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Comment by evnix | Hacker News Reader

apart from games going from 2k to 4k to 8k, there hasn't been any noticeable improvement in realism in the past 10 years. ray tracing if enabled looks nice but that's pretty much the height of it, characters look just as janky as they did 10 years ago.

I feel the primary reason are the consoles, game devs can't push the boundaries as most consoles are around 5-6 years behind gaming PCs.

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I think your comment is wrong and perhaps speaks to your own visual senses than any factual effect.

There’s been so many advancements in the last ten years outside of raytracing. Better character motion, better character AI, spatial audio, audio materials, speech matching just off the top of my head.

Every single thing about games has gotten noticeably better for realism.

One only needs to watch a Digital Foundry video or a GDC talk to see the big uplifts.

10 years is a long time too and spans all the way back to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era. So your comment is nonsensical at best

character motion being the same old animations, just done/interpolated better

the only advancement I know of which got close to be implemented in games is https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation (I think Sebastian worked with EA or some other big company at some point) - still haven't played anything using this though

What a surface level take.

Firstly, we’ve been doing the “same old animations” for a very long time, and in most areas of content.

Secondly, they aren’t they same old animations, technologies to produce them are becoming higher precision, more efficient, and better in many ways.

Continuing on, the amount of work being poured into dynamic animation, IK, and the like is significant.

Various locomotion systems, including AI4Animation that you linked are becoming significant contributions. Though crazy you single that out as an exception, because it is also using the “same old animations” just a large unstructured set of them. But this work is a direct continuation of motion matching, which also works on large datasets of unstructured animations, and *has* shipped in quite a few titles, and is a very significant jump in how animation is done today.

And that’s just animation.

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023280/Motion-Matching-and-Th...

Your opinion here is highly ignorant.

There’s been tons of advancements on higher fidelity motion, better interaction , pose blending, constraint targeting, secondary motion, pose based deformation etc..

Have you played The Last of Us part 2? The amount of details all over the world, smooth animations that blend midway into another, etc, really is a step forward imo.

10 years is two console generations ago, 2012 was still ps3/xb360 era. If you don't notice any difference, then that is more explained by your lack of paying attention than lack of improvement.

The pursuit of realism hit diminishing returns years ago; the manpower needed to make a game hyper-realistic isn't justified by the number of additional sales it will produce. Instead of becoming more realistic, most games have instead focused on having more bright neon particles swirling around on screen. That's much cheaper and much more effective than chasing further realism.

This will likely change in the near future as the industry invents ways to replace human modelers, texture artists, etc, with automated "AI" tools.

You are right, but I think it goes back and forth. I can recall seeing a game I was working on (Homefront 2?) where it looked surprisingly photo real - at least as a prototype. But the physics took you out of the illusion as soon as anything moved.

Nowadays I see developers doing amazing things with shaders, like you said. And stylized models are easier to make, but also less in the uncanny valley.

Realism can be cheaper when you don't care about optimizing, or AI can optimize for you. When you can scan in objects and it is workable in a game engine that's cheaper than designing them. We're there with mo-cap vs character animation.

Cyberpunk 2077 at least pushed the rendering part of the engine into next-gen territory: Volumetric lightning and fog almost everywhere, environment reflection on even the smallest water surface and monochromatic light actually turns many surfaces into mirrors. All that in an outdoors setting with a ton of assets and an almost impracticle amount of verticality (no naturally empty half of the Screen). Before that release, most game devs would have told you that this is still impossible on todays hardware.

But that engine also shows that you are not wrong with your remark about consoles holding progress back: The game barely ran on the ps4, and even on the ps5 you won't get stellar framerates... You need a really nice PC to run the thing smoothely...

It runs really, really smoothly on my Xbox Series X. I'd arguably say even smoother than my OC'd 10900K + RTX 3090 PC.

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