HDR lighting is not realistic lighting
Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
11–20 of 76 posts
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#12This just feels like old man yells at sky. Old splinter cell and other stealth games still used on screen indicators of stealth. It was never "simple lighting" that made the player understand if they are "in stealth or not". It has always been up to the game designers to make visual understanding of what is hidden and what isn't hidden, this has nothing to do with graphics.
+1. At the end of the day, this boils down to a more general problem of conveying state/data to the player (though maybe I should concede it now arises in the new dimension described by the author).
Two examples that immediately come to mind are trying to fight in World of Warcraft when underwater (where I had no eff'ing clue where exactly the enemy actually was, relative to my character) and overly flashy effects in games, often MOBAs (where they were taken so overboard to where I had no idea what was even happening on the screen).
I'm surprised people put up with either of these. I found both of them in and of themselves really frustrating and detracting from the fun of just playing the game.
I'll give an affectionate shoutout to Transistor; one of the mechanics is having to deal with paparazzi-like monsters that are just flying cameras whose difficulty is in obscuring your screen with flattering action shots of the protagonist. Lazy, but clever and adorable!
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#13This just feels like old man yells at sky. Old splinter cell and other stealth games still used on screen indicators of stealth. It was never "simple lighting" that made the player understand if they are "in stealth or not". It has always been up to the game designers to make visual understanding of what is hidden and what isn't hidden, this has nothing to do with graphics.
The implication is that the reason why you don’t see a lot of people sneaking around splinter cell-style in real life is because the lighting makes doing that really hard
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#14I believe that creative liberties in games and movies are essential. Just as Star Wars would have been incredibly dull without laser sounds in the vacuum of space, there is no absolute need for entertainment to strictly mirror reality. From a design perspective, if implementing a cutting-edge lighting system clashes with the core game design, I think it's perfectly acceptable to fall back on a legacy lighting model.…
You can either do it where the safe areas are just super dark, raytracing be damned, or you can do it where even if there is light, and you're clearly "visible" as long as you stay below a certain light level, everything is fine (Minecraft style, perhaps).
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#15I believe that creative liberties in games and movies are essential. Just as Star Wars would have been incredibly dull without laser sounds in the vacuum of space, there is no absolute need for entertainment to strictly mirror reality. From a design perspective, if implementing a cutting-edge lighting system clashes with the core game design, I think it's perfectly acceptable to fall back on a legacy lighting model.…
True. There comes a point where the endless pursuit of realism starts getting in the way of a certain kind of narrative creativity. And in the process, we lose what should be the very essence of the word entertainment: to entertain.
The other day, I watched Emmerich’s latest film, Moonfall. A proper disaster movie, with all the necessary tropes. In short, that was real cinema, I had a great time. And yet, a large number of reviews on IMDb kept pointing out how “unrealistic” the film was. But if I’m watching an Emmerich movie, the very last thing I want is realism.
I think this is part of the current zeitgeist. The great inversion of real and virtual, as described by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, seems to make people believe that what happens on screen is reality, and then has to reflect their own conception of reality. The slightest deviation from that conception reminds them that it is only fake, and that they must, at all costs, "return to the matrix" in order to escape the real and the existential dread that follows.
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#16I believe that creative liberties in games and movies are essential. Just as Star Wars would have been incredibly dull without laser sounds in the vacuum of space, there is no absolute need for entertainment to strictly mirror reality. From a design perspective, if implementing a cutting-edge lighting system clashes with the core game design, I think it's perfectly acceptable to fall back on a legacy lighting model.…
Also: you cannot pretend to be "physically realistic" on a computer screen. The simplest thing: if there is more ambient light, your pupils decrease and your sight is different. You cannot simulate "true light" unless you also simulate that.
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#17As an aficionado of the genre, it is a real shame that stealth games have fallen out of favor with the current crop of gamers.
90s and early to mid 2000s seems like was the peak for 3D games with deep storylines and pure stealth mechanics (MGS, Splinter Cell). By the time the late 2000s rolled around we started getting the watered down hybrid model aka stealth but you can play it like a FPS or TPS if you prefer.
Finally in the 2010s seems like even these hybrid stealth games were on their way out for the most part. Correct me if I'm wrong but I can count the number of releases on one hand.
My pet theory is that these types of games are simply too high brow for casuals who have become a larger segment of the target audience.
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#18MGSV had realistic graphics (one of the first games with PBR) and handled it well. One of the devs had a GDC talk about their lighting approach, too.
In the game light/shadow (in addition to what outfit you're wearing, surface you're on, if you've showered recently and other factors) has an effect on your camouflage index. Unlike prior Metal Gear Solid games this is never shown as a value on-screen but instead communicated by clues from enemy reactions and sound cues, where eg. their animation will change to show they've noticed something suspicious from a distance.
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#19This feels like a very poor excuse when there are plenty of stealth games, or games with stealth aspects, that are successful despite leveraging modern tech. Splinter Cell games became bad long before we had raytraced shadows.
> there are plenty of stealth games...
Can you list some? The stealth genre has pretty much died out, and most games where stealth is not a central gameplay element (e.g. the AssCreed games) implement it poorly.
> Splinter Cell games became bad long before we had raytraced shadows.
The last one (Blacklist, 2013) was actually very decent.
Re: Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
#20As an aficionado of the genre, it is a real shame that stealth games have fallen out of favor with the current crop of gamers. 90s and early to mid 2000s seems like was the peak for 3D games with deep storylines and pure stealth mechanics (MGS, Splinter Cell). By the time the late 2000s rolled around we started getting the watered down hybrid model aka stealth but you can play it like a FPS or TPS if you prefer. Fina…
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