Sonic Generations Megathread

You sure that's the only reason? This is supposed to release about the end of the year.

 

Or the game still being 7 months from release. :v:

 

I'm very very sure that polygon jim was just showing solaris what the pictures look like without Anisotropic Filtering. If you read the posts previous you'd know that.

 

I'm not a game developer, but wouldn't the lack of particular features allow the addition of more objects in a game world? I understand memory is, of course, a limiting factor, and Sonic's speeds require him to have a large gameworld. There's generally a reason for everything, and the lack of something may fall upon the lack of ability from SEGA's visual department, but surely there's a larger reason if something you deem so simple isn't added.

 

Except that's not lack of Anisotropic Filtering, AF only improves image quality when seeing textures at a steep angle. I.E. Floor or walls. It does nothing when the texture is at a perpendicular angle which is what you see in both Sonics and the flower/trees.

The image in that wikipedia article illustrates that perfectly.

 

In case anyone's interested, go and download evilhamwizard's big image dump here, take any one of the images into an image editing program and scale it down to 1920x1080. That's how it would look like on an HDTV. As it is, it's quite blurry and certain objects and textures lack detail or look rather craggy. Nevertheless, everything that I've seen so far is artistically beautiful and impressive, so even I can excuse the visible flaws in graphics. Especially if this game is still more than half a year away, if all things go well.

 

Or maybe they just have different models that are used specifically for the menu screen.

Well, that's true enough, but those aren't the pictures I'm talking about. I was talking about stuff like, y'know, that shot where everyone was admiring the oooh shiny gloss on the floor and shit. Not that it matters, because if it looks fine from its intended size/distance/etc., I don't care how shit it looks when you blow it up and stick it under a microscope.

Also, pidgeonholing the absolute worst two inches of a screenshot and saying the whole thing looks like shit isn't doing a whole lot for your case there, Jim. I'm not looking at individual textures or hand-counting polygons, here. I'm looking at screenshots and saying "That looks nice," because it does. When life hands you a busty dame in fetish gear, you don't pull out a magnifying glass and criticize her for the scuff mark on her lower-left stocking, you just take it all in, let out a whistle, and... you know what I'm just going to stop that metaphor right where it is before it gets out of hand.

 

Are there any good screenshots of the game rendered at normal resolution? Could the effects causing this might be multiplied tenfold or such due to rendering it at such a high resolution? I don't see why something like this would be in this game and not Unleashed, when usually it's the other way around, fixing little issues like that. Still, most of you all know more about how modern games render textures and the like than me.

 

Artistically this game is beautiful. Technical detail shouldn't nessesarly be a factor in the art direction. Not that I am defending blurry textures I am just saying that it doesn't detract from my enjoyment of the visuals.

 

What I meant was one that was at HDTV size in the first place, rather than taking a large one and manually resizing it. I just wondered if, at the 360's natural resolution, the blur effect might be applied less or such, since if a zoomed out Sonic has a small or decent sized eye texture, it might look alright in normal areas at a normal resolution but be filtered too much at that size. Again, no idea if the theory is right but I thought it might be different from simply resizing those large shots.

Then again maybe Sega just goofed and this is more common from them than I thought.

 

Actually, Xbox 360/PS3 games that run at 1920x1080 are very rare. Most games are actually 1280x720 or lower and are upscaled to 1920x1080, so when you play the game it doesn't actually look as crisp as the screenshots downscaled to that resolution.

 

You are retarded if you think the game should use high-res textures for things that'll end up occupying just a few screen pixels. Give this a thought.
Sonic Unleashed on Xbox 360 and PS3 was rendered in 880x720 (yes, that's not even "full" 720p; source) and then upscaled to 1280x720 or 1920x1080, depending on the console setting.
Many of the issues you pointed out are a result of the ridiculous resolution of those "screenshots", and the rest will probably be fixed in the final game.

 

And I notice the same stupid issues in Unleashed all the time. I actually just notice details unlike everyone else here. I said nothing bad about the textures technically, I have a problem with the retarded mipmapping on everything an inch from the camera.

 

I thought about suggesting some vague similarities/coincidences with Sonic Fan Remix, but I shied away from doing so considering the probably incendiary nature of such idle chatter. But! I later found my way to Mercury's blog post about this game, whence I shall just leave this here.

 

I usually don't go hunting for those little details, but I agree with you that it would be great if we could tweak the LOD bias to make the mipmapped textures look sharper. I guess Sonic Team have their reasons for not doing this nor applying anisotropic filtering. Probably performance considerations, the PS3/360 hardware is getting old.


For those who have no clue about texture filtering (ie. "what the heck is mipmapping and AF"), I recommend <a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ati,819.html" target="_blank">this article</a> by Tomshardware.
It's old, but covers the basics well, better than the current Wikipedia articles.

 

The texture conversation is pointless, but people whining about said conversation taking place infuriates me even more.

TL;DR - You're all stupid. Cut it out.

 

EDIT: Ninja'd by Chimpo. Had the page open for a little while.

The game looks very, very pretty. There's some graphical issues that need to be ironed out, but it's early days right now. It's rather normal for parts of game to change graphically through development. We saw it happen with Unleashed and Colours. I can't imagine that any glaring issue (like M and C.Sonic's eyes will be at some points) will be left like that in the final build.