSR6-ibA
| badpun wrote:
| Lol, so as usual, game devs perform technical miracles,
| rendering an incredibly rich virtual world at smooth 60
| FPS, while a bloated and barely-competent Silicon Valley
| company cannot even display a freaking video clip of it
| without tearing.
| fmajid wrote:
| Twitter is barely even incompetent.
| franciscop wrote:
| As a usual twitter user, I've been dreading watching any
| videos there and I'm used to find them on youtube because
| of this. I thought it was because I was using linux, but
| now that I've moved to a macbook m1 with the power of a
| supercomputer 10 years ago, the quality of the videos is
| too ridiculous to take twitter videos seriously.
| Freaky wrote:
| Twitter's infamous for encoding video into little more than
| mildly suggestive compression artifacts.
|
| Here's a 4k60 YouTube video:
| https://youtu.be/VGnuGnOWeTE?t=605
| staindk wrote:
| Yeah I'm not sure how anyone's meant to find something
| impressive to look at when there's a layer of vaseline over
| all of it. Maybe there's a higher quality version being
| served to some Twitter users.
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| Or looking at it on your phone screen hides the muck.
| skohan wrote:
| You could not have seen this 10 years ago. Tons of geometric
| detail (unless those bikes are really clever billboards) and
| lots and lots of texture detail. 10-year-old GPUs would have
| had neither the VRAM nor processing power to put this out.
|
| Also this seems like a result of photogrammetry - so I think
| you can credit artists and the tools which make this possible.
| nothis wrote:
| Photogrammetry (together with a physical based rendering
| pipeline to get the lighting just right) probably deserves
| all the credit in this. I remember first reading about it in
| 2014, in an article about an indie game for that matter. The
| Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Here's an article:
| https://www.pcgamer.com/find-out-why-the-vanishing-of-
| ethan-...
|
| Since then, every game that embraced it for photo realism
| looks basically perfect in terms of world geometry. Doesn't
| even have to be crazy high-res or high poly, as long as you
| don't stick your virtual nose directly in front of stuff, you
| can easily fill every pixel on screen with one that's ~95%
| there from where it should be in a real-world photograph.
| skohan wrote:
| Aren't artists still involved in getting assets ready for
| production? My understanding was that a fair amount of
| polishing and refinement would still be required after
| capture (e.g. trimming down a very high poly model to
| something which can be rendered at 60FPS) - but I don't
| know to what extent that may have been automated by now.
|
| I guess technologies like Nannite will also reduce the need
| for this type of grunt work.
|
| But in either case, artists will still be involved in
| framing and staging the scene, doing the actual capture
| etc.
|
| Creating a beautiful scene through photogrammetry is still
| a form of art, the same way photography and painting are
| each forms of art.
| nothis wrote:
| Art direction trumps tech in games for a while, now. This is
| just well lit, well researched and compression artifacts smooth
| out the details. Character's eyes are still kinda dead,
| animations fidgety, screen space reflection artifacts if the
| "reflected" area isn't in frame, etc, etc. Definitely no
| different from the average "realistic looking game" 5 years ago
| and probably, yes, even "high end graphics" 10 years ago.
| Things are slowing down.
| riffraff wrote:
| what bothers me in this, even in a still frame, is cars and
| scooters/mopeds.
|
| There is something of with them and very noticeable, I think
| because of the uniformity and "polish" of the
| surface/texture/materials.
|
| The rest of the city does look pretty great tho.
| andrewallbright wrote:
| As a hobbyist game dev one thing I've (recently) learned is that
| optimizing performance is paramount in video games. Running at 60
| FPS you have a budget of 16 ms per frame (VR requires 90 FPS
| minimum else risk VR sickness; ~11ms per frame). Any scripts and
| anything you want on screen needs to fit in that amount of time.
| It's a big exercise in smoke and mirrors.
|
| I'd love to know what optimization techniques are used so that
| those precious CPU/GPU cycles can go to those good looking
| things.
|
| Side note: being absolutely forced to optimize the heck out of
| games as an essential practice gives me a much greater sense of
| performance characteristics in my "real" job and also in
| leetcode.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| At a high level it's about doing as little as possible.
|
| Don't allocate memory. Don't re-layout ui. etc
| jessermeyer wrote:
| Modern renderers:
|
| Use the GPU to decide what to render, and in a growing number
| of cases, will cull triangles in compute (software) instead of
| letting the fixed pipeline do it. The vertex shader feeds
| parameters to the fragment shader even if the triangle is
| culled (depth or backfacing), so with vertex counts climbing,
| there is a lot of dead time spent feeding fragment shaders that
| are never ran.
|
| Render at a lower resolution and temporally upsample to a
| higher resolution.
|
| Using low overhead apis that optimize command recording
| performance (DX12, Vulkan) and transfer / memory access.
|
| Multithread all the things.
|
| Obsess over data locality and compression.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Culling triangles seems to be going away though, especially
| with the rise of ray tracing. The expectation is that even
| aspects of the scene we can't see influence lighting. How are
| they managing that?
| enragedcacti wrote:
| IANAGD, most graphically intense games are using a hybrid
| approach where RT will inform lighting/shadows and
| reflections but still rely on traditional rasterization
| heavily. That gives you a good bit of room to fudge the
| raytracing since the rasterization gives you a baseline.
|
| That said, it seems like the culling advice for RT is
| "expanded camera frustrum" culling, distance culling
| dependent on size, and choosing the right geometry LOD.
| Beyond that they want you to aggressively mark geometry as
| opaque and carefully arrange objects into groups (BLASes)
| according to a couple rules so the GPU can skip as much
| work as possible.
|
| https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/best-practices-using-
| nvidi...
| jessermeyer wrote:
| What makes you think culling triangles is going away? Ray
| tracing is usually done with a highly approximated volume
| or planar representation of the scene, which is then
| applied to surface triangles.
|
| Rendering objects that 'we can't see' has been done for as
| long as shadow caster light sources have been around. Even
| though we cannot see the mesh directly, the light can, and
| the viewer can see the shadow. These indirections all play
| their role in the greater "rendering equation", and the
| specific solution depends on the constraints of the
| application and resources of the development team.
|
| Some renderers have abandoned triangles altogether for
| signed distance fields, but this involves re-creating from
| scratch the entire art pipeline.
| eclipxe wrote:
| You can get by with 72 fps in VR and avoid sickness.
| andrewallbright wrote:
| That's good; you get more of a frame budget that way. I saw
| 90 and even 144 as target frames to avoid VR sickness. It's
| good to know 72 frames can work too.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| Frame rate plays a role - especially when it drops down
| below targets and stutters, which does happen irl, but
| designing the experience to avoid motion sickness from the
| ground up is what makes the difference. Keeping something
| stable in the view that moves along with head pose like a
| HUD element while everything else around you is moving
| makes a huge difference. Seeing the world around you in
| motion from inside a car with the stable windscreen will be
| much easier than zooming around through freespace even at
| 120hz for most people until they get comfortable with the
| sensory mismatch. I have heard several interesting
| approaches to acclimatization and can recommend this [1] if
| you are affected & am told positioning a real fan blowing
| air on you while in the headset will orient your
| proprioception in a way that helps.
|
| [1] https://medium.com/@ThisIsMeIn360VR/motion-sickness-
| and-the-...
| rcarr wrote:
| Why are any comments listing criticisms of the realism of this
| video being flagged? This is not what I would expect from Hacker
| News and is very worrying.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| These flaggings are because we're saying things that are too
| obvious, other flaggings are because we're saying things that
| aren't obvious enough.
|
| Pretty soon they'll demand that there just be a menu of
| approved viewpoints you can choose from.
|
| False flaggings should shadow-ban your account. Let the
| deletionists feel important without bothering the rest of us.
| Bakary wrote:
| The unrealistic flaws of the video are fairly obvious and don't
| really need pointing out, and sometimes the endless nasal
| pedantry takes its toll on the mind
| rcarr wrote:
| Some of the flaws are obvious. Some of them aren't. Either
| way they can lead to very interesting conversations and get
| the mind thinking. You should be flagging blind hatred not
| observations and criticism.
|
| You're literally shutting down free speech. Metaphorically
| you're creating a walled compound where all the "happy"
| people can pretend everything is fine and dandy meanwhile on
| the opposite side of the wall is a bunch of unhappy homeless
| people who literally had their house taken away by the people
| in the compound just because they happened to disagree with
| something one of the powerful people said at a dinner party.
| Bakary wrote:
| You can vouch for comments to unflag them by clicking on
| the timestamp. I have done so multiple times when it was
| clear the author had made an interesting point but did so
| in an unduly hostile manner. However, the ratio of flagged
| comments that didn't deserve their fate is incredibly low.
|
| The free speech martyrdom angle makes sense on paper, and
| it's true that there are users that act as commissars, but
| the practical reality is that no interesting discussion
| actually flows from the flagged content. This is something
| every online community eventually learns through
| experience.
|
| Most of the time, the abstract idea of free speech is the
| only merit these comments have, and from that we can also
| ask if flagging is not an expression of speech in and of
| itself.
| rcarr wrote:
| Well I'd be interested to know what part of the Hacker
| News guidelines this comment I made has violated and why
| you have deemed the ensuing discussion uninteresting and
| adding nothing to the discussion.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33297520
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Bakary wrote:
| Your comment seems fine to me and it's still standing at
| the time of writing, so there's no issue there.
| rcarr wrote:
| Thank you. It's really not a nice feeling to be silenced,
| especially when it feels completely unjustified. Makes
| you question reality itself. I hope the powers that be
| unflag it.
| Bakary wrote:
| To clarify my earlier point as I now realize I sounded
| more hostile than I intended to. Sometimes, people will
| flag for aesthetic reasons even if the comment doesn't
| technically deserve it. They might be tired of
| negativity, and click the flag button in a moment of
| weakness just for the experience of being excited about
| things again. There also is a separate phenomenon of dead
| or removed comments usually meriting it, even taking into
| account trigger-happy moderation.
|
| In this case, your comment spawned helpful discussion so
| I'll happily vouch for it if it is ever killed.
| rcarr wrote:
| Thank you for vouching and giving some insight. The
| moderators have got a tough gig!
| pprotas wrote:
| Let me go off topic a bit here. I've never seen a scene in a game
| as realistic as the footage provided in this tweet, and I say
| this as someone who has been gaming all my life. I am not even a
| fan of CoD, don't even play those types of games. As a Dutch
| citizen I was simply happy about the fact that they were able to
| recreate Amsterdam in such a beautiful way.
|
| Full of excitement I've opened the comment section for this post
| and what do I see? The top comments are full of negativity about
| how the waves in the water don't look right, the sounds of the
| footsteps are not squelchy and there are artefacts in the
| rendering.
|
| Why is HN so negative about amazing things? I get that we like to
| provide constructive criticism, since we are so passionate about
| technology. But come on guys, this is just spewing hate at the
| level of some cesspool internet forums I will not name. Be better
| HN!
| geraldyo wrote:
| hourago wrote:
| > As a Dutch citizen I was simply happy about the fact that
| they were able to recreate Amsterdam in such a beautiful way.
|
| But if you live in New York, San Francisco or London you would
| be tired of seeing your city in games. Even games like
| Assassin's Creed Valhalla, supposedly a Nordic setting, it
| mainly focus on England and the visit to North America is as
| important as the time that you spend in actual Scandinavian
| land.
|
| So, some people is not impressed by the settings while others
| are grateful just by being represented at all.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > But if you live in New York, San Francisco or London you
| would be tired of seeing your city in games.
|
| Huh? I live in NYC and I don't think I've ever played a game
| set here. I know vaguely there's a Spider-Man game set here,
| that I never played, and at least one GTA inspired by but not
| actually set in NYC.
|
| I'd love to play a game set in NYC that looks this great.
| It'd be my first time.
| icambron wrote:
| The GTA game is set in NYC in all but name. I have played a
| lot of games set or partially set in NYC. It's sort of the
| default "we need a big city".
|
| Wikipedia has a list [1]
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_set
| _in_N...
| nine_k wrote:
| The original Deus Ex (1999) takes place in NYC for about
| 1/4 of the game, and the city is really recognizable.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I don't recall playing in a London setting ever since some
| PS1 game from the 2000's.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Watch Dogs Legion?
| Nursie wrote:
| PS2 - The Getaway.
|
| Very impressive for the time!
| anthk wrote:
| Me as an European on phantasy RPGs. Stone walls? Any
| historical center of part of town/cities. Villages?
| Villaremota de Arriba from Nowhereland with wheat fields for
| kilometers.
|
| Rural town in thethe US with dinners and odd gas stations or
| some Manhattan clone like Max Payne? That's exotic.
| gigantor wrote:
| bjourne wrote:
| Hacker News became Nitpicker News a long time ago. Might be a
| dysfunction caused by employment. In software development a
| "nit" (i.e a bug such as as null pointer dereference) ruins the
| whole experience. In most other fields such a nit would be
| wholly irrelevant.
| mstade wrote:
| Have you seen the Matrix demo from a few months back? If not,
| you might appreciate it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29533685
|
| Blew my mind!
| Popeyes wrote:
| Perfection through negativity is a thing I am guilty of.
| "Wouldn't it be better if..." is often a phrase that runs
| through my thoughts when evaluating something artistic.
|
| But like you, I was thinking, is that a video with actors
| pretending to be computer characters or actually a thing.
| Maursault wrote:
| > Why is HN so negative about amazing things?
|
| Any that often and typically respond negatively and not
| constructively are usually compensating for a fragile sense of
| self-worth. Narcissists predictably pretend not to be impressed
| _because they feel threatened by the accomplishments of
| others_. They know they personally could not do better and fear
| the possibility of failure at their own attempt. They must
| instead act as if the accomplishments of others are flawed,
| inconsequential, trivial or meaningless, to feed their ego and
| inflated sense of self-importance.
|
| And because they are easily offended, perceive any criticism as
| an affront to their character, they are about to interpret my
| comment as personal attack and downvote it into oblivion,
| ironically proving my point. But they better watch out, they
| better not cry, they better not pout, I'm telling you why,
| Newton's Second Law of Motion is never broken, and unless they
| seek diagnosis and corrective treatment, they are only able to
| cement their own misery by causing misery.
| rcarr wrote:
| Would you go to an art gallery with a friend and expect to
| look at every piece and both be in complete agreement about
| how wonderful every piece of art was? Do you expect them to
| all dress the same as you and eat the same foods and drink
| the same drinks? Or would you expect your friends to have
| individual likes and dislikes and to notice different
| elements in each art work according to the way they perceive
| the world? Would you diagnose any friend who disagreed with
| your perception of an artwork you consider wonderful to be
| suffering from narcissistic personality disorder?
| Maursault wrote:
| These examples are not applicable and thus straw man
| arguments, because I limited the scope of my observations
| to those _that are most often and typically critical and
| unimpressed,_ and did not include, universally, anyone that
| happens to not care for something. The symptom is not that
| they don 't like something, rather it's that they don't
| like anything.
|
| Clearly this new version of CoD is graphically superior to
| previous versions, yet the criticism is focused on less
| than perfect minutia that probably also existed in or was
| inferior in previous versions. The graphic realism is
| better than any previous version of CoD, yet that still
| isn't good enough for narcissists. Even if it was
| absolutely perfect in every way, this still would not
| satisfy them because they are mentally ill and suffering
| from specific symptoms that cause them anxiety, to feel
| like nothing they do is good enough, to feel threatened by
| others' accomplishments. When they dismiss and denigrate
| they are really focused on their own fragile ego.
| rcarr wrote:
| I will admit that I missed that you had limited your
| scope to those who are "most often and typically critical
| and unimpressed". That said I think the main thrust of
| the argument still stands. You can't assume that people
| are comparing this to previous versions. It's perfectly
| within the realms of plausibility for someone to comment
| who's never played Call of Duty in their life. They might
| have just been intrigued with the post title, looked at
| the video and then just stated the details that broke the
| immersion for them. Would you prefer they just didn't
| comment at all? Are they not allowed to voice their
| experience?
|
| It is also rather wild to throw around narcissistic
| personality disorder diagnoses based on one aspect of
| behaviour. I'm not a psychologist but I'm pretty sure
| you've got to match several behavioural criteria
| consistently to warrant such a diagnosis.
| Maursault wrote:
| I was replying to the general question,
|
| >>>>> Why is HN so negative about amazing things?
|
| And as that is my experience also, I shared my theory and
| supported it. Further, NPD is diagnosed through
| observation of behavior or reports of behavior, and
| regardless of NPD diagnosis, any symptom of NPD is
| necessarily _narcissistic._ My slim hope is that
| narcissists will become more mindful of their behavior,
| recognize that they spread misery, get evaluated,
| treated, and either be cured or mitigate their disorder
| below detectability, and narcissism will become extinct,
| because there are few things in this world that
| completely and utterly suck as much as narcissism, and it
| is everywhere.
|
| I'm not sure who made pride popular and decided that it
| can be harmed, because it is an indulgence. The virtue is
| the opposite of pride, namely, humility, and in general,
| virtues are the antitheses of narcissism, beyond humility
| including charity, modesty, gratitude, temperance,
| patience, courage, accountability, commitment, courtesy,
| cooperation, empathy, forgiveness, respect, reliability,
| sacrifice, sincerity, and so on and so forth. Rather than
| the Golden Rule, narcissists subscribe to egoism to act
| only selfishly and in self-interest, as their ego is
| central to the motivation and goal of their own actions.
| By and large the political ideology of narcissism is
| conservatism and libertarianism, focusing on exclusivity
| and their wealth and their interests and their rights
| against and in contest to those of all others, in
| contrast to liberalism, which is an ideology of
| tolerance, liberty, equality, and promoting general
| welfare.
| CleverLikeAnOx wrote:
| If I went to several art galleries and they always
| criticized everything there, I would consider them bad
| company. Or at least the wrong person to take to an art
| gallery.
| draw_down wrote:
| Everyone who doesn't like what I like has a mental disorder.
| Come on, let's grow up.
| [deleted]
| Maursault wrote:
| This is a lovely straw man.
|
| While dissent is of fundamental importance to progress, as
| nothing would advance if everyone always agreed, those who
| are consistently negative and somewhat terminally
| unimpressed reveal far more about themselves with their
| criticism than what they reveal about the target of their
| criticism. If criticism is validly supported, this is not
| what I'm referring to, but instead condemnation,
| exaggeration, labelling and nitpickery.
| draw_down wrote:
| rcarr wrote:
| But who is to decide what is and isn't nitpickery? There
| is a famous story about Senna, the formula one driver who
| drove round a course and crashed into a wall. When he got
| back to the pit stop and was asked how he crashed Senna
| was adamant that the wall had moved. Everyone thought he
| was mad but nonetheless they went out and measured it and
| it turned out that the wall was a few millimetres out
| from where it should have been.
|
| Everyone perceives the world differently. What is
| nitpickery to one person can be the difference between
| success and a car crash to another.
|
| https://www.essentiallysports.com/greatest-f1-story-when-
| ayr...
| Maursault wrote:
| Your example is not one of nitpickery. In situations of
| high performance tolerances are tighter and tiny details
| can be critical. A better example is someone being
| unimpressed with a formula one racer's performance
| because of their sponsors or team colors when even the
| driver finishing in last place has rare and enviable
| driving skills the observer lacks.
| rcarr wrote:
| No, the Senna example above is not nitpickery. However if
| I raced with one of my friends and he crashed into a wall
| and then blamed it on the wall having moved and we then
| went and measured the wall and found him to be correct,
| yes he would be right but he would also be nitpicking as
| I doubt that either me or any of my friends have the
| ability to drive with millimetre precision. He would have
| crashed into the wall regardless of whether it had moved
| or not.
|
| I was trying to use that example to highlight the fact
| that we don't know the skills and perceptions of anyone
| who is posting on Hacker News. One person might say that
| the immersion is ruined because of the lack of accurate
| sounds when walking. To the average person that might be
| nitpicking. For someone who is a sound designer or a
| musician or someone with a generally heightened auditory
| sense it could be the difference between immersion and
| the breaking of the illusion. The same person might even
| be fine with the previous generation graphics if the
| sound was spot on. We just don't know who is commenting
| on the post and we don't know how much their internal
| perceptions differ to our own. To label them nitpickers,
| narcissists and some of the other unsavoury stuff that is
| being levelled in this comment section is really unfair.
| I feel we should try and give charitable interpretations
| and give everyone the benefit of doubt where possible.
| Maursault wrote:
| > I was trying to use that example to highlight the fact
| that we don't know the skills and perceptions of anyone
| who is posting on Hacker News.
|
| This is arguing an appeal to authority. It doesn't matter
| what their expertise is, what matters is their claim and
| whether it is relevant and validly supported. While the
| OP title claims realism, what they meant were that the
| graphics are improved and exceptional, leaving the
| naysaying criticisms along the lines of, "that doesn't
| look realistic, it has weird artifacts everywhere and the
| animation is unnatural" more revealing about the observer
| than what they've observed.
| rcarr wrote:
| Respectfully disagree. It's not an appeal to authority at
| all, it was highlighting neurodiversity. It is quite
| common for autistic people to have heightened auditory
| perceptions, that does not make them authorities in the
| field of audio unless they have studied it and become a
| recognised authority. Everyone perceives the world
| differently. That's exactly why a detective interviews
| multiple witnesses in an attempt to gain a more accurate
| perspective of the objective reality.
|
| You've taken a tweet and you're now trying to define a
| narrow window of acceptable discussion about the tweet
| based on it's title. How many conversations are you
| having in real life that stick to such rigid parameters?
| That's not how conversation works. This isn't a formal
| paper that must be laser focussed on a single topic. It's
| a much more relaxed space that allows for discussion of
| things that may even only be weakly related to the
| original content. Someone could post a story about their
| time in Amsterdam with no relation to Call of Duty or
| video games and I would still consider it valid
| discussion.
|
| You can't just just pick and choose that all technical
| discussion of the topic must now be about the improved
| graphics and nothing else. You also can't assume that
| your interpretation of the title is the correct one or
| the one the author intended. Doing so is arrogance, which
| ironically enough, is one of the nine diagnostic criteria
| of Narcissistic Personality Disorder according to the
| DSM-5.
| Maursault wrote:
| > It is quite common for autistic people to have
| heightened auditory perceptions, that does not make them
| authorities
|
| Notwithstanding the contradiction and equivocation, this
| is an appeal to authority.
|
| > You've taken a tweet and you're now trying to define a
| narrow window of acceptable discussion about the tweet
| based on it's title. How many conversations are you
| having in real life that stick to such rigid parameters?
| That's not how conversation works.
|
| Ad hominem, focused on me for some reason. Straw man, by
| inaccurately rephrasing my argument in order to attack
| it. And fallacy of control, apparently a belief that you
| control definitions of terms and how things work. This
| was followed by going beyond the scope of our discussion
| to other discussions you deem valid.
|
| > You can't just just pick and choose that all technical
| discussion of the topic must now be about the improved
| graphics and nothing else. You also can't assume that
| your interpretation of the title is the correct one or
| the one the author intended. Doing so is arrogance, which
| ironically enough, is one of the nine diagnostic criteria
| of Narcissistic Personality Disorder according to the
| DSM-5.
|
| More control fallacy, straw man, ad hominem, but I
| believe this also includes the mind-readers fallacy.
| Apparently I am being scolded for what I secretly believe
| and my argument has been completely lost to the void. To
| avoid fallacy, one must ignore the person, focus on their
| argument without molesting it, avoid attempts to control
| them or assert what is in their mind can be known. What
| is said is the realm of valid argument. I did none of
| these things and my right to my opinion, whether correct
| or incorrect, is absolute.
| rcarr wrote:
| Congratulations, you've read a book on rhetoric and
| misunderstood half the definitions.
| Maursault wrote:
| Anything I may have done is irrelevant. All that matters
| is the argument, and for discourse to be logically valid
| it must only address the argument. To be vague is to be
| unconvincing, and any attempt to personally characterize
| me is fallacious argument.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I had a less than positive impression of this trailer, while
| simultaneously acknowledging that on objective merit it surely
| deserves a quite positive impression. And I think there's a
| very specific reason for this! The uncanny valley [1] is caused
| by things looking realistic, but not quite right. But the
| important thing is that in many this often causes a sense of
| discomfort or even revulsion.
|
| This scene in particular is aiming for realism in an everyday
| scene, and likely relying heavily on photogrammetry (which
| makes it look even more realistic). But it's far from perfect.
| And so some may be able to simply appreciate it as a step
| forward in technical achievement, but for others it's going to
| be triggering uncanny valley effects. I suspect this may be a
| driving factor in the negative responses.
|
| If this is the case this is going to be a major bottle-neck for
| graphics going forward. Even something as small as a
| character's eyes being in some indescribable way 'off' can
| trigger uncanny valley effects. So there's a long road ahead to
| trying to overcome the uncanny valley, but one where each step
| forward may not be able to be appreciated for the technical
| progress that is.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
| omnibrain wrote:
| I don't think the the Uncanny Valley Effect is as much a
| problem, because I believe it's a moving target. "The
| Avantgarde" in media will always suffer, but the next
| installments will profit from the public getting used to it
| and the "new avantgarde" moving the goalpost again.
|
| Have a look at the Final Fantasy movie. A lot of moviegoers
| decried the Uncanny Valley, especially regarding Aki, but if
| you watch it with today's eyes, there is no such effect.
| amjadtwofaced wrote:
| jameshart wrote:
| The fact of the matter is that this is _not_ an example of a
| massive improvement in world modeling, simulation or light
| transport.
|
| It shows that you can get a lot of the way towards people
| saying 'wow that looks real' _just by using high def HDR
| textures and a good environment map_. In almost every other
| respect this render is far from state of the art.
|
| And as you say, if that impresses people then that's great! The
| team have discovered the shortcut to where to put in the effort
| to convince viewers! The goal of this kind of game environment
| engineering is to create sufficient verisimilitude to have the
| player suspend disbelief - and this seems to do the trick for a
| lot of people.
|
| But looked at critically it's surprising how many ways this
| engine is producing bad results and yet people are willing to
| overlook and say they're blown away by the realism. Maybe the
| uncanny valley for environments is not as deep as we thought.
| glitcher wrote:
| I appreciate it because of how well it captures the look of a
| real world location. I've seen a lot of games attempt to
| capture the spirit of a real place and not get nearly as
| close as this.
|
| I agree it's not an example of massive improvement
| technically, but I think it's pretty good work that pushes
| incremental improvements in a forward direction.
| jameshart wrote:
| That may just be a reflection of the kinds of games you've
| been playing. _Forza Horizon_ has been doing an incredible
| job of creating convincingly real locations at high frame
| rates for a while now, for example[1]. In terms of busy,
| detailed urban environments that feel solid and alive, look
| at _Half Life: Alyx_. Others have pointed to the _Matrix_
| unreal demo that shows off some truly gamechanging
| techniques for environmental modeling and realism.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/r1xK6PRk1DU
| mcv wrote:
| It is absolutely brilliant world modelling. I'm looking at it
| on a small screen, but the level of detail and accuracy blows
| my mind. I've never seen anything this detailed and accurate.
|
| The only thing that makes it immediately obvious that this is
| from a game, is the clunky movements from the people. They
| should really start putting some effort into that.
| jameshart wrote:
| Some things to look more carefully at, then, if the only
| thing you noticed was the character animations:
|
| - the screen space reflections are broken in the left-hand
| 10% or so of the screen
|
| - early in the clip there is some weird z-buffer error
| where reflections from the boat's roof are showing in front
| of the car windows
|
| - although the water surface has reflections that make it
| appear not to be flat, its geometry cuts off along the side
| of the boat in a pure straight line
|
| - there are tearing artifacts a couple of times where we
| are seeing the top of one frame and the bottom of another
| (may be a screen recording artifact rather than a rendering
| one though)
|
| I don't think these are merely being 'nit picky' - these
| are clear ways in which the render is a long way short of
| 'realistic'.
|
| As I say, great modeling and texturing with environmental
| PBR clearly does a lot of work convincing a viewer a place
| is 'real'. But it seems a bit sad to present that in an
| engine which has such glaring flaws and _ignore_ them.
| Other engines exist that do this better.
| mcv wrote:
| I was commenting primarily about the modelling, which is
| absolutely amazing with the exception of the way people
| move. That the rendering is not perfect is a different
| issue. I still maintain it's incredibly good at first
| glance. That there are details that betray it as a render
| is hardly surprising, but by far the most glaring thing
| giving it away is the way people move.
|
| I just watched it again on a bigger screen, and I didn't
| really notice any of the details you mentioned. It's
| clear it's a render from the slightly artificial look
| many things have, which is especially the case for
| people. But the city scene in general looks absolutely
| fantastic. If you know games that look more real than
| this, I'd love to know which.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| From my limited experience, that's always something the CoD
| teams have done incredibly well: maintain focus on
| _suspension of player disbelief_ as their core KPI.
|
| Technologies or tricks that enhance it are used. Technical
| masturbation that's ancillary is eschewed.
|
| In the first CoD game, the illusion shattered instantly when
| you deviated from the expected path (e.g. linger in an area,
| backtrack, or take an odd turn).
|
| But that was part of the focus and prioritization of
| effort... they could have improved that, at the expense of
| making the main path less stellar. They didn't.
|
| I've gotta admire the focus and feature discipline.
|
| _Edit:_ One of the core things that strikes me from the
| video (not having seen generations of intervening games) is
| how far human animation libraries and mocap has come. At some
| point, they 've climbed enough of the opposite wall of the
| uncanny valley not to have it be obviously wrong. Glad we
| finally got there.
|
| And other side note, everyone should remember this is a
| multiplatform release. They don't have the luxury of spec'ing
| to the latest and greatest hardware from Nvidia and AMD. This
| has to run on consoles with decent performance and with a
| minimum of per-platform code rework and optimization.
| TillE wrote:
| > maintain focus on suspension of player disbelief
|
| Something that really struck me when I when I first played
| Half-Life 2 was how much it all felt like a movie set,
| where everything was designed to look fantastic along this
| one narrow path that you're quickly ushered along, but
| there was absolutely nothing beyond that path. It's all
| just lovingly detailed facades.
|
| That's the story with all linear AAA games. I think for
| most players the illusion works great, but I can't help but
| see the artifice.
| somethings1123 wrote:
| > That's the story with all linear AAA games. I think for
| most players the illusion works great, but I can't help
| but see the artifice.
|
| It's okay, since this a stylized classic HN insight porn
| comment.
|
| Calling it an "illusion" is a really dumb take. It
| reminds me that hardly anyone in this forum reads
| fiction, and even if you created Ready Player One for
| them, they'd do exactly what the game designers gave them
| to do.
|
| Anyway, Call of Duty games have a great variety of
| levels. "Defend Burger Town" comes to mind as a Modern
| Warfare 2 (2009) level you could explore pretty freely.
|
| Half Life 2 had open set pieces. Uncharted 4 has possibly
| the best chase sequence in gaming. It would be so stupid
| and reductionist to call that an "illusion," just because
| they have some paths for your car to take.
|
| What do you want? Even the real world expects you to walk
| and drive along paths. That's just architecture dude. It
| exists just as often in "open world games" like Red Dead
| Redemption as it does in "sequence of setpieces" games
| like Call of Duty.
| la64710 wrote:
| Smart comment
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Funny story: I got deja vu working along the Seine in Paris due
| to first experiencing it in Battlefield 3.
|
| That came out ten years ago! At a glance, this looks like it is
| using ray tracing, which is a big improvement in rendering.
| cfcosta wrote:
| Being a CS player, I had the weirdest dejavu feeling ever
| when I went to Venice. The level of detail is so much better
| now its not even funny.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I'm as impressed as you are but telling people that the
| graphics are realistic is basically a challenge. Nobody
| complained about the unrealistic graphics of Super Mario 64.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Yes I criticised the technology in my comment that got flagged,
| while saying that the artists did a great work.
|
| If you only want praise I recommend LinkedIn.
| ffitch wrote:
| I don't mind a spectrum of opinions. I never played video games
| and it's hard to tell har far ahead this reel is compared to
| other modern games. It looks appealing, at the same time
| there's clearly a room for improvements. I don't have a trained
| eye, but I'm really curious what gives it away.
| jesuscript wrote:
| You are talking to generations of people that grew up with
| video games. This isn't some shit they saw for the first time,
| they've been watching the progress since childhood at this
| point.
|
| Basically, they lost perspective on how amazed an average
| person would be. Similar to how porn addicts don't flinch at
| triple penetration videos, or ... you get it. Wish I could come
| (ooof) up with better analogies.
|
| Yes, even I went "nope, that's not real enough".
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Also, we've been able to generate pretty realistic images for
| quite some time now. For some expertly crafted ray-traced
| stills, it's nearly impossible to tell whether the picture
| was computer-generated.
|
| This looks pretty amazing, I'll give that, but you can still
| clearly see it's a computer game. A bit better than the last
| one maybe, but not "can't tell if rendered"-realistic.
| varjag wrote:
| It took me a whole few seconds to confirm it's a game. Mind
| you I've been to that place and I've rendered my first wire
| mesh in 1991.
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Love this perspective :)
| someweirdperson wrote:
| My first thought was "ok, that's the reference video of
| real Amsterdam, now where is the video from the game..."
| skohan wrote:
| > you can still clearly see it's a computer game
|
| But I think it's quite amazing that we've gotten to the
| point where people in this thread are pointing out the
| details which betray that this is not photorealistic, in
| order to prove that point.
|
| Even a few years ago, we would have been pointing to the
| small details which _do_ make it seem photorealistic, like
| volumetric lighting or well done reflections.
| joshspankit wrote:
| I suspect that even in 50 years there will still be
| people pointing out their modern equivalent of inaccurate
| lighting and saying how it breaks the illusion.
|
| In my decades of watching technology, those voices have
| always said things with the same tone.
| pprotas wrote:
| Are you comparing 1 frame of a still that hasn't been
| rendered in real-time to a video game that is being
| dynamically rendered at at least (I hope) 30 frames per
| second?
|
| > you can still clearly see it's a computer game
|
| I'll give you that, but we are comparing this footage to
| footage of other video games from the past. Can you name a
| video game that looks more realistic than this? Maybe some
| of those realistic racing games I guess, but that is a
| different type of video game. My point is: currently, this
| is as close as we get to real-life, no? Sure, it can be
| better (and it probably will be in the future), but I'd say
| this ranks pretty high.
| treis wrote:
| All of these demos look way better than the one in the
| OP:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi_RW2ofkFY&ab_channel=Ga
| min...
| riffraff wrote:
| I think people are reacting to the tweet saying
|
| > almost can't believe this is a video game
|
| Hyperbole is fine but it does tend to cause backlash.
| nine_k wrote:
| It's a video game, that is, it renders in real time on
| hardware costing a couple thousand dollars max.
|
| It's not trying to look impeccably realistic cinema level
| CGI, but it's damn impressive given the limitations of a
| video game, and of gaming hardware.
| rcarr wrote:
| I agree. I wouldn't even say it's backlash it's just
| debugging out loud.
|
| HN users want to test how true a statement is because
| when you're coding a program, any edge cases that prove
| your code wrong can literally break everything. I think
| that begins to rub off on how you perceive all kinds of
| propositional statements in other areas.
| themitigating wrote:
| Is that really hyperbole considering the quality?
| shaded-enmity wrote:
| Yeah, it's much, MUCH different to have those vistas
| unfold in front of your eyes at smooth 144 fps while you
| have control over the movement and everything compared to
| hyperanalizing 1 still frame or a sequence of frames with
| no real control.
| cehrlich wrote:
| Yeah, I don't understand negative comments. I don't care if it
| uses the most state of the art whatever mapping, fact is I used
| to live on the square where the main part of the video is shot
| and I was shocked by just how close to reality everything
| looks. I think it's the most immersive environment I've seen in
| a game.
|
| The human models aren't as convincing, but there's also dozens
| of them on screen at once, the developers are still bound by
| what a pc/console can do.
| bakugo wrote:
| > Why is HN so negative about amazing things?
|
| There's nothing "amazing" about this. Graphics don't make a
| good game.
| thfuran wrote:
| But this is about the graphics, and good graphics pretty
| indisputably do make good graphics.
| bakugo wrote:
| These aren't good graphics though, they're realistic
| graphics. "Good" is subjective, and most people who have
| been playing games for a decent amount of time have moved
| past their "realism is the most important aspect of game
| visuals" phase.
|
| In recent years I've been way more impressed by the visual
| design of highly stylized, anti-realistic games that,
| instead of simply trying to look like real life, instead
| create environments with distinct looks that you don't get
| anywhere else.
| synu wrote:
| I didn't read that as spewing hate at all, especially compared
| to what cesspool forums are capable of. They listed a few
| things that are still not up to a realistic level, which
| started some interesting conversations around why that stuff is
| still hard.
| pprotas wrote:
| Actually, you are right. Looking back at the comment, I
| didn't provide constructive criticism to my fellow HN
| commenters.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| People seem to gain something by trying to be the person
| hardest and last to impress. It's like some sort of Simon
| Cowell effect where people think being able to point out the
| flaws in something is a quality of an expert rather something
| anyone can do about anything.
|
| Gamers and tech forum posters like HNers do this all the time
| about the things in their wheelhouse that they would say they
| know a lot about from graphics to React to dev tools to games.
|
| It's boring and I think it's a dreadful thing to practice. A
| better exercise is to try to see the good things in something
| and appreciate those in light of the trade offs the thing must
| make.
|
| Anyone can come enumerate the bad things about something.
| jader201 wrote:
| I don't disagree with anything you or the parent post said.
| And while I don't feel like I'm quick to criticize HN posts,
| I wonder if part of it is that negative/critical comments
| spark more interesting discussion?
|
| E.g. I saw the CoD video, then clicked to see comments. And
| while my first thoughts were "yeah, this is pretty stunning,"
| I didn't have anything else to say.
|
| I wonder if most that agreed also didn't have much to say?
| Especially since this wasn't a "Show HN" where more positive
| feedback is targeting the author. There's no one here to give
| positive (or negative) feedback to, so discussing criticism
| may be the more interesting discussion?
|
| But I suppose this is pretty amazing tech, too, and there is
| likely something interesting to discuss there.
| darkerside wrote:
| Negative thinking usually makes you sound smarter than
| positive thinking, with less effort. Not a criticism, just
| an observation. I think you're right that an empty thread
| would be worse than a bunch of nitpicks.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| There's an infinite number of reasons something can be
| wrong: there's only a few it can be right.
|
| Also, basement internet drastically underappreciates the
| magnitude of effort that goes into creation.
|
| I don't play CoD, but I can appreciate the years of
| development of work that likely went into this (+ the
| engine, the libraries, the mocap animations, the sound
| work, etc).
|
| Is it perfect? No. But it would take an incredibly large
| and well-funded team a lot of calendar time to produce
| anything that surpasses it.
|
| So kudos to the entire team at Infinity Ward for making
| something and shipping!
| mikkergp wrote:
| It is kind of sad though, and I say this as someone who has
| been trying to analyze more of my own negative reactions
| and be more positive. A video like this has so much
| potential to to inspire. And in that vein I do think it's
| pretty cool, I hope at some point someone makes a "game" or
| simulation that's just an open world earth with some land
| air and see vehicles. (Time travel would be neat too, but
| that's a lot of continent) Moon would be cool to, though a
| bit less varied :-)
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This is an even bigger issue, people feeling like their
| opinion is so important they HAVE to have one and they HAVE
| to share it.
|
| If you don't have anything to say beyond "yeah it looks
| awesome", upvote and move on.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I distinctly remember a shift in the quality of my colleagues
| when I started noticing they all pointed out what was _good_
| about my equipment /work (I'm a video/audio producer and
| editor). They saved critiques and suggestions for when I
| solicited them.
|
| I always attributed it to people needing to reaffirm that
| they are experts. They don't really care what they are
| talking about, they just want everybody to hear them
| contribute. Perhaps it's because they are defensive about
| their own skill level and are feeling "imposter syndrome." Or
| maybe they are just super egotistical, who knows. Psychology
| is complicated haha
| kotlin2 wrote:
| One adage I like: "pessimists sound smart, optimists make
| money."
| zasdffaa wrote:
| With you, and I hate the destructiveness of it. I notice
| thought, it's those who have least to offer are first to
| criticise. Look at the comments of those who are genuinely
| good (eg. BeeOnRope here on HN) and you see a far more
| tolerant and constructive responses.
| themitigating wrote:
| "People seem to gain something by trying to be the person
| hardest and last to impress. "
|
| It's not considered positive to be impressed easily and
| often, that's similar to how a child acts, which equates with
| immature for most people. Also, if you are hard to impress
| then you must have experienced more than those easily
| impressed. For some it's a way to appear superior with just a
| simple opinion. Basically arrogant assholes.
|
| The alternative is cynicism but then again that's also
| sometimes used to seem elite.
| rcarr wrote:
| Poster of the waves and squelch comment here. I probably should
| have added that I too find it an incredible achievement before
| listing the things I noticed that were off. I listed those
| things because I know that the people who work on these games
| and engines frequent hacker news so if I point the main things
| out that I've noticed as being off then it's feedback for those
| guys as to what to work on next. Things like the NPC animation
| are pretty obvious but stuff like the lack of squelch are easy
| to overlook.
|
| I also like to hear from people involved in these things, who
| may post a comment or reply about efforts going into solving
| these challenges. I've learned some cool things about Far Cry 2
| which I didn't know about after posting that comment.
|
| Nothing should be above criticism. The Titanic was an amazing
| achievement for its time but thankfully we have learned from
| its mistakes and now build better and safer ships as a result.
| We need both praise and criticism in the world in order to
| succeed. Whilst it is tempting to "bake a cake filled with
| rainbows and smiles and everyone eat and be happy" it does not
| lead to happiness or successful outcomes in the long term.
|
| To paraphrase Ferris Bueller, we should "stop and look around
| once in a while, else you might miss it". We should especially
| do this after our successes. But nonetheless, the world spins
| ever onwards and we should aim to improve with every iteration
| of that spin lest we fall backwards.
| rvz wrote:
| draw_down wrote:
| brandall10 wrote:
| I'd consider the criticism more uncanny valley type stuff -
| because it looks of a certain quality the flaws are more
| evident. It seems for the most part the excellence here is in
| the art design taking advantage of modern GPUs and the
| criticism is warranted from a technical perspective.
| z9znz wrote:
| > uncanny valley
|
| I think this is it. When the games are less realistic
| overall, the mind can still suspend disbelief. And in fact it
| often does; so low-fi everywhere is all accepted and
| forgotten.
|
| Who hasn't read a book (or in the HN crowd, also played a
| text MUD) and become completely lost in the fictional world?
|
| But once we hit that near-perfect, we stop suspending our
| disbelief (or the bar is raised near the top); so the
| imperfections which are detectable become jarring.
| kqr wrote:
| Where you see negativity and hate, I see constructive criticism
| and an honest conversation about flaws out of love for the
| craft and a desire to get the best we can.
|
| We don't improve things by gushing over how great they are
| already. We improve things by pointing out where improvement is
| possible. Clearly there are game devs (past, current and
| future) reading these discussions. Maybe just one can be
| inspired to solve one of the technical challenges mentioned?
| skohan wrote:
| This type of criticism sometimes seems to capture the spirit
| you're describing, but sometimes it seems to verge on
| entitlement when talking about video games.
|
| I think it was John Carmack who bemoaned the fact that the
| video game audience quickly accepts any advancement in
| graphics as the new status quo for gaming, and complains
| about any game which doesn't immediately match it.
|
| I think consumers of the medium don't always appreciate the
| technical achievement which modern AAA video games represent
| - it's maybe one of the few domains of computing which
| demands the people working on it to use 100% of the hardware,
| and to pull tons of dirty tricks to eek out every last bit of
| performance.
|
| So sometimes it seems the audience attributes something to
| laziness, just because something is missing they have seen in
| another game, while what they are seeing is the result of
| very talented engineers working overtime to deliver a
| miracle.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Well yes and no. If general tone of most discussions is just
| critical, overall mood is crappy to be polite. If you are in
| crowd of complainers, even if they keep saying its
| constructive, its a properly depressing place to be. Life is
| not just numbers, points, striving for perfection. What makes
| us humans is much, much more.
|
| This short video looks amazing, specifically _because_ its
| not state of the art in engine work and current level of
| tech. Yet you feel like you are there, on one of the canals.
| Many games these days use better meshes and have higher count
| of triangles and other techniques yet they don 't deliver
| these emotions to those who visited Amsterdam.
|
| And games were, are and always will be about emotions.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Do people not know what real life looks like anymore ?
|
| Not even a second in the video you can see some weird artefact
| through the car windshield, the lighting looks completely off too
|
| What fools us is the low res + motion blur, pause the high res
| video at any point and it looks like a video game:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_LlSR6-ibA
| nothis wrote:
| Just had the video play without sound and my girlfriend said
| she thought it was real before she noticed the overlay text
| being weird. We just went to Amsterdam, too
|
| I agree that we'll be shaving off these last 3% of visual
| artifacts for a while (honestly, on a good setup, games have
| been looking like this for 5+ years, the main thing this video
| has is photogrammetry and lighting). But this _does_ look
| realistic.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It look like an architecture renders from 2010. The last 3%
| will never be shaved off because we're not using the right
| techniques. CGI in star wars are realistic, as in you they
| can fool 99% of people even when paying close attention.
| Video games are realistic if you glance at a video of them
| from 3 meters away while being busy doing something else
|
| I guess it depends on your definition of realistic, I'm a
| photographer, everything screams "fake" in these supposedly
| "realistic" games. Some of them are artistically pleasing
| (rdr2, tlou2, &c.) I'll give you that, but everything is off,
| the lightning, the camera movement, shadows, reflections,
| depth of field, motion blur, textures, ...
| jmyeet wrote:
| My first thought is this is really getting into the uncanny
| valley. Some things look incredibly realistic that it highlights
| how other things don't and overall creates a bit of a jarring
| effect. Some random thoughts:
|
| 1. You see the sidewalk on the bridge is wet like it's been
| freshly rained on. Other things don't look like this. The bridge
| is higher than the road on the far side so should be drier but
| the road looks drier;
|
| 2. The boat just looks off to me. It's like it's too "clean";
|
| 3. Of course the movement of people is off. Games just haven't
| conquered this yet.
|
| 4. The water also looks off given the lighting and the
| conditions. It should be murkier rather than dark with an almost
| oily finish;
|
| 5. It looks like the near side of the canal is in shade but I
| don't really see the line from whatever is obstructing this
| (assumedly it's buildings to the "left"). The Sun is low in the
| sky to the left;
|
| 6. The sky just doesn't seem to match the expected position and
| lighting from the Sun.
|
| Don't get me wrong: it is amazing, particularly rendered in real
| time. But there are uncanny valley artifacts.
| jayflux wrote:
| This looks Amazing, but one thing I found jarring was the
| animations. It feels like game developers haven't improved how
| NPCs walk since GTA 3. I don't know if it's because every NPC has
| the same gate or something but it's odd.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| GTA 4 was a breakthrough in ped animation due to their Euphoria
| engine. GTA 3, on the other hand, is memed to this day for the
| way they made women move their hips when walking. :)
| brap wrote:
| I thought the exact same thing. Relatively to everything else,
| it almost feels like game developers aren't giving it any
| attention. Obviously they are, so what is it about NPC
| animation in particular that makes it so difficult? Even facial
| expressions seem pretty good nowadays...
| Pulcinella wrote:
| In this specific case I could imagine it's just a very low
| priority. It's a first person shooter where the vast, vast,
| vast majority of the time you are exchanging gunfire with
| enemy characters or other players. Except for small sequences
| like the one in the OP, you are very rarely ever interacting
| with NPCs in a non-violent manner outside of cutscene (makes
| for some easy talking points about the state of the AAA games
| industry) so I imagine those animations don't receive many
| resources budgeted towards them.
|
| CoD Infinite Warfare (I.e. "the one in space") had sequences
| in between every mission where you could talk and interact
| with the crew of your spaceship and the NPC animations were a
| lot better there. Also they had a lot of NPCs modeled after
| celebrities for some reason (e.g. F1 driver Lewis Hamilton)
| so there was likely pressure to animate the NPCs better.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| Meh. I don't care much about how realistic it looks like. I care
| about how realistic the interactions are, this is: can I break a
| car in two? Can enter any building? Can I make a hole in the
| ground? Can I cut trees? Can I kiss NPCs? Can I demolish any
| building? Sadly, games are not optimizing for these kind of
| interactions.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Try doing something like that in the real world and you will
| not be doing anything for many years :)
|
| In the real world you can't enter or demolish any building you
| want. So it makes sense for games not to offer this either
| until it's an actual plot point to do so.
| rtlfe wrote:
| > Can enter any building? Can I make a hole in the ground? Can
| I cut trees? Can I kiss NPCs? Can I demolish any building?
|
| I'd really prefer for the developer to focus on the gameplay
| and plot rather than make a perfect simulation of earth. What
| you describe sounds like a cool sandbox, like Flight Simulator,
| but isn't appropriate for most games.
| aerovistae wrote:
| It's not really practical or sensible to task your developers
| with making sure that Spiderman can start digging a hole if he
| wants to. In the long run probably frameworks will start to
| handle these things - soil mechanics, building infrastructure,
| metal deformation, and so on, and then all games will start to
| include them by default by gradual degrees. But hoping the game
| developers themselves make working hedge trimmers instead of
| focusing on actual gameplay is silly.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| If you can't rip a car in half or see the insides of a
| building then battle damage will look like it's painted on.
|
| If Spiderman can't move a bit of rubble (he doesn't really do
| dirt) then he can't pull something into or out of place to
| free a friend or trap an enemy.
|
| It's (all) the little things that are in the way of a game
| feeling immersive and appealing to people who aren't just
| into the main mechanic (ie shooter on rails).
| FredPret wrote:
| On that note, can you shoot through anything?
|
| In real life, you can punch holes in and through buildings and
| trees, given enough bullets and a high enough caliber
| Rimintil wrote:
| Only certain wood materials and glass.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Not really if you look at people walking around for more than 1
| second. Character animation has always been the weakest point of
| video games.
| TillE wrote:
| Of CGI in general. I like Rogue One a lot, but they were _way_
| too proud of their awful rendition of Grand Moff Tarkin, giving
| repeated closeups to an incredibly fake face.
|
| The biggest budgets in Hollywood still can't escape the uncanny
| valley.
| saint_angels wrote:
| I think the main problem here is with transitions between
| animation states and matching each animation to the context. If
| ML motion matching[1] becomes popular in the industry, I think
| it would smooth out these issues a lot.
|
| [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16CHDQK4W5k
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I remember this being solved over ten years ago, without ML,
| there was this software that seamlessly blended between poses
| and activities (morphine or something like that?). I wonder
| what happened to them. Unreal 5 also has similar tech.
| saint_angels wrote:
| can't find anything on "morphine", but animation blending
| is something that Unity/Unreal/etc had for a while.
| Although, I don't think any publicly available engine
| solves this like Ubisoft ML models do. Usually it requires
| at lot of work to look seamless
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I know that area, it is very accurate. Wow. Really a major step
| forward.
|
| Sure there's some things 'off' but there is so much right. Wowwww
| Gregam3 wrote:
| I used to like 20 seconds from this exact spot, even though I
| believe it. I'm in some disbelief that this is real, it's just so
| accurate.
| Axsuul wrote:
| Just missing the window girls
| z9znz wrote:
| It looks incredible.
|
| Although this beautiful recreation is missing the endless
| tourists aimlessly walking on bike paths and the very loud
| conversations between Dutch people (their talking volume is what
| many of us consider yelling, but that's just normal).
|
| Once we get VR headsets that are maybe twice as good as the best
| now, and we have high quality simulations, the scifi stories of
| people choosing living in unreality seem more plausible.
| akaike wrote:
| Except the human models, this looks really amazing. At first
| glance I really thought it's just some edited after effects video
| :)
|
| Amsterdam looks very pretty!
| 8note wrote:
| I'd really want to see the not just bikes described
| infrastructure in action. Lots of bikes, sidewalks that stay at
| sidewalk level when they cross streets, roads vs streets with
| transitions between them etc
| amelius wrote:
| It looks incredibly realistic in Google Streetview too. A
| technology from, what, 10 years ago?
| hypersoar wrote:
| I'm reminded of this blog post[0] from 2017 about bad tone
| mapping in video games. A game can put all the work it wants into
| realistic puddle reflections, but it'll still scream "video game"
| to your eyes if the color grading is so out of whack that it
| couldn't possibly be a real scene. That post is focused on how it
| was done wrong so often in the early days of HDR.
|
| This clip has lots of things that stick out to me as video gamey,
| but the color is on-point. I suspect that's a huge part of the
| realism.
|
| [0] https://80.lv/articles/games-look-bad-hdr-and-tone-mapping/
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I give props for also detailing the interiors of shops. Most
| games will just close the door and put a piece of opaque piece of
| glass
| sylware wrote:
| does it have a vulkan backend?
| Rimintil wrote:
| DX12 on Windows and Xbox.
| sylware wrote:
| If I recall properly wine has a dx12 to vulkan translation
| layer (which is not dxvk)?
| mkl95 wrote:
| It looks like they invested a ton of money on texture
| optimization and lighting algorithms. However the animations look
| like the basic skeletal animation / skinning you can learn from
| an OpenGL/DirectX tutorial. That imbalance is kind of weird.
| krangfu wrote:
| Game and movie too different thing.
| greenthrow wrote:
| "Brand new AAA game looks incrediby realistic" has been a very
| banal observation for the last 20 years.
|
| If this were a link to a discussion of some special technique
| that the creators of the last CoD used maybe that would be
| interesting. But this is lacking in any kind of substance.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Did you watch it? I really think this is very next-level.
|
| It's not perfect yet, definitely not but it's a major step IMO.
| Perhaps it helps that I know the city.
| kingkawn wrote:
| The next tier of mediocrity
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| What game looks much better than this?
| dymk wrote:
| TLOU2, Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Zero Dawn 2
|
| RDR2 in particular looks much more realistic. More
| detailed terrain, better lighting, leagues better
| character animations.
| acapybara wrote:
| Needs more people riding bicycles.
| 4oo4 wrote:
| CoD has a history of being very selective about what parts of
| their games are realistic.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttjSaW-lSNQ
| layer8 wrote:
| What stood out to me in the second video is that the walla
| (background noise/chatter) didn't match the relatively low number
| of visible people, and also didn't change when moving around
| (until the player entered the side alley). Realism isn't just
| visual.
| vl wrote:
| Is there a good single player mission in this new CoD, or is it
| all optimized for online grinding, as it used to be?
| mdswanson wrote:
| I enjoyed the single player campaign. Yes, it's more of an
| interactive movie at times, but there are some fun
| scenarios...and the graphics are insane. Took perhaps 6 hours
| to play through.
| password321 wrote:
| Seems like their world models are outpacing the development of
| their NPCs because they immediately ruined the immersion.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Amazing. I wonder if the textures come from photographs.
|
| Here there's a higher quality video
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_LlSR6-ibA
| nojvek wrote:
| Both Nvidia and Intel have some amazing papers on real time ray
| tracing by using neural nets to filter noise and upsample.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VxbTiuabW0k
|
| I wonder if those techniques were used.
|
| If metaverse looked like this instead of crappy new horizons app,
| i'd be a lot more interested.
|
| This reminded me of the lara croft demo unity had a while back.
|
| Amazing to witness evolution of realism in games.
|
| I visited Amsterdam a while back and couldn't tell from first few
| seconds whether it was real or not. The jerky human movement gave
| it away though.
| rizz0 wrote:
| Amsterdam local here -- in fact, I live in exactly this street.
| Where the first cartel guy gets subdued is where I get my coffee,
| and the people that live in the canal houses are my neighbors.
| (My house may or may not be in the map, would have to play the
| game to check.)
|
| Fun facts:
|
| (1) A year or two ago several guys spent days using some sort of
| device to scan all buildings in our street. They got complaints
| from several bar owners and tenants as they appeared to be taking
| photographs inside the buildings, and they wouldn't explain why.
| I wouldn't be be surprised if it was for this map.
|
| (2) The footage is hyperrealistic not just graphically, they got
| the details right with surprising accuracy. Even the garbage bins
| are in exactly the right place. (It's also not unlikely that a
| guy could be subdued like this without people being too
| surprised, as tourists like to use this district to get wasted
| 24/7.)
| echlebek wrote:
| Comments like this are why I love the internet, cheers!
| stuaxo wrote:
| They seem to have missed the absolute shedload of bikes.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| This area has few bikes compared to the rest of the city, due
| to the sheer amount of foot traffic. Truckloads of british
| tourists are unloaded here every day.
| nlstitch wrote:
| No cycling people and no people riding scooters... hmm
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