F.E.A.R system requirements released

Chaos said:
http://img68.imageshack.us/img68/3087/fear36ti.jpg
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6928/fear58oh.jpg
http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/6835/fear62od.jpg
Click to expand...

Am I the only one who thinks this game looks 'ok'?
Nothing deserving all the hype it's generating for it's graphics.

Static projectors and lightmap hacks everywhere, not to say those aren't any good... yet.
hl2 made excellent use of them - better than games boasting completely real-time unified lighting capabilities.

Single-layered texture work just looks bad after being subjected to the bumpmapped-normalmapped-glossmapped-specular multi-layered tiles in farcry, doom3, riddick...
 
I have no clue what you mean by static projectors in the context of lighting. But this game doesnt use lightmapping for sure! If you use plain lightmapping, you cannot have dynamic shadows for all objects, nor can you have dynamic/destructible lighting. This game uses offset mapping which is a far better method than either normal maps or bump maps. Without glossmaps you cant have clear specular highlights unless you actually apply phong shading for each pixel.... (specular is pretty evident from the screenies). Agreed that the art in this game is no match to HL2, but technically, this engine is way better in terms of capabilities.
 
Afaik doom3 did use lightmapping and dynamic shadows for most objects at the same time.
Basically for the reason that lightmapping still cannot be completely done away with until game engines and hardware becomes powerful enough to calculate radiosity.

Offset mapping I can only see in those bullet mark decals.
The walls are looking downright flat rest of the time.

Specular/glossmaps are present but without any bump/normalmapping on them making the walls like an aluminum sheet with bricks painted over them.

Static projectors = what I call ut2003/04 style hacks for simulating moving shadows from static objects, don't know what they are commonly known as.
 
saumilsingh said:
Afaik doom3 did use lightmapping and dynamic shadows for most objects at the same time.
Basically for the reason that lightmapping still cannot be completely done away with until game engines and hardware becomes powerful enough to calculate radiosity.

Offset mapping I can only see in those bullet mark decals.
The walls are looking downright flat rest of the time.

Specular/glossmaps are present but without any bump/normalmapping on them making the walls like an aluminum sheet with bricks painted over them.

Static projectors = what I call ut2003/04 style hacks for simulating moving shadows from static objects, don't know what they are commonly known as.
Click to expand...
This is how the walls look like....





Both of them look mighty fine.... with bumps as you want... As I said earlier, lightmaps only work when all the lighting in an environment is static. A single dynamic light can lead to lightmaps working incorrectly. A lightmap is actually a misnomer... it should be called a dark map or something. Its just a texture in which the values vary from 0-255 based upon how dark an area should be. This is precomputed before actual runtime. If you want colored lights, there'll a different channel for R,G and B. All the older games that used lightmaps did was to use a multiplicative blend of the lightmap and the base texture using multitexturing. So in general the base texture was made overbright by the artist to compensate for the darkness due to a lightmap. In a modern shader architecture, this can be done on per pixel basis. In a simplified manner, the shader code to do this would be like this(fgt the syntax ;))....

ComputePixel(IN basetexture, IN lightmap, IN vertex color, OUT pixelvalue)
{
textureval = basetexture*lightmap;
pixelval = normalize(vertex color * textureval);
}

In case of bump mapping, we need to know the normal vector and light vector at each pixel. The light vector is easy to calculate as light position(maybe static) - position of pixel. So bumpmapping is possible in case of static lighting. this code shall change to:

ComputePixel(IN basetexture, IN lightmap, IN lightvec, IN bumpmap, IN vertex color, OUT pixelvalue)
{
textureval = basetexture*lightmap;
bumpvecl = Normalize(bumpmap)+GetNormalVector();
bumpmap = lightvec DOT bumpvecl;
pixelval = normalize(vertex color * bumpmap * textureval);
}

In case of a specular lighting, we use the phong equation which states that specular highlights are directly proportional to the angle between the reflection vector and the viewer direction raised to the power of n where n is the shininess of the object. The glossmap basically stores this value from different directions so that such a complicated function is not necessary to be calculated at runtime. One just add the gloss map value to the above equation.

So as you see until now... all these effects can be done efficiently with static lighting. However the real clincher comes when the lights move around... if this happens, as you see, all the precomputed stuff above needs to be thrown out of the window! The glossmap cant be precomputed as light directions change, the light vector in case of bump mapping also needs to be done at runtime. Lightmaps obviously have no meaning as the light direction is no longer constant so a multiplicative blend is not arithmetically valid. However all this is easy compared to the main problem... shadows. To efficiently calculate the shadows from a dynamic light source, you either need to use shadow mapping (also called 2 pass zbuffer shadow algorithm in graphics texts) or use stencil shadows. The former is more flexible and allows soft shadows to be rendered. However the big problem is that its an image space algorithm and is prone to aliasing effects. If the shadow map resolution is low, the shadows will not be accurate. Also generating shadow maps at runtime is extremely fillrate intensive. Hence most games that use shadow maps, use pre rendered shadowmaps to simulate pseudo dynamic lights (farcry indoors is a good example). Shadow maps if used properly CAN be used to generate true realtime dynamic lighting, but there's no game that actually does this cos of the above concerns. Stencil shadows on the other hand are much more efficient when used for a true unified lighting system. They are very geometry intensive as the same geometry must be rendered multiple times depending upon the position/number of light sources. However they can only produce hard shadows. All most all games that use a real dynamic lighting system utilize stencil shadows... (including doom, fear, riddick, dx2, thief3 and even NWN to a degree :p. riddick actually uses a combination in the soft shadows mode). As far as the question of D3 using lightmaps is concerned, it only does it for the lights that dont move/change direction for static entities in the map. If the map contains zero static entities, it'll not build any lightmaps. As a matter of fact, the default mode of lighting in D3 is all dynamic. You'll know this if u've ever used the D3 editor cos you can almost instantly test out the map. This is impossible if it was building any lightmaps. It does however allow u to optimise the maps using lightmaps to make rendering more efficient. I guess the same would hold true for FEAR as well. However there's one thing that FEAR has that doom doesnt by default... its self shadowing.... an object casts a shadow on itself.

Hope all this made sense. Also the so called dynamic lighting in UT2k4 is pure bluff... its just a decal carrying the light that moves under the rocket or bullet or whatever... same as q3.
 
lol who will understand all those calls.

Doom3 has self-shadowing I think, needs to be enabled from the console.
It's off by default though, causes problems when calculating shadows based off vertexes instead of every pixel.
Riddick suffers from this, weird artifacts are visible in self shadowed meshes.

Didn't know doom3 uses stencil shadows, they are most definitely not hard black blobs like farcry.
In doom3 the shadow softness actually changes when I point my flashlight over shadowed objects depending on the position and various intersecting light sources.

Dynamic isn't real-time isn't dynamic :p
Dynamic lighting and stencil shadows have been present since the quake1 days.
It looks cool though when used correctly, the doom3 flashlight is a good example I think. Although that might be coupled with it's own light source.
 
The textures look very well done, much better than HL2 anyway. Pretty heavy sys requirements, a lot of mainstream comps may havetrouble running it
 
Looks great...hmmm looks like im gonna get this one...the visuals seem to be a mix of half life 2 and doom 3...i mean the graphics engine or a mix between far cry and half life 2 ??
 
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