GTA 4 new features

[icelaglace]

Agreed with Max. It's pointless to have volumetric scattering on GTAIV.
It's very hard to calculate too, when you can fake this picture using z-depth fog easily.

Tessellation? So you want displacement maps? Because this is the use of tessellation anyway.

About the reflections, seems that everyone voted this, AFAIK; Boris wanted to use some special mask to apply different reflections (trees).
So it can be very good for rainy weather to have reflections of the environment too.

But then, Skylighting might be a problem on 1070 because of shadows I think. But it's not going to be that hard for him. It's his code after all.

I think if people still want sun rays then he can implement this, it's not very hard... as long as you can disable this, i'm fine.

+ with new AO optimizations, it can be great & make me come back to IV again.

[Guest]

Volumetric Sun Rays will be visible most of the time because VOLUMETRIC sun rays are rendered even if you are not looking at the sun.

<img border="0" src="http://img133.imageshack.us/img133/3807/save.jpg" alt="Pulpit rock" width="500" height="228">

It is not pointless.

[icelaglace]

Lol, okay.

Participating media (what you call volumetric) is not that SIMPLE to reproduce in real-time & depends of the atmosphere/dust & many other things, not here to do a physics class.
+ you're showing an interior scene, GTA4 is 95% outside.

But it is NOT the point here. It's about PERFORMANCE.
IV is already slow enough, you want it to be even more slower with a complex effect that people would not even care that much? Sun rays are enough for IV if you really want this.
The only game I know that use some kind of volumetric effects are Metro 2033 & Stalker.
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~ravir/HRPIEG.pdf
Old paper, but still good for learning what is participating media.

Reflections & shadows are way more important than this to me.
I think guys who do presets since a while like robi & stuff know what i'm talking about. It's painful, very painful.

[johnnywcw]

i would like to have realistic car reflection, like reflection from road, people and tree on car body.

[gp65cj04]

Some list:

1. Improve material would be good(better specular and reflection or even SSS on plant).

2. Better shadows
Check out this photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/carmbler/2 ... otostream/

Shadows have different grade (BTW, is it called volumetric shadow?)

[oritxupolite]

To me volumetric sun rays. Today there is not volumetric sun rays in videogames. Tecnique is very slow.

The only games with volumetric sun rays are Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Stalker Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat (and only a few hours in the cycle, you need to mod or change weather files to see more hours the effect .

We do not need to see the sun to see volumetric sun rays is a feature of the volumetric sun fays . In Crysis or Stalker CS or COP we can see rays without see to the sun .

Will be increible see volumetric sun rays in ENB mod , even with very slow perfomance , because is a edge cutting feature and exclusive

[gp65cj04]

To me volumetric sun rays. Today there is not volumetric sun rays in videogames. Tecnique is very slow.

The only games with volumetric sun rays are Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Stalker Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat (and only a few hours in the cycle, you need to mod or change weather files to see more hours the effect .

We do not need to see the sun to see volumetric sun rays is a feature of the volumetric sun fays . In Crysis or Stalker CS or COP we can see rays without see to the sun .

Will be increible see volumetric sun rays in ENB mod , even with very slow perfomance , because is a edge cutting feature and exclusive

Yep, volumetric light and shadow looks great especially during the night on street and it's very noticeable.
Neon light on billborad, street light and car's headlight, any light source not just moon light.
About games that uses volumetic light, I think Alan Wake is the classic one.

[roxahris]

Volumetric lighting in Alan Wake is used rather conservatively, and only really for your flashlight, streetlamps, and other light sources that you'd expect to cast solid rays in darkness. Everything else seems to be more conventional lighting. In an open-world game like GTA4 where the setting's a big city, getting it to look right would be impractical. Meanwhile, sunrays are visual flash - they look pretty, but they're the modern equivalent of bloom without HDR. Having the sun cast rays over your character's outstretched arms looks cool, but you definitely don't see it in real life.

May I suggest dynamic resolution changing/temporal antialiasing? GTAIV is a very "heavy" game to handle - and with ENBseries on it, it becomes heavier still. However, the load is very much lightened through using lower resolutions, and often the results of running in a lower resolution with more effects are preferable to running at a higher one with less.

[legacyy]

I vote for Shadows and Reflections. These effects will have the most "impact" in therms of visiblility. And i think they don't cost that much performance.

Sun Rays aren't very visible, the only case you really notice them is when you see the sun trough trees.
-> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmxvy_ySHno
(@Ice... I hope it's okay for a small showcase)

[AgainstAllAutority]

once i've tryed to make optimised screen-space algorithm, actually Boris told me the best way, but i got accuracy issues... it looked like this:


but unfortunatly i wasnt able to make it good-looking with proper fps consumption...
and that were post-process, screen-space rays...

seems like the only arguments against volumetric light and shadows - fps... but noone is playing GTA itself, ppl mostly use it like a basement for screenshots...without AA we are able to get proper performance in cost of lower quality...
after all noone forces u to run any of effects... u can feel free to turn them on/off...

cmon community, make a right choise!