Holy Crap LA Noir facial technology!

mobucks

mobucks

Fmr. President of racism.
Orderite
<object><param></param><param></param><param></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/q2EG5J05048?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="390"></embed></object>

wow. never seen better. All real actors too. This is too awesome looking. Gaming will never be the same.
 
I'm just waiting for my prediction to come true - no more living actors - instead of one pompous celebrity, there will be a team of Koreans in some basement animating every actor in every film.
 
Custom animations like that for all important NPCs? $$$.

It does look extremely good, but I agree with Sea that if the actors are unconvincing it can backfire. Wonder if other developpers will use that tech soon (Bioware seems likely to me).
 
Impressive. The only problem I see with this procedure is that the motion capture and the...uh...head capture aren't done at the same time which can lead to unconvincing facial expressions in scenes where the characters aren't simply standing and talking.
 
Well, this has its bad and good side.

Impressive for a game, and if used properly can produce some astonishing results.
On the other hand, each NPC would depend on one actor, so that could lead to some very poor performance. And many actors would have to be envolved, taken the number of NPCs (if they don't want to have 1 actor's face on 10 NPCs, that is). Of course, that means more money spent, and if they want some celebrities appearing, they'd have to pay mucm more - probably as much as if the real movie was made. And that is, of course, very demanding, for every gaming company.
Also, I'm nitpicking, but all those lighting, shadows and textures would prove (and are proving, in this video specifically) to be quite weak. I mean, you can have very realistic facial expressions with motion capture, but if you ask me, the whole image is ruined by poor effects that are used (again, just in this video).
Overall, it is a nice thing, but I'd stick around with those "classical" techniques of showing faical expresion - such as those used in Bioware' games nowadays. I'd stick to them, at least until this thing gets improved more.
 
To be frank motion capture is not really the sphere from which you should expect mind-blowing innovations. Not now, not in the future.

With real-world capture, you're limited, first, by what your real actors and situations have to offer, and second, by costs and tediousness of the process.

Even with a perfect motion-capture system, you would still have to hire actors, and get them to play *right* each individual situation your game generates. It can't get less tedious and costly than that.

The innovations to come are in procedural generation "out of thin air", because that's what will both diminish the costs and maximize the potential in terms of narrative interactivity.

Motion-capture would probably still be used, but more as a reference database.
 
With each jump in gaming technology the imagination of the player dies a little more...the faces in Baldurs Gate were good enough for me and my feeble imagination. I know, I know, there not the same, but still I want them to leave a little something for the player to imagine within the game. Realism for realism sake sucks...

bg2.jpg
 
.Pixote. said:
With each jump in gaming technology the imagination of the player dies a little more...the faces in Baldurs Gate were good enough for me and my feeble imagination
Click to expand...
I dunno, I don't remember having this intense "imagining" going on while I played Baldur's Gate or Final Fantasy VI or Phantasy Star II or Sword of Vermilion or Loom or any "old time" game, RPG or otherwise. I pretty much depended on the visuals provided by the game for my interpretation of how things in the game world looked. Of course, there were certain things that weren't given a visual in the game. But generally there was some sort of description given and I had a vague idea of what it probably looked like but I can't recall ever dwelling on it.

There are good reasons to use things like an isometric perspective, hand-drawn art, and the like rather than the omni-present FPP, ultra-realistic polygonal-everything that the game industry has a hard-on for now. But, this nostalgia about having one's imagination tickled because of primitive graphics and engines that didn't let you see details just seems weird and overstated to me. Perhaps my imagination is simply lacking... I had no problem being a video-gaming bookworm growing up though.

Anyway, for the type of game being advertised, this obviously has a lot of potential to improve the gameplay for reasons stated in the video and I can't see why anyone would be opposed to it. I can see some good applications for RPGs as well. However, I don't disagree that getting non-motion capture that can look as good or better would be much better in the end for various reasons. But, currently I don't really see much that can compete with it outside of CGI cut-scenes and movies (and even in those I would suppose a lot of motion-capture is used).
 
This a masterful engraving of Dwarf Fortress. It shows dwarves and modern technology. The dwarves are making a rude gesture. The dwarves are striking down modern technology. This engraving relates to the awesome fun an imaginative player has with Dwarf Fortress which doesn't need modern technology to be an amazing and deep strategy game.
 
I dunno, I don't remember having this intense "imagining" going on while I played Baldur's Gate or Final Fantasy VI or Phantasy Star II or Sword of Vermilion or Loom or any "old time" game, RPG or otherwise. I pretty much depended on the visuals provided by the game for my interpretation of how things in the game world looked. Of course, there were certain things that weren't given a visual in the game. But generally there was some sort of description given and I had a vague idea of what it probably looked like but I can't recall ever dwelling on it.
Click to expand...

I agree. The only problem I have with modern graphic is that often they are boring (since developers simply reproduce reality and that's it) and flaws stick out like a sore thumb.

I never had a problem with, for example, deus Ex and its boxy looking graphics and humans (where are the ears!?) while nowadays sometimes I find myself nitpicking on things like mismatched/low res textures.
 
I like the idea of the game much, but I am also worried that the facial expressions will be in a fashion "Look NOW - I'm making my guilty face so it means I'm lying". What I mean is that it may be too easy to read people depending on the facial expressions.
 
The best facial animation I've seen in a game so far was in Vampire: Bloodlines. I'm surprised that that hasn't been surpassed so far, and this doesn't look that much better either. It looks like they're being very exaggerated with the facial language so people can pick up on it. A shame, because it detracts from the realism.
 
Best facial animations were Max Payne, hands down.
Perfect 80's-action-emotions.
 
Kyuu said:
.Pixote. said:
With each jump in gaming technology the imagination of the player dies a little more...the faces in Baldurs Gate were good enough for me and my feeble imagination
Click to expand...
I dunno, I don't remember having this intense "imagining" going on while I played Baldur's Gate or Final Fantasy VI or Phantasy Star II or Sword of Vermilion or Loom or any "old time" game, RPG or otherwise. I pretty much depended on the visuals provided by the game for my interpretation of how things in the game world looked. Of course, there were certain things that weren't given a visual in the game. But generally there was some sort of description given and I had a vague idea of what it probably looked like but I can't recall ever dwelling on it.
Click to expand...

Did you ever read a book ?
Probably not...
Do it and come back tell us how your imagination was never sollicited

Edit : I just saw how you mentioned being a bookworm. How can you be a bookworm, which I would translate to enjoy being transported to other place by the sole force of text joining with your imagination, and deny the power of suggestion carried by a game that doesn't describe too much ?

Anyway, explicit game environnements are not the antonym of imagination stimulation : vampires bloodlines pretty much proved it. Yet older games are here to remind us it's not necessary.

To give a quick example : I felt the wind of the radioactive desert in a incredibly more immersive manner in Fallout 1, where what I had almost nothing to look at than rough tiles, than in Fallout 3, where everything is over-described.

I would guess that the evocative power of a sound is much more important when you're less distracted by the visuals, leaving your brain make up the rest.
 
Arr0nax said:
Did you ever read a book ?
Probably not...
Do it and come back tell us how your imagination was never sollicited
Click to expand...
It's not really the same with games though for me. Unless I'm playing a purely textual game, I "imagine" exactly what I'm given. If I'm playing a game of chess I don't imagine a majestic war of tactical brilliance, I imagine chess.

I can still be involved with the story without imagining it in graphical detail, I usually imagine it in the same art/quality as in game. If I'm imagining an assassination in BG, for instance, I can picture the epicness of a bunch of assassins leaping out of the shadows to stab some poor politician, but all the imagining is done in the BG engine. I don't imagine it in first person perspective with much added, I imagine it using the graphics of the game. You can use imagination in a lot of ways.

Edit: I would probably say games like Wasteland allow for the imagination to kick in graphically, but if the game gives me much more, I'll use that to bolster my imagination story wise etc.
 
I hate this technology.

Why? I'm tired of cut scenes in gaming.

Hate me, but the only games that ever did them right were all Japanese.
 
))<>(( said:
I hate this technology.

Why? I'm tired of cut scenes in gaming.

Hate me, but the only games that ever did them right were all Japanese.
Click to expand...
I agree, though games like Half Life 2 aren't all that much better, because during "dialog" I always end up jumping around, throwing things at the character talking, and totally breaking my own immersion in the world (ADD?).
 
It's because the dialogue isn't that interesting.

Japan can break ADD problems with simple bad translations. They are the masters.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top