Hyper-realism?

[Gryph]

In the 1998 IMHZ interview with Paul Schutyma (sp?) and the Peter Molyneux "The Room" demo, they showed areas of hyper-realism which they were able to achieve with the use of portal technology. I was wondering if such areas are in Prey or if not, is it atleast possible to do so?

Would such a thing be possible only in Portals engines built from the ground up and not in this one since the portals are an addition to the Doom 3 engine?

[George Broussard]

I don't know what hyper-realism is. I suspect just photo realistic art.

Portals have nothing to do with that, and are simply rendered ares into different parts of a level. The actual art is irrelevant.

[Gryph]

Ah...well then I was mislead. I guess it was just more PR words.

[Lengis]

"hyper realism" was just a buzzword for pretty looking textures. It has nothing to do with Portals, but was a so called "feature" of the Portal "Engine". It just meant that the Portal Engine looked pretty. Ofcourse, today it looks crappy, and best described as "ugly realism"

[Gryph]

Yeah...I was just going by what was said in the video.

"Using our Portal engine, which is basically holes in space connecting different geometric areas, we can achieve areas of what we call "hyper-realism."

I have been fooled!

[Lengis]

Gryph said:
Yeah...I was just going by what was said in the video.

"Using our Portal engine, which is basically holes in space connecting different geometric areas, we can achieve areas of what we call "hyper-realism."

I have been fooled!

Lol, yea because portals are so "HYPER REALISTC!!!!!!"

Dude, this is also the guy who uses the phrase, "gameplay ramifications". He's clearly a trekkie who isn't quite in touch with reality

[3DProgrammer]

Gryph said:
Yeah...I was just going by what was said in the video.

"Using our Portal engine, which is basically holes in space connecting different geometric areas, we can achieve areas of what we call "hyper-realism."

I have been fooled!

What Schuytema meant was that due to the fact that they had a portal engine, they could achieve areas that seem to have more polygons and higher res textures since the portals allow them to cull (not render) all the other parts of the maps that aren't visible to the player. If the player can't see a portal, then all that sector that is connected by that portal wont be rendered, that means that you have more resources free to use and create those "hyper-realism" areas.

BTW, I don't think HumanHead added a system of portals similar to what William Scarboro wrote, I think they are just using OpenGL's P-Buffers of Frame Buffer Objects to render what's seen on the portal to a texture. This means that there isn't any complicated math like what William Scarboro had to figure out, they just render the target scene of the portal to a texture and then they render the scene where the player is with the texture generated on the place of the portal. Anyway, that's a guess, I'm confident I'm sure but I wouldn't say that's the way they do it since I don't have the source code

[DudeMiester]

The demo had an extreme LOD scale, the portals, very good art, and a technical wizard to back it up. However, there was no one magic ingredient. The group effort is what makes it look so good.

[3DProgrammer]

3DProgrammer said:
BTW, I don't think HumanHead added a system of portals similar to what William Scarboro wrote, I think they are just using OpenGL's P-Buffers of Frame Buffer Objects to render what's seen on the portal to a texture. This means that there isn't any complicated math like what William Scarboro had to figure out, they just render the target scene of the portal to a texture and then they render the scene where the player is with the texture generated on the place of the portal. Anyway, that's a guess, I'm confident I'm sure but I wouldn't say that's the way they do it since I don't have the source code

BTW, this doesn't mean that its easy in any way, they still need to update the position of the entities in such way that the portals look as if there was an actual portal. So they have to update the angle of the frustum where the portal is rendered, and have to update the position and angle of the entities that go through a portal. But they don't need to do that to all the geometry like the old Prey engine.

[clayasaurus]

In this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR1U7RvxLTI , he says 'hyper realism' can produce 20-30 times the polygon count.

[Sayantan]

Originally Posted by clayasaurus

In this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR1U7RvxLTI , he says 'hyper realism' can produce 20-30 times the polygon count.

Originally Posted by 3DProgrammer

What Schuytema meant was that due to the fact that they had a portal engine, they could achieve areas that seem to have more polygons and higher res textures since the portals allow them to cull (not render) all the other parts of the maps that aren't visible to the player.

5chars