Are gamers really surprised by this?
Suddenly, a lot of the gullibility around "AI" is starting to make more sense.
I didn't even think about it, but now that I see it, it's a clever solution to the problem at hand. If 99.9% of players are not going to care or see the trick, it's fine.
Lmao right?
I literally feel like chatgpt-like AI is basically just a thing rewording google searches to sound human
Ehich i guess is a thing for making it make sentences that sound human, but not " intelligent"
fuckin' cleverbot-ass thing this dang ol' redditors are worshiping
Indeed! In general I think most people don't appreciate how much smoke and mirrors goes into game design. One of my favs is how they made the grass in Ghost of Tsushima look so fucking incredible:
We're talking about people who would willingly not only play but pay a game from a game developer whose last good game is over two decades old at this point. Of course they'll be the rubiest of rubes.
The sloppiness here is indeed not parenting it to the camera
I love learning little trade secrets like this.
Yeah it's like watching those shows about how Hollywood does special effects.
Red Letter Media has changed the way I see movies fer sure
Definitely! How can you not think these little tricks are cool! Are G*mers really upset by this?
You should check out OddHeader on YouTube. His whole thing is finding Easter eggs and things the devs left in. There's also Shesez who, by hook or by crook, gets a free camera in games to explore how cutscenes are made and other things players aren't supposed to see
If they don't render every single drop of rain as a physics-based object in real time, I'm going to [redacted]
If they don't let me simulate every single molecule of water in that rain on my $2 million supercomputer I'm going to [redacted] so hard that Todd Howard will feel my disappointment. 
I figured out games have a "rain box" when I was eight years old and playing Need For Speed Underground 2. Like come on, it's clear they don't render rain throughout the entire game world.
I know but its just REALLY funny to see
it's usually attached to the camera though. this zoom out thing is weird and bad.
It's bad, but usually a result of really aggressive culling and the likes. Quite a few older games have a really small rain box not attached to the camera for performance reasons, and if you play the game in widescreen you can see it.
But yeah it's really weird to see a modern game using a set rain box not attached to the camera, I agree
I wouldn't mind this if the rain was only coming from clouds with frowny faces while all the other clouds were smiling
Same vibe as SM64 literally having a little camera person flying around on a cloud
Now I want volumetric rain.
Would love rain that made one see the water roll of the roofs in a dynamic way, even at a bit of distance or while under cover. Not necessarily simulated or volumetric, I dont mind cheats and cardboard tricks to make it look good and performant.
That sounds really neat actually. I don't think it'd be very hard to add, either, it's just some hidden assets that show themselves a bit after it starts raining. Roughly the same as river and waterfall effects, just at funny scales. It'd be a rather large amount of work to place all of them if it's a big game with a lot of roofs and gutters, but still a good use of time compared to some of the crap AAA games throw artists at.
Sounds terrifying to try to do in a procedural game though.
Well, crytek managed to do it with Hunt Showdown this past event and it looked amazing. Not sure how different creation and cryengine are, though it was my understanding implementing rain into Hunt was considered impossible before.
That sounds cool too but picture the idea of fus roh dah pushing the rain. https://youtu.be/_y9MpNcAitQ?t=38
You could do some extremely cool stuff with player skills creating wind effects that have affect it. Matrix style rain fight stuff.
Driveclub, a racing game on the PS4, does do this with the windshield and bonnet of the car when it rains.
I don't think I've ever seen a game do that. I'll add it to my scope creep list.
wait until they learn about frustum culling
I just learned these devs are so lazy that they don’t even render anything that’s not on camera….. They are literally destroying my house every single frame!
Did you know, that objects far away from camera are actually just low resolution stand-ins? And the image isn't actually even 3d, everything is the same distance from the player!
Please delete this they'll work it into their npc-based language and become even more insufferable
Wait, was the rain like this in Skyrim too?
I'm pretty sure that's just a texture over the camera.
Heavy Rain
I think Halo: Reach for Xbox 360 actually doesn't do this, in theater mode you can pause and fly around to see individual droplets rendered based on distance but frozen in place.
They're actually little dots too, they only turn into blurry lines when in motion.
Halo: Reach was a really impressive use of the hardware. Surely the drops are cenntered around the camera in the example you describe?
ngl Reach's Forge mode was kind of the peak of AAA for me. it's all been downhill since that.
The one that gets me sometimes is that in a lot of first person shooters the gun is rendered on a separate layer than the rest of the graphics. It's not actually there. It's just an animation.
Some games use that to their advantage by making the gun huge to block the rest of the scene so less gets rendered.
Is there a particular reason Bethesda's games always come out buggy and weird like this
It's their special sauce that gives their games that unique flavor
Jank game engine hacked together with some middleware slapped in and no time or interest in QA
Conway’s Law: A system’s design structure mirrors the communication structure of the people who built it.
So if Bethesda has dysfunctional communication practices such as excessive meetings, slow feedback loops, or pipelines that don’t allow their workers to work independently, their software is also going to suffer from the artifacts of that dysfunction.
Weather Report as a Bethesda developer.
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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