IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
Welcome to Screen Space Ambient Occlusion.
It moves based on the angle of your view, so just standing still can make the shadows move, feeling very odd.
It's grainy, and approximates, due to performance / algorithm implementation.
It incurs mouse input delay and major loss of framerate.
Other forms of AO, like those that are baked into the geometry look better and don't have those downsides.. but they also don't work for anything dynamic like players or structures.
There's some experimental versions out there like Alechemy AO (that was made by twin of the man who made NS2's engine, Spark!) but like all solutions so far, it is not immediately compatible with what's being used for NS2.
On a side note, all these fancy effects are not compatible with competitive play anyway. They're great for attracting rookies and make the game look mature, especially on promo youtube videos. Still, they obscure the view and may be the cause of bad aiming. I only use high textures (so they're crisp enough), antialiasing and anisotropic filtration. And if I would make a video of the gameplay I can record a demo and then recapture it on maximum settings. AO may look good in story-rich games with emphasis on visuals. In competitive games... not that much.
This is something that has bugged me for a long time in many other games and I've never been able to learn about it because I don't know enough about rendering to even google it properly. Why does the "dirt" appear to be on the lens of the camera, as if the shadows are made of a stationary texture? What's up with that?
Because it's how it works — it's the screen space ambient occlusion, it doesn't work in 3D, basically. It's a post-processing technique, a shader that's applied to the rendered image (with Z-buffer component, but still 2D). It doesn't know anything about the scene geometry, only about pixels and their depth. It's fast and happens to be dirty.
@rkfg, I like the Atmospherics also =(
I understand, that there is a bunch of "pro comp" players that play at 640x480 res with all settings set to LOW to keep the distracting effects away and FPS over9000. But I don't like to play a "shooting blanks" game, I want to "fell it". And I think, that AO can be tweaked a bit to be more accurate, no?
@METROID, atmospherics add that console-like soap that lowers the contrast and makes it even harder to see fast-moving targets. Playing at low-res is a stupid idea, you lose the ability to aim precisely at long distances as all you see is a big square dot. I doubt NS2 is that bad coded so it checks hits in the screen space, hence if you hit your big dot, you hit anything that happens to be represented by that dot and it's like instead of tiny bullets your LMG is now shooting giant pillars that kill everything in range and even onoses run for their lives dropping poo because you're one scary bastard with BFG. Of course the hit registration doesn't depend on screen resolution. It's just experiments our fellas did for the sake of it. And low textures may help increasing FPS or making the picture more contrast, I dunno, I'm fine with high textures.
SSAO can be tweaked to some extent, from the description of it I see some knobs a developer can turn. Like the kernel size or amount of blur after it. But I'm not aware of the algorithm limitations and what you want to see. There are other AO implementations, they may be slower but more accurate/realistic. It's just a fast global illumination approach that produces some acceptable results.
@METROID, atmospherics add that console-like soap that lowers the contrast and makes it even harder to see fast-moving targets.
You mean "blur"? I think it is a more like air particles, yes, it's lowering your vision but not that drastically so can't see anything, tho' I admit that it hard to spot the skulk in the Onos bar, but it's a discobar anyway ))) But just look what an amazing light&shadow play it presents! You also can see the difference by turning it on/off in the Main menu.
SSAO can be tweaked to some extent, from the description of it I see some knobs a developer can turn. Like the kernel size or amount of blur after it. But I'm not aware of the algorithm limitations and what you want to see. There are other AO implementations, they may be slower but more accurate/realistic. It's just a fast global illumination approach that produces some acceptable results.
Hmm... can you peek me another game with this kind of AO artifacts?
Hmm... can you peek me another game with this kind of AO artifacts?
Like it says, try Crysis, it was invented there. There's also a big list of games exploiting the same algorithm. Or do you think these artifacts are unique to NS2?
He is saying AO creates input delay for the mouse and that AO gives you much less fps. Essentially two negative things that as far as I am concerned make AO not worth using even if it made the game look better.
Comments
It moves based on the angle of your view, so just standing still can make the shadows move, feeling very odd.
It's grainy, and approximates, due to performance / algorithm implementation.
It incurs mouse input delay and major loss of framerate.
Other forms of AO, like those that are baked into the geometry look better and don't have those downsides.. but they also don't work for anything dynamic like players or structures.
There's some experimental versions out there like Alechemy AO (that was made by twin of the man who made NS2's engine, Spark!) but like all solutions so far, it is not immediately compatible with what's being used for NS2.
I understand, that there is a bunch of "pro comp" players that play at 640x480 res with all settings set to LOW to keep the distracting effects away and FPS over9000. But I don't like to play a "shooting blanks" game, I want to "fell it". And I think, that AO can be tweaked a bit to be more accurate, no?
SSAO can be tweaked to some extent, from the description of it I see some knobs a developer can turn. Like the kernel size or amount of blur after it. But I'm not aware of the algorithm limitations and what you want to see. There are other AO implementations, they may be slower but more accurate/realistic. It's just a fast global illumination approach that produces some acceptable results.
Hmm... can you peek me another game with this kind of AO artifacts?