55 replies to this topic

[Machineabuse]

The film grain effect doesn't add anything to the game. In an otherwise phenomenal looking game it's the one eyesore.

Not that it even works conceptually, I was under the impression the pilot was sitting in a cockpit looking through glass, not seeing the world through a CRT.

There should be a toggle in the options to turn it off IMO.

[Roundlay]

Conceptually, it works. Pilots are viewing the environment via a display within the cockpit.

Artistically, I think the use of noise within the game is nice slash cool.

Don't remove it, add a toggle.

[Axeman6ft7]

Toggle it, being able to turn it off may also help those with lesser graphics hardware.

[HandSlander]

Firstly, twas hilarious to find that when going from Low to Med or High graphics I was introducing a hazy static that made it harder to see distant enemies!!

Now, I know analog is "cool" but realistically in the future everything will be digital - even moreso than it is now. And when I see a staticky feed coming through my HUD I find it hard to believe. Especially when there is the technology to fuzzy bunny an orb of super-metal-healing-magic-sparkles 2 metres in front of you but the passionate pilots of Hawken mechs can't even get a good video feed when going into a battle to the death situation!!!

I recently rewatched the Star Wars Trilogy and of course its excusable that in the 70s they wouldn't have foreseen digital and hence the analog looking "help me obiwan kenobi you're my only hope" with static interference and poor signal. But in 2012 I think we can foresee the future is a world with either pure digital signal or zero.

A workaround could be, that when your mech takes heavy hits i.e. TOW missile, the video feed blacks out for a second and you get a VIDEO FEED ERROR readout in red in the center of the HUD.

[Machineabuse]

If the pilot is viewing the environment digitally, then does the cockpit belong to the sensor mount_ lol

[Gagzila]

I think everyone is missing the point, in that it's not representing monitor / video feed grain but that it's a very dirty, hazy, heavily industrialised future world...that is what it actually looks like outside, therefore your "display" is replicating exactly what the camera is seeing. Can anyone actually confirm that what you are looking at are screens anyway_ As my understanding is that it is still a real cockpit in every sense like a fighter jets is and you are looking through reinforced, composite glass / some kind of transparent material that can stand up to the same kind of damage the mechs armour can. Even the mechs have windows as such on their exterior models to imply this.

Also HUD stands for Heads Up Display and is only related to the digital information displayed as an overlay on your view of the world such as the crosshair, heat indicators, etc. As in the below image, the HUD is just the green info overlay in the middle that relays you information while barely obscuring your view like your normal instrument panel would.



The grain is all part of the Hawken story, adds loads of atmosphere to the game and is also an anti cross map sniping feature as the haze grows stronger the further away you look (just like real life haze / smog in heavily air polluted cities), stopping you from just sitting on top of your base and sniping the other team in their base the whole round.

Cheers,

Gagzila

Edited by Gagzila, November 14 2012 - 07:18 PM.

[Machineabuse]

For the sake of discussion come now, if you pay attention to the presentation of the cockpit it is primarily filled with analogue tropes from  crud in the corners of the canopy to shadows cast on the inside of the cockpit (Projected light from screens is omnidirectional, light is clearly passing through from outside to the inside of the cockpit.). Haze is one thing, film grain on the surface of my eyeballs on the other hand is... well... yeah.

With respect to all, stylistically yes I understand that it's an aesthetic choice and from a user experience POV yes it adds to the feeling of encroachment but the rationalization of it as an actual function is at best tenuous at worst under scrutiny tears a hole in the verisimilitude of the experience.

[Ace4225]

Gagzila, on November 14 2012 - 07:17 PM, said:

I think everyone is missing the point, in that it's not representing monitor / video feed grain but that it's a very dirty, hazy, heavily industrialised future world...that is what it actually looks like outside...

In saying that, we could surmise that the film grain is coming from your helmet.. and it's electromagnetic interference from all the surrounding technology_

[OdinTheWise]

it is a screen as most of the mechs seen in the alpha have no windshield, (windows are a structural week point anyway).  the grainyness is acctually not "film grain", its the photo censors having trouble in the low light conditions.  if you do any digital photogrophy you would know this, (FYI good photography doesnt have grainyness).  it is a simulation of the photo sensors and low quality ones at that i too wish it could be toggled off but if you notice, when you record with frapps and such that the grain is not there so it would be very easy to implement a toggle function

http://en.wikipedia....iki/Image_noise


In digital cameras
"

Image on the left has exposure time of >10 seconds in low light. The image on the right has adequate lighting and 0.1 second exposure.

In low light, correct exposure requires the use of long shutter speeds, higher gain (ISO sensitivity), or both. On most cameras, longer shutter speeds lead to increased salt-and-pepper noise due to photodiode leakage currents. At the cost of a doubling of read noise variance (41% increase in read noise standard deviation), this salt-and-pepper noise can be mostly eliminated by dark frame subtraction. Banding noise, similar to shadow noise, can be introduced through brightening shadows or through color-balance processing.^[14]
The relative effect of both read noise and shot noise increase as the exposure is reduced, corresponding to increased ISO sensitivity, since fewer photons are counted (shot noise) and since more amplification of the signal is necessary.
[edit]Effects of sensor size

The size of the image sensor, or effective light collection area per pixel sensor, is the largest determinant of signal levels that determine signal-to-noise ratio and hence apparent noise levels, assuming the aperture area is proportional to sensor area, or that the f-number or focal-plane illuminance is held constant. That is, for a constant f-number, the sensitivity of an imager scales roughly with the sensor area, so larger sensors typically create lower noise images than smaller sensors. In the case of images bright enough to be in the shot noise limited regime, when the image is scaled to the same size on screen, or printed at the same size, the pixel count makes little difference to perceptible noise levels – the noise depends primarily on sensor area, not how this area is divided into pixels. For images at lower signal levels (higher ISO settings), where read noise (noise floor) is significant, more pixels within a given sensor area will make the image noisier if the per pixel read noise is the same.
For instance, the noise level produced by a Four Thirds sensor at ISO 800 is roughly equivalent to that produced by a full frame sensor (with roughly four times the area) at ISO 3200, and that produced by a 1/2.5" compact camera sensor (with roughly 1/16 the area) at ISO 100. This ability to produce acceptable images at higher sensitivities is a major factor driving the adoption of DSLR cameras, which tend to use larger sensors than compacts. An example shows a DSLR sensor at ISO 400 creating less noise than a point-and-shoot sensor at ISO 100.^[15]
[edit]Sensor fill factor

The image sensor has individual photosites to collect light from a given area. Not all areas of the sensor are used to collect light, due to other circuitry. A higher fill factor of a sensor causes more light to be collected, allowing for better ISO performance based on sensor size.^[16]
[edit]Sensor heat

Temperature can also have an effect on the amount of noise produced by an image sensor due to leakage. With this in mind, it is known that DSLRs will produce more noise during summer than winter.^[9]"

Edited by OdinTheWise, November 15 2012 - 10:41 AM.

[Ace4225]

OdinTheWise, on November 15 2012 - 10:38 AM, said:

it is a screen as most of the mechs seen in the alpha have no windshield,

I think the devs might disagree with you on that... as this pic from the live-action trailer clearly illustrates they're just in a glass cockpit.

Very interesting info related to photography tho

Attached Thumbnails

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[Decoy101x]

^ just owned everyone in the thread Lol

[Ace4225]

well, now I'm very confused, because the current in-game models don't really seem to have visible cockpits. :/

EDIT: Just saw a tutorial video on the pre-alpha build, and the chassis DO have some cockpits that visually match the first-person view.

I wonder why they would change it... or not create unique cockpits for each. (maybe it was too much work currently_)

Edited by Ace4225, November 15 2012 - 12:06 PM.

[OdinTheWise]

Ace4225, on November 15 2012 - 11:31 AM, said:

OdinTheWise, on November 15 2012 - 10:38 AM, said:

it is a screen as most of the mechs seen in the alpha have no windshield,

I think the devs might disagree with you on that... as this pic from the live-action trailer clearly illustrates they're just in a glass cockpit.

Very interesting info related to photography tho

This most likely is just a directors choice for a better nerrative style, but most of the mechs don't have that, you should not base a game off of a theatrical trailer like this. The default assault chassis and the infiltrator chassis are the only two I have seen with what would appear to be a windshield

[Roundlay]

HandSlander, on November 14 2012 - 01:25 PM, said:

Now, I know analog is "cool" but realistically in the future everything will be digital - even moreso than it is now.

You're confusing noise for grain. Digital capture processes are not immune to image distortion.

[Ace4225]

OdinTheWise, on November 15 2012 - 01:48 PM, said:

This most likely is just a directors choice for a better nerrative style, but most of the mechs don't have that, you should not base a game off of a theatrical trailer like this. The default assault chassis and the infiltrator chassis are the only two I have seen with what would appear to be a windshield

Ace4225, on November 15 2012 - 11:53 AM, said:

EDIT: Just saw a tutorial video on the pre-alpha build, and the chassis DO have some cockpits that visually match the first-person view.

I wonder why they would change it... or not create unique cockpits for each. (maybe it was too much work currently_)

there were mechs in the alpha build that had cockpits directly correlating to the designs we see in-game, but the game is still in beta, so perhaps the devs simply haven't finished all the cockpits.

The other reason I feel they really are meant to be glass cockpits is because of a point brought up [somewhere, either earlier in this thread or another thread] that sunlight is coming into the cockpit. You can see this clearly in-game [I forgot about it until it was brought up].

If you were looking at screens, however rounded, they would be casting an unnatural glow into the cockpit, and the internals of the cockpit would be lit in a very artificial way [it would look like a tank cockpit]. But it isn't lit artificially; the natural sunlight flares on the glass and shines on the interior exactly the way it should if the cockpit were indeed made of ordinary glass.

As a photographer who understands the effects of lighting on a scene, I'm surprised you didn't notice this.

Here's just a gameplay demo I pulled off youtube (you may want to skip to somewhere around 11:00):



You can see very detailed shadows coming into the cockpit from outside; that wouldn't be happening if the glass was actually screens. :/

Edited by Ace4225, November 15 2012 - 10:55 PM.

[Roundlay]

If the digital noise treatment within the game had any relationship to the nature of each cockpit's HUD, then mech instruments, the lobby, etc., wouldn't also be all noised up. If anything, this suggests we're seeing the game environment through a helmet. Adding noise is a way to draw upon the extensive visual language of film/hollywood.

[Ace4225]

Roundlay, on November 15 2012 - 11:47 PM, said:

If the digital noise treatment within the game had any relationship to the nature of each cockpit's HUD, then mech instruments, the lobby, etc., wouldn't also be all noised up.

If you're talking about the overall fuzzy treatment of the game's graphics, that could just be a technique to make non-bump-mapped surfaces and less detailed models appear softer and more realistic, as an addition to anti-aliasing. Sort of "cheating" to get around higher-poly modeling and advanced texturing.

[sorry if some of those terms don't make sense; 3D animation major over here]

Edited by Ace4225, November 16 2012 - 12:06 AM.

[HandSlander]

Yeah so to summarise - we agree that currently we are viewing the game environment through a glass/perspex/composite cockpit due to the lighting situation. However, the character also wears a full face helmet.

If you know about the F35 Joint Strike Fighter I believe that they wear full face helmets which are linked to cameras attached to the plane exterior. I believe this is so they can see "through" the plane if they are dogfighting and someone gets into their blindspot i.e. underneath the plane. I remember seeing this on a documentary I was watching so not sure if its integrated in all F35s but anyway - my point is that it could be a situation where the feed to the helmet generates the noise/fuzz/static.

Anyway to the guy that said I confused static for noise - well lets be honest here its the same argument in that this far in the future surely the optical feed quality is sufficient to eliminate noise.

Another person made the point that the devs are trying to make the game look smoother and softer by introducing it. I would agree with this point - the game looks easier on the eyes BUT in a competitive FPS it gives you a disadvantage to have this grain on which is why most people play on LOW graphics.

They should introduce DX11, TXAA, Ambient Occlusion and other such technologies to make it look nice without (a) a huge performance hit or ( introducing what is effectively static interference as post

Edited by HandSlander, November 16 2012 - 01:01 AM.

[Ace4225]

HandSlander, on November 16 2012 - 12:59 AM, said:

Another person made the point that the devs are trying to make the game look smoother and softer by introducing it. I would agree with this point - the game looks easier on the eyes BUT in a competitive FPS it gives you a disadvantage to have this grain on which is why most people play on LOW graphics.

They should introduce DX11, TXAA, Ambient Occlusion and other such technologies to make it look nice without (a) a huge performance hit or ( introducing what is effectively static interference as post

Newer NVidia GPUs are capable of adding Ambient Occlusion and TXAA beyond the game's programmed graphics.

I would have to disagree that the grain creates a serious disadvantage, since I ran the game at max settings and was still able to bullseye targets with TOW rockets, let alone a Hawkins, from halfway across the map.

[Ace4225]

However, I do agree it would be nice to implement a DX11 mode for those whose GPUs can take it.

Edited by Ace4225, November 16 2012 - 01:11 AM.