- Anonymous101
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Gears of War 2?
I hardly believe it looked good at all. The lighting and shaders are superb, but details are only...well, detailed if you're far enough away not to notice some of the horrible textures and even some of the lighting and materials. Foliage is mostly comprised of criss-crossing sprites. The game can also barely keep up with more than ten enemies onscreen at once (the "gigantic hordes" don't count, their AI is nonexistant and they serve as node-to-node entities), and the vegetation and clutter is seriously lacking detail. I guess that the intricate patterns and simple techniques like bump mapping layered one on top of the other help preserve detail.
I would personally like to see a whole bunch of elements in the engine: terrain tessellation for environmental detail scaling as seen in BF: Bad Company, some destructible environments, HDR (or an HDR hybrid like Halo 3's) with dual framebuffers to blend LDR and HDR values for some incredible lighting, normalized motion blur, and some form of ambient occlusion. Oh, and don't forget shinier more upgraded features already seen in Halo 3/ODST such as the volumetric fog, weather, atmospheric haze, gigantic skyboxes, amazing effects, the water, water shaders, shaders in general, and more.
I don't expect anti-aliasing, because the beautiful lighting more than makes up for it. Some anisotropic filtering would be nice though, and over the years, I think Bungie has been able to pull of local, moving lights capable of global illumination, dynamic shadowing, and overall improved GI. Baked ambient occlusion and depth of field are seen in cutscenes - DOF can be used to give dramatic effect to scenes and can reduce impact of jaggies. Ambient occlusion makes lighting on characters and environments look bawss. These would be great elements to key moments in gameplay.
Oh, also, moar alpha foliage. The 360 is good with it. Foliage should cast shadows and needs moar specular to make it look a little more lifelike.