[wincy]

I think there’s a value in realism, ARC Raiders is one of my favorite games right now and it reminds of of movies like Stalker or The Shape of Water, movies that show old run down buildings and industrial complexes in their full glory, paint flaking, water in the wrong place, it’s just fantastic. It really sells me on being in a once busy space that’s been abandoned and fallen from its former glory.

[dcrazy]

I’m not on the ARC Raiders art team, nor have I even played the game. But I can say with some confidence that what people react to in computer graphics isn’t realism per se, it’s verisimilitude.

[Terr_]

Right, too many games pitch the "realism" of "really like a Hollywood movie", reproducing effects which are really telltale flaws in cameras, microphones, or the theater-experience.

This is in contrast to the realism of "if you were there in person". If you step outside and look towards the sun and see lens-flares, consult an eye-doctor. If you see polyhedral lens-flares or bokeh... consult a roboticist.

[inigyou]

I think you have to exaggerate certain things to get them over certain mediums.

The lens flare isn't telling you the sun literally makes polygonal shapes. It's telling you the sun is fucking bright and it's dazzling you, and it's doing that by reference to something we've seen in films shot with cameras.

You can achieve it other ways. HL2 Lost Coast - Valve's HDR tech demo - conveys the same basic fact by delaying the tonemap change. As you walk from the dark area to the bright area, the tonemap stays set for the dark area so your whole screen is washed out in white, until it gradually shifts to normal over about half a second. This is also how your pupils work, of course.

[Terr_]

> Lost Coast [...] This is also how your pupils work, of course.

As a purely temporal change it was neat, but I recall being distinctly annoyed with Lost Coast over how that effect made things worse (less realistic) for scene elements not under the crosshair / gun / avatar's-nose. We naturally expect contrast (and focus, see DoF rant) to improve when we direct our auto-adjusting eyeballs towards the area. In other words, realism of moving between light-environments came at the expense of realism in glancing around the room.

The straightforward fix would be gaze-tracking hardware... but now that I think about it (and with 20 years of tech improvements) I can imagine a much more mad-science approach: Track a simulated visual memory for the avatar!

Imagine a game that tracked recent virtual saccades to build up a cache of data like gaussian splats. So if that player has already seen the black notebook on the black desk in the dark room, it shows up more easily even if they walk in and out of the bright outdoors.

[dcrazy]

Lens flare effects have gotten decidedly more camera-like in recent years as other cinematic postprocessing effects have become common. You’ll see lens distortion and chromatic aberration along with aperture-shaped lens flares in many titles nowadays.

[thaumasiotes]

> If you see polyhedral lens-flares or bokeh... consult a roboticist.

It's not just games. I just saw an episode of a TV show in which two people were sitting in a car, talking to each other.

Whichever one of them was speaking was in focus. The other one was dramatically blurred. This traded back and forth rapidly, because that's how conversations work. It was incredibly bizarre.

[inigyou]

I watched a video essay about the nightclub in Hitman 3 and this is basically what they said, too. The place doesn't have to look completely realistic, it has to sell the vibe of the space. Plenty of nightclubs in games that have fine graphics and props but actually don't feel like nightclubs. That was the point of the video actually.