Responses to shown by Microsoft proved controversial, to the extent that even the mainstream media began to report on . But if we analyze the shown part of the gameplay, what can it tell us about the technical component? And if the game is accused of looking βflatβ, then why and what can be done about it? The journalists of the "digital factory" Eurogamer tried to answer these questions.
First of all, the presentation of Halo Infinite suffered greatly from the poor quality of the live stream: this is how most viewers initially experienced the content. βIt's very difficult to show the full power and graphical authenticity of what Xbox Series X can bring to you through streaming. Come back and watch the game in 4K at 60fps." Head of Xbox Marketing Aaron Greenberg. Unfortunately, the only available 4K60 resource is still a compressed YouTube video, but there is no doubt that when analyzing the Ultra HD version, a lot of details stand out that are washed out or disappeared in the broadcast.
Small details are just one of the criticized elements of the presentation. Halo Infinite's main gripe seems to be that it looks "flat" and doesn't feel like a next-generation game. If so, it's largely down to lighting, as 343 Industries Slipspace's new engine is moving beyond linear environments. , but also switches to a fully dynamic lighting system. This is a strong departure from Halo 5, which relied heavily on pre-calculated "baked" lighting and shadows, complemented by a handful of objects that cast dynamic shadows.
The advantage of moving to a dynamic lighting system is increased realism and greater flexibility: for example, daylight fine tuning can be enabled. Indeed, the gameplay trailer seems to show a slight change in time of day during playthrough. Such a system is completely at odds with the standard static lighting system, where The Last of Us Part 2 demonstrates one of the best examples. Static lighting saves a lot of performance, and reflected light can also be simulated relatively cheaply, but much of the effect is achieved through offline precalculation or "baking". The end results can be impressive, but there are many downsides: for example, dynamic objects are lit in a completely different way than static ones, resulting in visual tearing.
In addition, the preliminary calculation takes a very long time, and even the slightest changes significantly increase the iteration time. In any case, dynamic lighting and shading, like in Halo infinite, is more expensive, but has the advantage of treating dynamic and static display objects in the same way, so nothing falls out of the picture, everything is handled uniformly, and the scale and lighting capabilities in games become much more flexible. With all of this in mind, many of the benefits of dynamic lighting are being used in the actual game design of Halo Infinite, of which we've only seen a very small snippet so far.
However, dynamic lighting systems are very heavy on the graphics accelerator, and this is a very serious limitation: Eurogamer experts believe that this is the main reason why the gameplay of Halo Infinite does not look so impressive. If you pay attention to the time of day, the sun is close to the horizon, while the area is characterized by many hills or trees. As a result, most of the game environment receives indirect lighting from the sun, meaning most of the action takes place in the shade. And this is a problem, because, as a rule, video game graphics do not convey areas in the shadows well. Moreover, games mostly use physical materials that are completely dependent on their interaction with light, and as a result, textures look faded in the shadows.
And this problem is not unique to Halo Infinite. Metro Exodus has some issues, but 4A Games on PC has found one potential solution: real-time global illumination using ray tracing. This is not the only way to solve this problem, as other methods are being created: Epic has a great Lumen system in Unreal Engine 5, and CryEngine serves the same purpose of SVEI (sparse voxel octree global illumination). With some form of tracing to help indirect lighting and shadow areas, Halo Infinite would be a completely different game. But this would require compromises, because all these methods are very expensive in terms of computational resources.
First, the Xbox One and Xbox One X versions of the games won't have the horsepower to do this, but many might say that's okay. After all, we want to see the difference between generations, and the Xbox Series X supports hardware ray tracing (RT). And if the game uses RT, we can hope that developers will spend this power primarily on global illumination, in addition to any reflections. The trade-off is that running a game in 4K at 60fps and RT may well be beyond the technical capabilities of the Xbox Series X. However, in an age of heavy use of image reconstruction based on previous frames, trade-offs could be made. Let's put it this way: would many people prefer legacy lighting technologies in 4K, or would they opt for next-generation lighting technologies at higher frequencies, but at 1440p resolution?
Lighting seems to be the main reason for the "flatness" of Halo Infinite, and in games like OnRush that also use fully dynamic lighting, you can see that brightness and saturation can be achieved simply by shifting the action to a different time of day. But at the same time, the problem of indirect lighting will not go wrong. It's reported that Halo Infinite is far from complete and that new builds are coming out quite often, but dynamic lighting technology is at the heart of 343 Industries' plans. And it is unlikely that it will be canceled or significantly changed by the time of launch.
In addition to lighting, you can pay attention to other shortcomings of the demonstration. The next major drawback is the dynamic level of detail. Rocks, grass, and even billboards in the distance suddenly appeared in the frame. The original video shows the game in 4K at 60 fps: that is, 8,3 million pixels are rendered every 16,7 ms, and a lot of vegetation requiring very small triangles can easily reduce the frame rate. Even for graphics accelerators like the Xbox Series X, this will create problems. Perhaps the resolution is too high and the final game will use dynamic scaling? The demo was all played at 3840Γ2160 solid resolution, but was later confirmed to be the PC version, not the console version.
You can also pay attention to such trifles as the absence of shadows on the weapons and hands of the Master Chief. Games like Crysis 3 have been offering this since 2013, and it can be done cheaply, as the Call of Duty games show. It's a small feature with a big visual impact that will hopefully be implemented in the final build for Xbox Series X. Also curious about some overly "solid" transparency effects on things like shields - perhaps Bungie's Halo Reach approach would be preferable? Finally, some materials spoil the impression: the game has a lot of standard plastic and metal, and it looks worse than the bright alien materials from previous Halo games.
Let's see how Microsoft and 343 will continue to push Halo Infinite and what changes they will make to the game, which has been in development for years - after all, only a few months remain before the launch date. It is known that the project years after the launch of a lifetime, and that a ray tracing update is in the pipeline - perhaps it will actually improve the look of the game.
Source:
Source: 3dnews.ru