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Amsterdam looks incredibly realistic in the new Call of Duty (twitter.com/juanbuis)
488 points by doener on Oct 22, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 380 comments



Amsterdam local here — in fact, I live in exactly this street. Where the first cartel guy gets subdued is where I get my coffee, and the people that live in the canal houses are my neighbors. (My house may or may not be in the map, would have to play the game to check.)

Fun facts:

(1) A year or two ago several guys spent days using some sort of device to scan all buildings in our street. They got complaints from several bar owners and tenants as they appeared to be taking photographs inside the buildings, and they wouldn’t explain why. I wouldn’t be be surprised if it was for this map.

(2) The footage is hyperrealistic not just graphically, they got the details right with surprising accuracy. Even the garbage bins are in exactly the right place. (It’s also not unlikely that a guy could be subdued like this without people being too surprised, as tourists like to use this district to get wasted 24/7.)


If there would be several guys photographing my building or bar, and would not explain why, I would call the cops, because that is extremely invasive, probably illegal and suspicious. You can photograph the „public“ but not private spaces like bars, inside of buildings and so on.

And the „we don’t tell you“ would not fly with the police.


I doubt photographing the inside of a bar from the street is illegal.


It depends if you do it just one time like a tourist or you are being there all day.


You'd be surprised.


This is one of the most touristy places of the city though. Tourists photographing everything happens everyday there.


Comments like this are why I love the internet, cheers!


They seem to have missed the absolute shedload of bikes.


This area has few bikes compared to the rest of the city, due to the sheer amount of foot traffic. Truckloads of british tourists are unloaded here every day.


That's a really nice place to live! Can I ask how you got that place? Is it a private or social accommodation?


I bought an apartment. Living here (ie. red light district) is not for everyone though because the area gets an insane amount of tourists. There is social housing too.


Though it does look great, i wish more games focused on actually being fun to play instead of having long cut scenes and micro transactions.

Ironically other than the fact that you have to pay per game and that you’re often forced to die, I prefer arcade games. They generally minimize friction to play

edit: to clarify, I mean games with good graphics specifically. There are many great games (especially indie) out there.


How many do you want? There are plying and tons of games like that on steam that release every day.

Paying for lives was the first micro transaction!


It appears that the easiest way to making micro transactions work and be cost-effective is some kind of vending machine with coupons.


Well, this is Call of Duty, the Micheal Bay of video games.


That is an excellent way of characterizing COD. I play the campaigns pretty much because it's like participating in an action movie and you just kinda get to go along with the ride of it. It's not too tough or defeating (looking at you elden ring.)

I don't really have time for really long games anymore and these are as entertaining as movies IMO.


Absolutely, and theres nothing bad or wrong about playing it or watching a Micheal Bay movie. If you like it then great.

Many games seem to transition into more movie-like experience. Assassins Creed games for example, I found at some point I prefer to watch someone play it who cuts out the filler (while providing limited & entertaining commentary) and its just like a movie.


Nowadays there are games for all tastes being released weekly, the biggest game of the year, Elden Ring, seems exactly what you're looking for. Also try indies like Slay the Spire, Into the Breach and Rollerdrome


Gameplay innovation is risky. But if you spend a lot of money on looking good you don't want to risk that investment, so you just copy the gameplay of your last popular game, maybe with a new gameplay element from a competitors game


Fun has less to do with individual gameplay elements than execution. The balance between weapon types makes a huge difference in FPS games. Chip damage vs recovery mechanics, cover systems vs stealth vs run and gun etc.

Similarly there have been so many health systems in FPS games you don’t need to invent something particularly new, but you do need to pick something appropriate to the gameplay. For example in PvE players need to be able to fight waves of enemies but in PvP games nobody wants to stand for 30 seconds firing at a bullet sponge.

Puzzle games need interesting puzzles, racing games need appropriate tracks, and so forth.


We live in the golden age of gameplay innovation. It’s never been easier to develop and distribute a game. There is an vast ocean of indie game developers with new games coming out every week! There were 10394 new steam games listed in 2021. That’s over 28 new games per day! In 2010 only 349 games came out on the platform.


Exactly. There is tons of gameplay innovation. But from cheap(ish) to produce games, not those that pour millions into looking good.


Have you played Detroit: Become Human? Graphics there is mind blowing on ultra settings in 4k and story is great, one of the best games I've played in the last few years and I'm super picky and don't play games without good story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KV-RNmFuLw


The campaign for MWII is quite fun, if not one of the best of the series. And the ending cutscene is incredible!


that's why you have emulators, there is already almost infinite amount of great games existing, which you can play without any transactions

asking for good graphics seems ironical since you complain about devs focusing on graphics instead of gameplay


Play some soulsborne games. They look great (even if they aren't the very best graphics possible) and play great. Very rewarding. I just finished my first Elden Ring run @ 200 hours play time and I'm back playing Dark Souls 3 (yet again).


> I wish more games focused on actually being fun to play instead of having long cut scenes and micro transactions.

IME games do. But then I also don’t play any shooters.


I wish more games, any even, simply provided a "walk around as a tourist" mode. At this fidelity, it's enjoyable. I spent 6 months living in Amsterdam, it brought back memories. A short walk down from here is the back of the Hotel Grand Kraznopolsky. I can smell the weed from "the British bulldog" Cafe as I type.


That mode was especially enjoyable in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, walking around a simulation of antique Athene is (for lack of a better word) something.


The natural history museum in Montreal (where ACO was developed) had a mummy/Egypt exhibit and they actually had computers setup with that sim running (pretty sure Ubisoft sponsored the exhibit).


i loved midtown madness because i was able to drive around san francisco. ten years later when i first visited, i was able to recognize many of the landmarks because of the game.


Angel Studios, the developers of Midtown Madness, would eventually be renamed Rockstar San Diego. You might've heard of em.


I felt the same with Watch Dogs 2.


I liked The Division 2 for it's pretty close version of DC for this same reason. Obviously sans societal collapse etc.


Woo! I worked on that game.

We actually took GIS data from the real DC and modelled the world. So the map should be very close to accurate.

The Division 1 was handcrafted, so we cut a lot of the world away that wasn’t interesting, small alley ways and such.

I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to hear that you enjoyed the work that went in.


My friends and I spent a good chunk of time playing that game right after we all finished college and moved away for jobs. One of us actually moved to DC and playing The Division 2 actually helped him learn the area! Really fun game, your work is much appreciated!


Really enjoyed Division 2! Having visited DC during the Last Administration, your apocalypse was much nicer :)

On the GIS side of things, didn't Ubi team up with some European nonprofit to make other real world locale into games for educational purposes? Can't remember the details, but I used to work for a museum and my boss wanted us to do something like that. And I was like that'd be nice, but we're not Ubi.

It would be awesome to read about your production pipeline, like did you go from drone footage to photogrammetry to dozens of artists manually fixing things, or? Was there much ML involved?


No ML. We templated some common architecture patterns and placed things in the world.

I wish I could show you our internal demonstrations of it. Basically we would plot the map in snowdrop using GIS, then raise cuboids from the shapes on the map. Then we would manually try to match google street view with something in our template library, and modify the object to match reality.

It was a very manual process, but we based the map on the real thing so distances should be 1:1.


I've recently taken up photogrammetry mapping with my drone. I'm quite amazed at the textured 3d output you can get from that by capturing buildings just by flying around them. I imagine it won't be too long that we just fly a drone over a city and entirely map it in 3d with very high resolution and detail. It's accurate to within a few feet unless you use RTK and ground stations which can bring you within centimeter accuracy. Lidar is also making things easier/cheaper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vrpKFV0odg


Why does every YouTube video start with a loud "WHAT'S GOING ON GUYS!!!" lol


That's awesome. The results were terrific and fun. Thanks for your work on that!


> didn't Ubi team up with some European nonprofit to make other real world locale into games for educational purposes?

You're likely thinking of the Discovery Tour line derived from Assassin's Creed. https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/assassins-creed/discovery...

"[F]reely roam Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Viking Age to learn more about their history and daily life. Students, teachers, non-gamers, and players can discover these eras at their own pace, or embark on guided tours and stories curated by historians and experts."


Why are small alleyways not interesting in a shooter? Many area to hide. Though perhaps it would stimulate camping, but I wouldn't call them 'not interesting' :)

I didn't find The Division too interesting, just couldn't get into it. I also don't really understand why they keep going on with that Tom Clancy label. The guy's been dead for almost a decade. If they feel the need to badge his name all over it, it feels like it's just B-content and they need to stick such labels on it to sell it.

I think his early books were pretty good but the later series were just drivel IMO. I don't think he even wrote them himself.


I live downtown in Manhattan: the "Gangs of New York" update on that title was interesting to play... First thing I did was go find my condo building with a mountain of trash piled up against the door.

Some of the geography has been futzed with for gameplay purposes, which was incredibly confusing as someone who could navigate the area without a map!


There's the "walking simulator" genre for that. I didn't care for the story, but I recently played Dear Esther, it's absolutely stunning on a 4K screen.


Good one. Also Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture by the same producers.

Not walking simulators but low-key “just sorta look around” games I like: Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch.

Edit: Corrected the Finch title, thank you!


*What Remains of Edith Finch


Death Stranding is another great example, such a poetic game


Another one with a terrible story that I absolutely loved. I don't know whether Kojima is a genius or a lunatic, but I'm glad I played his game.


The photogrammetry of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is also impressive to just look at.


Was it based on some real place?


GTA IV was my favorite for this. I'd expect this to be hard to achieve since verisimilitude is expensive, but manageable if your character is only going to go down a fixed path.


I thought Watch Dogs Legion did a pretty good job with London


It did an excellent job, and considering the amount that was cut out it was still extremely easy to navigate from the east to west end along entirely recognisable roads.

The pub over the road from Parliament was a bit jarring but understandable.


Ironically one of the earlier CoDs had a great semi-stealth mission in Pripyat (Chernobyl). City was modeled so well with all the iconic eyesights, really gave you a feeling of being in an abandoned post-nuclear town.


You're likely referring to COD4:MW, aka the one that made the franchise what it is. That game was outstanding for the time. Real cool locations, renderings like from the spectre gunship camera system, etc, made it special. The gameplay hasn't aged that well tho, it's easy to see the cracks now.


Ross Scotts dream software: https://youtu.be/at5YMpTLl9U


I wonder if it can be used in VR mode for people with agoraphobia or social anxiety.


If anyone is interested I put a list together last year for someone who was looking at VR for public speaking coaching due to social anxiety and not sure what the current state of the art is or where these folks are now other than the web sites are all still up. In no particular order:

https://www.ovationvr.com/ https://virtualspeech.com/ https://virtualorator.com/ http://presentationsimulator.com/


Thank you!


Wouldn't simulated environment cause similar anxiety effects? Like I'm very scared of snakes IRL, I'm confident i won't enjoy looking at them in VR either


The idea is to do this in session with a therapist, or at least under guidance. By exposing yourself safely to a trigger reducing the effects (like a fight or flight response for example)


I think the purpose is to overcome that anxiety which requires you to be to be exposed. Maybe looking at vr snakes could help you :)


No need to wish for this: the “walking simulator” genre is downright massive.


It looks incredible.

Although this beautiful recreation is missing the endless tourists aimlessly walking on bike paths and the very loud conversations between Dutch people (their talking volume is what many of us consider yelling, but that's just normal).

Once we get VR headsets that are maybe twice as good as the best now, and we have high quality simulations, the scifi stories of people choosing living in unreality seem more plausible.


> Dutch people (their talking volume is what many of us consider yelling, but that's just normal).

It's funny, I thought it was Americans who are so loud compared to the Dutch.


It looks like they invested a ton of money on texture optimization and lighting algorithms. However the animations look like the basic skeletal animation / skinning you can learn from an OpenGL/DirectX tutorial. That imbalance is kind of weird.


I guess the next frontier for realism is character animation. To me their robotic movements and moonwalking feet break the illusion. There were very neat demos of ML-generated postures/movement, so it may be possible to nail it.


There are games with very realistic character animation like e.g. The Last of Us Part 2. But that is a lot of effort, requires a lot of expertise and is likely very expensive. Correct animations can also conflict with fast and responsive movement, and most games will prefer responsiveness to realistic animations. Having both requires advanced approaches that can blend different animations well, which seems to be rather difficult.


It's funny, I remember reading somewhere that research on Computer Graphics, rendering specifically, is 'solved' because photorealism had been accomplished.

What had been omitted though was that efficient photorealistic rendering, as well as the visual elements that human perception instantly picks up on such as material(s) translucency, lighting/shadows, and as you've already mentioned animations (and the bigger challenge of facial expressions!) is what everyone's after.

And what we have at the OP is indeed impressive work, which still looks artificial. Contrary to the critique of the comments so far, and outside the graphics research interpretation, this isn't something necessarily negative imo. I like video games that preserve a few elements of non-photorealism.


Human perception does not pick up bad lighting or shadows, this is a fairly well known fact in the computer graphics world.

Sure, you can compare two and tell which one is better but unless it is really bad humans won’t be bothered by it or even explain what’s wrong.


This is an interesting video about how hard it is to effectively animate just one small aspect of human motion: walking through a door: https://youtu.be/AYEWsLdLmcc


That's what I was thinking. Some people are complaining about very subtle details not being quite right. But to me, what really stands out as video-game-y is the way the character and camera and other people move. It's hard to describe, but they just don't move like actual people do. Gotta watch some bodycam videos for comparison.

Don't get me wrong, the visual clarity is a great achievement. But if they're gonna spend more effort on making it more convincingly real, that's a better target IMO than reflections and wave patterns.


For characters animations don't blend too well with each others as some things reset between postures, and the walking animation doesn't translate too well to crowded spaces as people would turn their bodies to maximize the distance between body and objects (up to a point), sometimes even opting to take a different path depending on people.

And the camera is very smooth, which filters out the little balance shifts we all do (even typing something here I notice the subtle changes to vision oscillating in complex patterns which head-bobbing would be a simplified first-order approach to).

I assume it's still very difficult to do all these things with current computing power, and in the case of the camera I'm not sure it will ever be possible for something interactive to feel quite perfect unless you switch to a VR headset and carry your own balance into it.


Regarding camera movement, not completely sure what would be required for a VR-like experience. But I can watch bodycam videos like https://youtu.be/0RGLSTXu7Ws?t=75 (police action, end of a high-speed chase) and never think that it seems artificial. The camera body movement is fairly subtle, but feels aligned with the way I expect the carriers' body to move.


Wow, looking at my computer screen felt like a static webcam view until you pointed this out and I noticed my head bobbing around every two seconds.


I'd be interested in hearing the perspective of a video game programmer, because from my own intuition as a layman, it sounds as though making realistic model movement is an order of magnitude harder than working on the environment alone.

At least, the fact that this game has familiar human movement tropes that resembles decade old games sounds like a testament to that.


Not exactly general motion, but the linked video is about fluid motion in games: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31200393


I agree. This game is in the cerebral palsy category of character animation (e.g. the NPC tourists on the canal's other side).

GTA 3/4/5 are in the megalotesticle category (characters moving like wavering boats).


Just played Yakuza: Like a Dragon and the NPC animation there as well as the animation and art style in general looked better in that game than in this clip.


Lol, looks pretty realistic to me. This is very much like how most tourist in the city behave!


100%

It feels like character movements haven’t changed much in the last 20 years. Which is a shame because the visuals are great, but let down by 2006 style animation.


Yeah its to the point where you can instantly recognize someone doing a parody of a GTA character walk. I have no idea how it is implemented but it looks as if character limbs move at a smooth constant speed. As a runner I have seen graphs that show human locomotion is in fact made up of brief bursts of speed followed by a sharp decceleration. I’m sure they could model this but its probably not a major priority.


How much freedom does the player have in this type of game?

From watching these videos it seems like the player does not influence the story at all?

What if you jump into the river for example? Would you be able to swim around in it? Would bystanders be worried about you, call the police, the police would come and get you out of the water etc?

Or would a magic hand keep you from jumping into the water and you have to stay very closely on track to the scripted story?


The campaign in Call of Duty is not a open world campaign where you get to do whatever you want and the environment reacts appropriately in most situations. It's basically a interactive movie where you get to practice sneaking and shooting sometimes, in the style of a Michael Bay movie.

Expecting what you write about in the third paragraph is a misunderstanding of what the game is trying to be.


It’s Call of Duty so there is a linear singleplayer that is like an interactive movie, and then an online multiplayer which is the part that people actually play.


about zero in CoD


Looks very realistic, here's the same location in Google Street View https://goo.gl/maps/q2qrUGSoFEouq3Kj6


It honestly would pass for a recorded video at twitter's resolution... if it wasn't for the character animations looking decidedly average and robotic.


It does look great. The water, particularly with the boat going through it, is what I noticed first. I spend a lot of time in boats and around water, so it's always one of the first things I see in graphical simulations.


Comparing the photo and the game the other thing I’d say is that the game actually looks too clean in comparison to reality.


Does the game have too few bikes compared to Google Street View?


I thought it looked like some characters and animations superimposed on google street view


The scale seems off.


It's more claustrophobic than Amsterdam generally appears to be IRL, and my guess is that this level of detail requires such environments, as it always has traditionally, since in large open spaces you have to compromise.


"Well boss, looks like the team will need another couple weeks vaca-- er, research in Amsterdam. We don't have everything quite realistic enough yet."


Considering they picked the red light district I assume they are not done with their 'research' :)


I'm reminded of this blog post[0] from 2017 about bad tone mapping in video games. A game can put all the work it wants into realistic puddle reflections, but it'll still scream "video game" to your eyes if the color grading is so out of whack that it couldn't possibly be a real scene. That post is focused on how it was done wrong so often in the early days of HDR.

This clip has lots of things that stick out to me as video gamey, but the color is on-point. I suspect that's a huge part of the realism.

[0] https://80.lv/articles/games-look-bad-hdr-and-tone-mapping/


I feel for all those game devs, making something realistic is a lot of work but it's hard to be impressed. Something has to be hyper-real to compete with reality; it's why over-saturated images are so common, a more realistic rendition just doesn't capture it.

I just finished Horizon: Forbidden West, and the more fantastical setting let the devs stretch their legs. (Coincidentally, Guerilla Games are from Amsterdam). Few moments of that game aren't jaw-droppingly beautiful. I frequently heard my companions "can we go now" dialog lines because I was crouched down staring at the moss. And I played half the game at 720p30 MPEG compressed with PS Remote Play because I didn't want to take over the TV. When I moved the ps5 to my desk it was like seeing it again for the first time.


For another ultra-realistic feel in a computer game: https://twitter.com/esankiy/status/1580225720361832448

The trick here is you have a very POV camera-mounted-on-head effect with lens distortions (in I think VR) and the environment is very deteriorated, making me doubt it was a game in the first place!


As a hobbyist game dev one thing I've (recently) learned is that optimizing performance is paramount in video games. Running at 60 FPS you have a budget of 16 ms per frame (VR requires 90 FPS minimum else risk VR sickness; ~11ms per frame). Any scripts and anything you want on screen needs to fit in that amount of time. It's a big exercise in smoke and mirrors.

I'd love to know what optimization techniques are used so that those precious CPU/GPU cycles can go to those good looking things.

Side note: being absolutely forced to optimize the heck out of games as an essential practice gives me a much greater sense of performance characteristics in my "real" job and also in leetcode.


Modern renderers:

Use the GPU to decide what to render, and in a growing number of cases, will cull triangles in compute (software) instead of letting the fixed pipeline do it. The vertex shader feeds parameters to the fragment shader even if the triangle is culled (depth or backfacing), so with vertex counts climbing, there is a lot of dead time spent feeding fragment shaders that are never ran.

Render at a lower resolution and temporally upsample to a higher resolution.

Using low overhead apis that optimize command recording performance (DX12, Vulkan) and transfer / memory access.

Multithread all the things.

Obsess over data locality and compression.


Culling triangles seems to be going away though, especially with the rise of ray tracing. The expectation is that even aspects of the scene we can’t see influence lighting. How are they managing that?


IANAGD, most graphically intense games are using a hybrid approach where RT will inform lighting/shadows and reflections but still rely on traditional rasterization heavily. That gives you a good bit of room to fudge the raytracing since the rasterization gives you a baseline.

That said, it seems like the culling advice for RT is "expanded camera frustrum" culling, distance culling dependent on size, and choosing the right geometry LOD. Beyond that they want you to aggressively mark geometry as opaque and carefully arrange objects into groups (BLASes) according to a couple rules so the GPU can skip as much work as possible.

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/best-practices-using-nvidi...


What makes you think culling triangles is going away? Ray tracing is usually done with a highly approximated volume or planar representation of the scene, which is then applied to surface triangles.

Rendering objects that 'we can't see' has been done for as long as shadow caster light sources have been around. Even though we cannot see the mesh directly, the light can, and the viewer can see the shadow. These indirections all play their role in the greater "rendering equation", and the specific solution depends on the constraints of the application and resources of the development team.

Some renderers have abandoned triangles altogether for signed distance fields, but this involves re-creating from scratch the entire art pipeline.


Sorry, I just assumed that you’d need to construct the geometry in order to produce an accurate scene (with any complex lighting, be it shadows or ray tracing). I’ll be reading up more on the techniques you’ve mentioned. Im not a graphics developer so my suppositions are entirely naive.


It's more that "construct the geometry" is a highly subjective exercise. :)


At a high level it's about doing as little as possible.

Don't allocate memory. Don't re-layout ui. etc


You can get by with 72 fps in VR and avoid sickness.


That's good; you get more of a frame budget that way. I saw 90 and even 144 as target frames to avoid VR sickness. It's good to know 72 frames can work too.


Frame rate plays a role - especially when it drops down below targets and stutters, which does happen irl, but designing the experience to avoid motion sickness from the ground up is what makes the difference. Keeping something stable in the view that moves along with head pose like a HUD element while everything else around you is moving makes a huge difference. Seeing the world around you in motion from inside a car with the stable windscreen will be much easier than zooming around through freespace even at 120hz for most people until they get comfortable with the sensory mismatch. I have heard several interesting approaches to acclimatization and can recommend this [1] if you are affected & am told positioning a real fan blowing air on you while in the headset will orient your proprioception in a way that helps.

[1] https://medium.com/@ThisIsMeIn360VR/motion-sickness-and-the-...


Also this game Space Salvage claims to be a way to develop VR Sea Legs using design principles

https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/4028646407203318/


You think that's cool? Try the Matrix UE5 demo on PS5 https://youtu.be/WU0gvPcc3jQ


That's insane


That's really levels beyond that CoD trailer. The characters are much more realistic, too. Neo's face has a bit of a photoshoppy look, and the black girl's gait looks a bit stiff, but the rest is phenomenal.


The most interesting part is at the end, where they show engine features, but at the same time they character is walking through the streets and you can see character animation and lighting is off. My guess faces/motion in the middle of the demo are pre-animated.


I think we are all getting there.


This looks Amazing, but one thing I found jarring was the animations. It feels like game developers haven’t improved how NPCs walk since GTA 3. I don’t know if it’s because every NPC has the same gate or something but it’s odd.


I thought the exact same thing. Relatively to everything else, it almost feels like game developers aren't giving it any attention. Obviously they are, so what is it about NPC animation in particular that makes it so difficult? Even facial expressions seem pretty good nowadays...


In this specific case I could imagine it’s just a very low priority. It’s a first person shooter where the vast, vast, vast majority of the time you are exchanging gunfire with enemy characters or other players. Except for small sequences like the one in the OP, you are very rarely ever interacting with NPCs in a non-violent manner outside of cutscene (makes for some easy talking points about the state of the AAA games industry) so I imagine those animations don’t receive many resources budgeted towards them.

CoD Infinite Warfare (I.e. “the one in space”) had sequences in between every mission where you could talk and interact with the crew of your spaceship and the NPC animations were a lot better there. Also they had a lot of NPCs modeled after celebrities for some reason (e.g. F1 driver Lewis Hamilton) so there was likely pressure to animate the NPCs better.


GTA 4 was a breakthrough in ped animation due to their Euphoria engine. GTA 3, on the other hand, is memed to this day for the way they made women move their hips when walking. :)


Both Nvidia and Intel have some amazing papers on real time ray tracing by using neural nets to filter noise and upsample.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VxbTiuabW0k

I wonder if those techniques were used.

If metaverse looked like this instead of crappy new horizons app, i’d be a lot more interested.

This reminded me of the lara croft demo unity had a while back.

Amazing to witness evolution of realism in games.

I visited Amsterdam a while back and couldn’t tell from first few seconds whether it was real or not. The jerky human movement gave it away though.


It's the lighting which is amazingly realistic. The contrast between shadows and sunlit area. There are so many details which are off. It's the lighting which is so crazy good that it looks real on the first sight. Games don't have that very often.


the water decals from the boat are totally out of place for a boat moving at that speed and are obviously decals landing on the water texture... the people look soft focus and rounder than normal folks. The skin texture is really flat/matte. And that's from watching for 10 seconds and typing. It looks really good from the postage stamp sized video on the twitter feed. It looked like a game when I went full screen. Still not bad. Is the story still terrible and just mini-game after mini-game with endless waves of baddies till you push a volume trigger like their last well every single game?


Do people not know what real life looks like anymore ?

Not even a second in the video you can see some weird artefact through the car windshield, the lighting looks completely off too

What fools us is the low res + motion blur, pause the high res video at any point and it looks like a video game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_LlSR6-ibA


Just had the video play without sound and my girlfriend said she thought it was real before she noticed the overlay text being weird. We just went to Amsterdam, too

I agree that we'll be shaving off these last 3% of visual artifacts for a while (honestly, on a good setup, games have been looking like this for 5+ years, the main thing this video has is photogrammetry and lighting). But this does look realistic.


It look like an architecture renders from 2010. The last 3% will never be shaved off because we're not using the right techniques. CGI in star wars are realistic, as in you they can fool 99% of people even when paying close attention. Video games are realistic if you glance at a video of them from 3 meters away while being busy doing something else

I guess it depends on your definition of realistic, I'm a photographer, everything screams "fake" in these supposedly "realistic" games. Some of them are artistically pleasing (rdr2, tlou2, &c.) I'll give you that, but everything is off, the lightning, the camera movement, shadows, reflections, depth of field, motion blur, textures, ...


My first thought is this is really getting into the uncanny valley. Some things look incredibly realistic that it highlights how other things don't and overall creates a bit of a jarring effect. Some random thoughts:

1. You see the sidewalk on the bridge is wet like it's been freshly rained on. Other things don't look like this. The bridge is higher than the road on the far side so should be drier but the road looks drier;

2. The boat just looks off to me. It's like it's too "clean";

3. Of course the movement of people is off. Games just haven't conquered this yet.

4. The water also looks off given the lighting and the conditions. It should be murkier rather than dark with an almost oily finish;

5. It looks like the near side of the canal is in shade but I don't really see the line from whatever is obstructing this (assumedly it's buildings to the "left"). The Sun is low in the sky to the left;

6. The sky just doesn't seem to match the expected position and lighting from the Sun.

Don't get me wrong: it is amazing, particularly rendered in real time. But there are uncanny valley artifacts.


Unfortunately this level of fidelity relies on the user having effectively zero agency or ability to do anything or move anywhere outside of the tight boundaries of this area.

Still impressive! But probably not terribly compelling for anything other than pure looks.


Agreed. While it is truly impressive, I'd rather give up a bit in photo realism to have a true open world experience with believable NPCs.


Yep. Making this environment fully interactive would be an entirely new task to accomplish. The game only allows you to stick to the script, which for CoD is appropriate. But developing a MMORPG like a Skyrim, where the environment is meant to be fully interactive, would be exponentially more complex. I'm sure it's just a matter of time though


Except the human models, this looks really amazing. At first glance I really thought it’s just some edited after effects video :)

Amsterdam looks very pretty!


I don’t understand all the nitpicking done here. I’d say it’s extremely fun to what how tech progresses! Great work all involved!


Seems like game developers have gotten car racing and general environmental rendering figured out. There has been times where I truly couldn't tell whether game play footage it was real video or rendered. That all ends when characters enter the picture. Anything "living" just seems off, whether it's a human or even a dog.

Why can't video game use actors to model movement and looks and then extrapolate from there? Maybe they do already, it's just not very convincing.


A least some of this is the characters movements have no context. They're making gestures that might look more natural if they were talking to another character but they're standing alone on a bridge.

There's also no realistic gravity between their feet/body and the ground or objects around them. They pop up and down if there's a step and appear to be floating.


Because it’s cheaper to make bad dolls than do motion capture for everything


Very realistic. Unfortunately Price's English accent is not so realistic, being more from chim-chim-churree/Big Vern territory [1]. Not shoer people talk lahk vat in Sarf Lahndahn any mawwah, squire bruv guvnah.

[1] https://twitter.com/byramb/status/1326098732501381120?lang=z...


I don’t see anything super impressive that could be attributed to CoD developers. I think most of this really advances in hardware that allows more lighting, higher quality textures and more polygons. But even with all of that, this isn’t looking incredibly realistic. There are games and engines that done it little more convincing



This looks like a 2002 Nintendo GameCube release called like “World Baby”

(Credit https://twitter.com/cd_hooks/status/1559665074868031490)


What is the point of comparing it with Horizon Worlds? The games have a different art style, have access to a different amount of compute power, and are targeting different frame rates and resolutions.


> I don’t see anything super impressive that could be attributed to CoD developers. I think most of this really advances in hardware that allows more lighting, higher quality textures and more polygons.

Who do you think is making the lighting, textures, and polygons? Who do you think is coding the engine for it?


Maybe I'm jaded being around graphics for too long, but every few years we have a bit of an advancement and proclamations of "wow, this looks real!". Probably since early 90's. Only theb, a couple of years down the road, same material suddenly looks funky compared to new material.


It's just relativism in action, no?


Might be, but there is some dose of objectivity in judging sensory input / reality of sight?


This is exactly as realistic as I remember Half-Life 2 looking when it was first shown. There definitely seems to be a "hedonic treadmill"-style effect for realism.

Also, I gather Call of Duty is a shootyman game so players will presumably be murdering these realistic people in great detail?


The graphics are stunning, but the animations are not. I would prefer a game with less polished graphics, but super realistic animations/physics of everything. NPC's , cars, boats, fluids etc. But still an amazing next generation graphics scene.


I've submitted the video yesterday here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33292230

Sadly it was ignored. The graphics are really impressive!


Thanks this is much better link, gives more footage.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_LlSR6-ibA


:cookie:


CoD has a history of being very selective about what parts of their games are realistic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttjSaW-lSNQ


Amazing. I wonder if the textures come from photographs.

Here there's a higher quality video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_LlSR6-ibA


I’ve been in computer graphics 30 years. This satisfies me. If the young generation wants to take it further, more power to you as well. Maybe the uncanny valley is even bridge-able in my lifetime.

PCVR support when?


Still I hate that games like call of duty are expensive, are somewhat decent but short as fuck.

Just playing it randomly, without some tryharding you can complete it in something like less than 10 hours, it sucks.


I've always been surprised by this metric. True, if the game is only a couple of hours it can be a bad investment. However, I can think of at least half a dozen ten hour games that have left me with a more memorable impression than some games I've played for ten times as long.

To my teenage self it would make sense, though. Enough time but not enough money, which makes long (sometimes artificially long) games a necessity.


The problem is that the story is short.

Compare those CoDs to e.g Cyberpunk which I needed like 40 hours to complete

it was way better


Personally, I see it as an equation of Story/atmosphere quality x mechanical pleasure x length where story is the trump card.

A game like SOMA has low mechanical pleasure (it's a walking simulator, essentially) and a short length, but the story and atmosphere are so high that I will forever remember the experience.

Cyberpunk has decent length, decent story/atmosphere (obviously this is subjective) and decent mechanical pleasure so it's a great game.

CoD has a short length, decent to high mechanical pleasure (well at least I hope so for their sake since it's supposed to be about the multiplayer shooter replayability) and low story/atmosphere because it's just a string of action movie clichés. I think that's what makes it sound very mediocre compared to Cyberpunk.

Other gamers might see mechanical pleasure as the trump card, and I can definitely understand their POV (Portal 1 for instance). I'd venture a guess that length is rarely a trump card except if you are stuck with the games you do have. Usually for length to be the most important factor, you need at least a decent degree of the two other factors to go with it. For example, what people love about Skyrim is that the basic gameplay of walking around and doing things is fun and you can just pick up the game everyday for months and still have things to do. The story is nothing special, but the atmosphere is comfy enough. You know the game is there for you when you come back from work.


Amount of time is a really bad measure of what you are getting. Quality > quantity. Not saying CoD is an example of quality (no idea) but we already have enough padding and needlessly repetetive tasks in many games.


I’d guess most of the player base is there for MP. Some of the more well known content creators on YT said they never played the CoD campaign as they jumped straight to MP. With the week of time between the SP release and MP release, along with MP rewards, there’s a reason to actually complete SP this time.


This amazement is not one I share. Yes, it appears more polished than GTA type graphics. In particular, the NPC movements. To describe it as "incredibly realistic" is a stretch.


What? The NPC animations are the least realistic thing in this. They move like robots.


Yes, my redaction was not good. NPC movements are not realistic at all


Not a gamer, and I've never been impressed beyond the "whoa, cool tech" thing in game videos. But this is good enough that I'd watch a feature movie rendered like this, no problem. It draws me in.

Someone once said that virtual reality will never look right "until you put some dirt in it". And that's just it. They've recreated the irrelevant clutter that goes along with real life and that's what makes it look right.


Call of Duty is interesting because, despite how you might feel about the gameplay at this point, it is one of the few games really pushing things forward graphically. Games that operate at this budget level have just become incredibly rare. Sony first-party games, CoD, CD Projekt, Rockstar, and honestly not much else.

The visual fidelity here is really incredible. Some elements, such as animations and water look bad by comparison, but it is still impressive.


Needs more people riding bicycles.


And yet it's not even close.


I wish there was more budget available for virtual tourism. I may just buy this CoD so I can (eventually) mod it and walk around Amsterdam in VR.


Not really if you look at people walking around for more than 1 second. Character animation has always been the weakest point of video games.


I think the main problem here is with transitions between animation states and matching each animation to the context. If ML motion matching[1] becomes popular in the industry, I think it would smooth out these issues a lot.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16CHDQK4W5k


I remember this being solved over ten years ago, without ML, there was this software that seamlessly blended between poses and activities (morphine or something like that?). I wonder what happened to them. Unreal 5 also has similar tech.


can't find anything on "morphine", but animation blending is something that Unity/Unreal/etc had for a while. Although, I don't think any publicly available engine solves this like Ubisoft ML models do. Usually it requires at lot of work to look seamless


The demo was a blender-like environment, with opaque white human models. You could shoot arrows at them, bullets, switch between poses and animations or set up obstacles to watch them react realistically and tumble around.

This was sometime before 2010.


Of CGI in general. I like Rogue One a lot, but they were way too proud of their awful rendition of Grand Moff Tarkin, giving repeated closeups to an incredibly fake face.

The biggest budgets in Hollywood still can't escape the uncanny valley.


No cyclists though?


I love it. These set pieces are like wonderful dioramas you can walk into. CoD Black Ops Cold War (2020) had a bunch of these and my favorite was where you infiltrate the KGB headquarters. So much detail and so much to look at.

Take it for what it is people. It's not the next GTA, nor is it minecraft. These levels are basically highly scripted walking simulators.


I find this amazing, but I wouldn't want to play a game with graphics that are too realistic because reality has an ugly tinge


Yes, those games with realistic graphics mostly resemble American gang violence movies. Not sure who enjoys this kind of ambiance.

I'm glad the indie game scene is as vibrant as ever because in the early 2000s the urban ghetto simulators was all that there was.


One analogy I could make is photorealistic pencil drawings of the Joker or other pop culture characters. It takes astounding skill, and you sound like a dick for being critical of the author, but the end result seems... pointless, somehow?


I was there in April and this video really throws me back. I can't count how often I had to go over one of these tiny bridges.


Meh. I don’t care much about how realistic it looks like. I care about how realistic the interactions are, this is: can I break a car in two? Can enter any building? Can I make a hole in the ground? Can I cut trees? Can I kiss NPCs? Can I demolish any building? Sadly, games are not optimizing for these kind of interactions.


It's not really practical or sensible to task your developers with making sure that Spiderman can start digging a hole if he wants to. In the long run probably frameworks will start to handle these things - soil mechanics, building infrastructure, metal deformation, and so on, and then all games will start to include them by default by gradual degrees. But hoping the game developers themselves make working hedge trimmers instead of focusing on actual gameplay is silly.


If you can't rip a car in half or see the insides of a building then battle damage will look like it's painted on.

If Spiderman can't move a bit of rubble (he doesn't really do dirt) then he can't pull something into or out of place to free a friend or trap an enemy.

It's (all) the little things that are in the way of a game feeling immersive and appealing to people who aren't just into the main mechanic (ie shooter on rails).


> Can enter any building? Can I make a hole in the ground? Can I cut trees? Can I kiss NPCs? Can I demolish any building?

I'd really prefer for the developer to focus on the gameplay and plot rather than make a perfect simulation of earth. What you describe sounds like a cool sandbox, like Flight Simulator, but isn't appropriate for most games.


Try doing something like that in the real world and you will not be doing anything for many years :)

In the real world you can't enter or demolish any building you want. So it makes sense for games not to offer this either until it's an actual plot point to do so.


On that note, can you shoot through anything?

In real life, you can punch holes in and through buildings and trees, given enough bullets and a high enough caliber


Only certain wood materials and glass.


What stood out to me in the second video is that the walla (background noise/chatter) didn’t match the relatively low number of visible people, and also didn’t change when moving around (until the player entered the side alley). Realism isn’t just visual.


If this photorealism/accuracy is interesting to you, you might find the game "Chernobyite" interesting.

Smaller indie studio scanned huge parts of Chernobyl and perfectly recreated it for thier game.

I havent played it, but interesting stuff.


Everything is perfect even better than real life. But still humans are still far from being looking natural, they always look like a balloon to me. Something is always off when it comes to simulating humans, the eyes movements, body


I'd really want to see the not just bikes described infrastructure in action. Lots of bikes, sidewalks that stay at sidewalk level when they cross streets, roads vs streets with transitions between them etc


I was in Amseterdam last week and seeing this in the game really impressed me!


Just missing the window girls


It's interesting we can create amazing graphics like this, but at the same time we can't model humans walking naturally. It looks quite realistic if you take out the humans.


We can model humans walking naturally, they just don't bother for CoD.


An environment this rich with detail will affect senses other than sight. The smells, temperature, ambient sounds and things all contribute to making it real. Peripheral vision and the combination of all these other senses make the experience.

Seeing the whole thing on 2D screen, i feel, makes it less realistic as the graphics improve. The difference between reality and the screen becomes more stark.

If it were liken cartoon, i think I'd suspend reality better just to be in it. This leaps away from artificial into reality and doesn't get there thereby raising my expectations and then disappointing me.

Great technological achievements though.


Human mind doesn’t (can’t) process the entirety of perceivable space-time in all of its detail, far from that. Rather we treat it more as a symbolic interface, superfluous accidental detail is simplified away whenever possible (sometimes excessively so: the Invisible Gorilla effect, optical illusions, and so on).

This is why I don’t see inherent value in increasing realism of film and videogame visuals (I do think contrasting degrees of realism could be used to achieve an artistic effect, but am yet to see this technique employed) and incidentally why I start to find unstaged photography frustrating and consider learning to draw (the technique employed by many illustrators, where a photo of an actual scene is taken as a reference and then traced over to leave out unnecessary detail and focus on shapes and colors of interest, is appealing).


I agree. I consider games as a modern form of art and simply trying to get them photorealistic doesn't seem to be the most interesting thing that can be done with the medium.


1) Graphics is totally amazing

2) Yet I can see that it is fake the second I look at it. No need to analyze. I am not trying to diminish the work done in any way as it shines.


I used to like 20 seconds from this exact spot, even though I believe it. I'm in some disbelief that this is real, it's just so accurate.


Looks fantastic.

Dumb question, but this is an intro it seems. It's not going to have gamers shoot machine guns FPS-style through these street right? Right?


[spoilers ahead]

Thankfully, this is not like the "No Russian" mission in the original Modern Warfare 2. Instead, you're tasked with intercepting a known terrorist, and have to protect yourself against the cartel. You will be punished for harming anyone that isn't part of the cartel.


Thank you, that's a relief indeed :)


Looks amazing. Unfortunately, doesn't look very interactable. So why not just be a film? Would look even better then.


I know that area, it is very accurate. Wow. Really a major step forward.

Sure there's some things 'off' but there is so much right. Wowwww


I give props for also detailing the interiors of shops. Most games will just close the door and put a piece of opaque piece of glass


Seems like their world models are outpacing the development of their NPCs because they immediately ruined the immersion.


Is there a good single player mission in this new CoD, or is it all optimized for online grinding, as it used to be?


I enjoyed the single player campaign. Yes, it's more of an interactive movie at times, but there are some fun scenarios...and the graphics are insane. Took perhaps 6 hours to play through.


It looks incredible. But there is one really big omission. Where are the cyclists? Where they to difficult to model?


remember... no dutch


It looks really fake to me. Flat looking textures, poor lighting, awkward looking characters?


what bothers me in this, even in a still frame, is cars and scooters/mopeds.

There is something of with them and very noticeable, I think because of the uniformity and "polish" of the surface/texture/materials.

The rest of the city does look pretty great tho.


Was it done using Unreal Engine 5?


No, they have their own engine.


Pity that most games are not available as open social worlds that you can use in VR


"Brand new AAA game looks incrediby realistic" has been a very banal observation for the last 20 years.

If this were a link to a discussion of some special technique that the creators of the last CoD used maybe that would be interesting. But this is lacking in any kind of substance.


Did you watch it? I really think this is very next-level.

It's not perfect yet, definitely not but it's a major step IMO. Perhaps it helps that I know the city.


The next tier of mediocrity


What game looks much better than this?


TLOU2, Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Zero Dawn 2

RDR2 in particular looks much more realistic. More detailed terrain, better lighting, leagues better character animations.


These games get more and more detailed yet still feel utterly lifeless.


The place is but the characters respond slow and grand theft auto


No cycling people and no people riding scooters... hmm


No. Not even close to the raytraced images from 2003 with PovRay. This is nothing close. Even an RTX GPU in not enough to what we've seen as photorealistic.


Game and movie too different thing.


Eventually people are going to just disappear into these amazing worlds and spend as little time in meatspace as possible.


The main things I noticed as being off:

- The wave breaks/spray from the boat doesn’t look right

- NPC motion is still janky and robotic.

- Lack of wind. All vegetation is motionless as is the hanging sign. Even on windless days vegetation still tends to sway minutely.

- Lack of squelch. The ground is wet and has leaves and puddles all over it but everyone sounds like they’re walking on dry ground. Some NPCs don’t seem to have audible footsteps at all.


- The bikes don't have locks

- No people actually riding bikes

- The guards are casually standing in the middle of the road

- The curb doesn't drop properly where the pedestrian area starts


> - No people actually riding bikes.

This is a common trope in media where nobody in the production uses a bike for transport. There are bikes there for setting, but people never use them as intended. They either just stand around them, or do this weird thing where they take their bikes out for a walk.


Except Stranger Things, but you could say bikes are essential to the plot


There is of course the iconic bicycle scene from Turks Fruit (1973) starring a very young Rutger Hauer and directed by Paul Verhoeven.

https://youtu.be/ze_Ncdy_igw


Grand Theft Auto San Andreas had a lot of bikes and were included in several plot lines


If we are listing games with bikes in them I feel that we should also mention the 1985 arcade game Paperboy ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperboy_(video_game)


Haha yes very true. The OG bicycle game.


Maybe there are technical challenges shooting actors sharing dialog while in motion on bicycles?

For cars this is a solved problem, and walking people are moving slowly enough for cameras to easily keep pace.


Plenty of American tourists standing on roads ;)


That part is realistic - the only part which is not is the lack of people shouting at them to move


And there's far too few of them :)


There aren't many bikes in that area in reality.

The alley wasn't correct. It's not a dead-end street.. :-)


You missed the part where the main character regenerates faster than Wolverine after taking a bullet


Animation is the hardest and will be the long pole of visual realism in games. I've seen better water than that, but it's still hard to make Pixar-quality water in video games. Paradoxically, the more realistic the graphics, the easier it is to notice flaws. Regardless, still impressive video.


And it's odd because by Far Cry 2, released in 2008, realistic wind effects and contextual sound effects were solved problems so it's like the gaming industry has spent 14 years moving backwards in these areas.


A lot of games have wind effects, with moving vegetation, particles and fabrics for example.

Whether or not it appears in a game will usually be dictated by budget: both hardware budget (usually dictated by the current console generation) and budget for content creation.

A scene like this probably leaves it out because they felt like they could use that budget better elsewhere. There are a ton of characters walking around this scene, and also a ton of geometric detail and texture detail. I am guessing the directors for this scene felt that was more important to allocate budget to, for wow factor in those areas, rather than subtle wind effects which would probably go unnoticed in a game where you spend very little time stopping to appreciate the trees and flowers.

edit: I have to take that back: actually if you look at the full resolution video it's clear they included subtle wind effects, as well as details like falling leaves


I did notice the falling leaves which I thought was a nice touch. I didn’t notice any wind but I did watch the video on a iPhone screen so it’s possible that the wind effects are so subtle as to not be noticeable at small screen sizes.


If you watch the YouTube version which is longer linked elsewhere in the comments you can see the trees moving, as well as things like awnings


Just because someone does something doesn't mean everyone else gets it for free. It takes effort to implement in every single game.


Maybe if Ubisoft had licensed out the Dunia Engine


Far Cry 2 did a lot of specific things to accomplish its vision and those have been abandoned as out of line with other games'vision. The fire mechanics, minimap, and healing mechanic are the ones that jump out at me


I would argue that major studios largely have, or at least stagnated. Cards and skins are now the priorities and everything else is designed to support that.


NPC motion is where I think graphics technology should be focused. Environmental detail is more than sufficient. It's actually now an uncanny valley because the environment looks so realistic, and it is jarring to see unrealistic human movement. It pops out a lot more and looks way out of place.


I don't think I want to be able to shoot at what my brain would perceive as real people.


The crowd/background sound in general sounds nothing like walking around in Amsterdam. Small thing but it really stood out to me.


I watched a documentary over a decade ago which followed Gareth Edwards as he was making the film Monsters. It was pretty revolutionary at the time as he was one of the first people to take advantage of DSLRs being able to shoot HD video and MacBook Pros getting to the level of computing power where you could do your own VFX. He managed to make a film that looked like it came out of Hollywood on equipment that in total cost less than $15,000. The on-set crew consisted of only seven people: Edwards himself, the two lead actors, a sound operator, a line producer, a fixer and a driver.

One of the documentary makers asked him why he had a dedicated sound guy; the rest of the production was so stripped back, there was no lighting guy, why a sound guy? Edwards responded that, as long as you’ve got a good story that keeps them hooked, the audience will forgive bad visuals but they won’t forgive bad sound. It’s a sentiment that I believe was also echoed by Robert Rodriguez in his low budget filmmaking days. Good sound is essential to keeping people tuned in and immersed in your video. It’s why the number one thing recommended to any YouTuber starting out is “get a good microphone”.

The graphics are 80% of the way there now. Weather and character animation still needs work but the most bang for the buck might now have swung round to sound design.


- Lack of aroma of waffles being cooked from an opened bakery window ...


Also Lack of aroma of weed being cooked from an open coffeeshop window...


I think they should rather fix those things before trying to make everything so photo-realistic. But maybe that's just my taste.


Level design, engine development and animation happen in parallel. Waiting for one to get better before you continue with another serves no point.


I'm sure it's the engine. Call of Duty water has always looked like that.


Yeah, I noticed that too. I think it's tied to the frame rate of the animations. Kinda weird


The water is too pretty and un-dirty in general.


All this robotic look will disappear one neural scene creation enters the mix


The video is full or reflection artefacts because it uses screen space reflections, in 2022. It would be so much better to use raytraced reflections like RTX games.

It also has transparency bugs. You see the boat through the reflection on the windshield of the car right at the beginning.

Walking animations are a bit clumsy with the path finding that is a bit unrealistic.

The water effects around the boat look bad.

This isn’t very much better in terms of technology than a AAA from about ten years ago. The artists did a great work.


You could not have seen this 10 years ago. Tons of geometric detail (unless those bikes are really clever billboards) and lots and lots of texture detail. 10-year-old GPUs would have had neither the VRAM nor processing power to put this out.

Also this seems like a result of photogrammetry - so I think you can credit artists and the tools which make this possible.


Photogrammetry (together with a physical based rendering pipeline to get the lighting just right) probably deserves all the credit in this. I remember first reading about it in 2014, in an article about an indie game for that matter. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Here's an article: https://www.pcgamer.com/find-out-why-the-vanishing-of-ethan-...

Since then, every game that embraced it for photo realism looks basically perfect in terms of world geometry. Doesn't even have to be crazy high-res or high poly, as long as you don't stick your virtual nose directly in front of stuff, you can easily fill every pixel on screen with one that's ~95% there from where it should be in a real-world photograph.


Aren't artists still involved in getting assets ready for production? My understanding was that a fair amount of polishing and refinement would still be required after capture (e.g. trimming down a very high poly model to something which can be rendered at 60FPS) - but I don't know to what extent that may have been automated by now.

I guess technologies like Nannite will also reduce the need for this type of grunt work.

But in either case, artists will still be involved in framing and staging the scene, doing the actual capture etc.

Creating a beautiful scene through photogrammetry is still a form of art, the same way photography and painting are each forms of art.


It’s also a blurry mess with tons of tearing at low frame rate. Might be down to the encoding that twitter does.


Twitter's infamous for encoding video into little more than mildly suggestive compression artifacts.

Here's a 4k60 YouTube video: https://youtu.be/VGnuGnOWeTE?t=605


Yeah I'm not sure how anyone's meant to find something impressive to look at when there's a layer of vaseline over all of it. Maybe there's a higher quality version being served to some Twitter users.


Or looking at it on your phone screen hides the muck.


Looking at the original youtube video, tearing seems to be from Twitter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_LlSR6-ibA


Lol, so as usual, game devs perform technical miracles, rendering an incredibly rich virtual world at smooth 60 FPS, while a bloated and barely-competent Silicon Valley company cannot even display a freaking video clip of it without tearing.


Twitter is barely even incompetent.


As a usual twitter user, I've been dreading watching any videos there and I'm used to find them on youtube because of this. I thought it was because I was using linux, but now that I've moved to a macbook m1 with the power of a supercomputer 10 years ago, the quality of the videos is too ridiculous to take twitter videos seriously.


Art direction trumps tech in games for a while, now. This is just well lit, well researched and compression artifacts smooth out the details. Character's eyes are still kinda dead, animations fidgety, screen space reflection artifacts if the "reflected" area isn't in frame, etc, etc. Definitely no different from the average "realistic looking game" 5 years ago and probably, yes, even "high end graphics" 10 years ago. Things are slowing down.


It looks incredibly realistic in Google Streetview too. A technology from, what, 10 years ago?


does it have a vulkan backend?


DX12 on Windows and Xbox.


If I recall properly wine has a dx12 to vulkan translation layer (which is not dxvk)?


Correct. And available for Windows, but not Xbox.


nope chars to slow


kinda weird to see US demographics superimposed over amsterdam. Couldn't spot a single blonde/redhead


The area in question is super touristy so that's not too weird :)

The lack of cyclists passing through is weirder IMO.


Let me go off topic a bit here. I've never seen a scene in a game as realistic as the footage provided in this tweet, and I say this as someone who has been gaming all my life. I am not even a fan of CoD, don't even play those types of games. As a Dutch citizen I was simply happy about the fact that they were able to recreate Amsterdam in such a beautiful way.

Full of excitement I've opened the comment section for this post and what do I see? The top comments are full of negativity about how the waves in the water don't look right, the sounds of the footsteps are not squelchy and there are artefacts in the rendering.

Why is HN so negative about amazing things? I get that we like to provide constructive criticism, since we are so passionate about technology. But come on guys, this is just spewing hate at the level of some cesspool internet forums I will not name. Be better HN!


People seem to gain something by trying to be the person hardest and last to impress. It’s like some sort of Simon Cowell effect where people think being able to point out the flaws in something is a quality of an expert rather something anyone can do about anything.

Gamers and tech forum posters like HNers do this all the time about the things in their wheelhouse that they would say they know a lot about from graphics to React to dev tools to games.

It’s boring and I think it’s a dreadful thing to practice. A better exercise is to try to see the good things in something and appreciate those in light of the trade offs the thing must make.

Anyone can come enumerate the bad things about something.


I don’t disagree with anything you or the parent post said. And while I don’t feel like I’m quick to criticize HN posts, I wonder if part of it is that negative/critical comments spark more interesting discussion?

E.g. I saw the CoD video, then clicked to see comments. And while my first thoughts were “yeah, this is pretty stunning,” I didn’t have anything else to say.

I wonder if most that agreed also didn’t have much to say? Especially since this wasn’t a “Show HN” where more positive feedback is targeting the author. There’s no one here to give positive (or negative) feedback to, so discussing criticism may be the more interesting discussion?

But I suppose this is pretty amazing tech, too, and there is likely something interesting to discuss there.


It is kind of sad though, and I say this as someone who has been trying to analyze more of my own negative reactions and be more positive. A video like this has so much potential to to inspire. And in that vein I do think it’s pretty cool, I hope at some point someone makes a “game” or simulation that’s just an open world earth with some land air and see vehicles. (Time travel would be neat too, but that’s a lot of continent) Moon would be cool to, though a bit less varied :-)


This is an even bigger issue, people feeling like their opinion is so important they HAVE to have one and they HAVE to share it.

If you don't have anything to say beyond "yeah it looks awesome", upvote and move on.


Negative thinking usually makes you sound smarter than positive thinking, with less effort. Not a criticism, just an observation. I think you're right that an empty thread would be worse than a bunch of nitpicks.


There's an infinite number of reasons something can be wrong: there's only a few it can be right.

Also, basement internet drastically underappreciates the magnitude of effort that goes into creation.

I don't play CoD, but I can appreciate the years of development of work that likely went into this (+ the engine, the libraries, the mocap animations, the sound work, etc).

Is it perfect? No. But it would take an incredibly large and well-funded team a lot of calendar time to produce anything that surpasses it.

So kudos to the entire team at Infinity Ward for making something and shipping!


"People seem to gain something by trying to be the person hardest and last to impress. "

It's not considered positive to be impressed easily and often, that's similar to how a child acts, which equates with immature for most people. Also, if you are hard to impress then you must have experienced more than those easily impressed. For some it's a way to appear superior with just a simple opinion. Basically arrogant assholes.

The alternative is cynicism but then again that's also sometimes used to seem elite.


I distinctly remember a shift in the quality of my colleagues when I started noticing they all pointed out what was good about my equipment/work (I’m a video/audio producer and editor). They saved critiques and suggestions for when I solicited them.

I always attributed it to people needing to reaffirm that they are experts. They don’t really care what they are talking about, they just want everybody to hear them contribute. Perhaps it’s because they are defensive about their own skill level and are feeling “imposter syndrome.” Or maybe they are just super egotistical, who knows. Psychology is complicated haha


One adage I like: "pessimists sound smart, optimists make money."


With you, and I hate the destructiveness of it. I notice thought, it's those who have least to offer are first to criticise. Look at the comments of those who are genuinely good (eg. BeeOnRope here on HN) and you see a far more tolerant and constructive responses.


You are talking to generations of people that grew up with video games. This isn’t some shit they saw for the first time, they’ve been watching the progress since childhood at this point.

Basically, they lost perspective on how amazed an average person would be. Similar to how porn addicts don’t flinch at triple penetration videos, or … you get it. Wish I could come (ooof) up with better analogies.

Yes, even I went “nope, that’s not real enough”.


Also, we've been able to generate pretty realistic images for quite some time now. For some expertly crafted ray-traced stills, it's nearly impossible to tell whether the picture was computer-generated.

This looks pretty amazing, I'll give that, but you can still clearly see it's a computer game. A bit better than the last one maybe, but not "can't tell if rendered"-realistic.


> you can still clearly see it's a computer game

But I think it's quite amazing that we've gotten to the point where people in this thread are pointing out the details which betray that this is not photorealistic, in order to prove that point.

Even a few years ago, we would have been pointing to the small details which do make it seem photorealistic, like volumetric lighting or well done reflections.


I suspect that even in 50 years there will still be people pointing out their modern equivalent of inaccurate lighting and saying how it breaks the illusion.

In my decades of watching technology, those voices have always said things with the same tone.


Are you comparing 1 frame of a still that hasn't been rendered in real-time to a video game that is being dynamically rendered at at least (I hope) 30 frames per second?

> you can still clearly see it's a computer game

I'll give you that, but we are comparing this footage to footage of other video games from the past. Can you name a video game that looks more realistic than this? Maybe some of those realistic racing games I guess, but that is a different type of video game. My point is: currently, this is as close as we get to real-life, no? Sure, it can be better (and it probably will be in the future), but I'd say this ranks pretty high.


Yeah, it's much, MUCH different to have those vistas unfold in front of your eyes at smooth 144 fps while you have control over the movement and everything compared to hyperanalizing 1 still frame or a sequence of frames with no real control.


I think people are reacting to the tweet saying

> almost can’t believe this is a video game

Hyperbole is fine but it does tend to cause backlash.


I agree. I wouldn’t even say it’s backlash it’s just debugging out loud.

HN users want to test how true a statement is because when you’re coding a program, any edge cases that prove your code wrong can literally break everything. I think that begins to rub off on how you perceive all kinds of propositional statements in other areas.


Is that really hyperbole considering the quality?


It's a video game, that is, it renders in real time on hardware costing a couple thousand dollars max.

It's not trying to look impeccably realistic cinema level CGI, but it's damn impressive given the limitations of a video game, and of gaming hardware.


All of these demos look way better than the one in the OP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi_RW2ofkFY&ab_channel=Gamin...


It took me a whole few seconds to confirm it's a game. Mind you I've been to that place and I've rendered my first wire mesh in 1991.


My first thought was "ok, that's the reference video of real Amsterdam, now where is the video from the game..."


Love this perspective :)


The fact of the matter is that this is not an example of a massive improvement in world modeling, simulation or light transport.

It shows that you can get a lot of the way towards people saying ‘wow that looks real’ just by using high def HDR textures and a good environment map. In almost every other respect this render is far from state of the art.

And as you say, if that impresses people then that’s great! The team have discovered the shortcut to where to put in the effort to convince viewers! The goal of this kind of game environment engineering is to create sufficient verisimilitude to have the player suspend disbelief - and this seems to do the trick for a lot of people.

But looked at critically it’s surprising how many ways this engine is producing bad results and yet people are willing to overlook and say they’re blown away by the realism. Maybe the uncanny valley for environments is not as deep as we thought.


From my limited experience, that's always something the CoD teams have done incredibly well: maintain focus on suspension of player disbelief as their core KPI.

Technologies or tricks that enhance it are used. Technical masturbation that's ancillary is eschewed.

In the first CoD game, the illusion shattered instantly when you deviated from the expected path (e.g. linger in an area, backtrack, or take an odd turn).

But that was part of the focus and prioritization of effort... they could have improved that, at the expense of making the main path less stellar. They didn't.

I've gotta admire the focus and feature discipline.

Edit: One of the core things that strikes me from the video (not having seen generations of intervening games) is how far human animation libraries and mocap has come. At some point, they've climbed enough of the opposite wall of the uncanny valley not to have it be obviously wrong. Glad we finally got there.

And other side note, everyone should remember this is a multiplatform release. They don't have the luxury of spec'ing to the latest and greatest hardware from Nvidia and AMD. This has to run on consoles with decent performance and with a minimum of per-platform code rework and optimization.


> maintain focus on suspension of player disbelief

Something that really struck me when I when I first played Half-Life 2 was how much it all felt like a movie set, where everything was designed to look fantastic along this one narrow path that you're quickly ushered along, but there was absolutely nothing beyond that path. It's all just lovingly detailed facades.

That's the story with all linear AAA games. I think for most players the illusion works great, but I can't help but see the artifice.


> That's the story with all linear AAA games. I think for most players the illusion works great, but I can't help but see the artifice.

It's okay, since this a stylized classic HN insight porn comment.

Calling it an "illusion" is a really dumb take. It reminds me that hardly anyone in this forum reads fiction, and even if you created Ready Player One for them, they'd do exactly what the game designers gave them to do.

Anyway, Call of Duty games have a great variety of levels. "Defend Burger Town" comes to mind as a Modern Warfare 2 (2009) level you could explore pretty freely.

Half Life 2 had open set pieces. Uncharted 4 has possibly the best chase sequence in gaming. It would be so stupid and reductionist to call that an "illusion," just because they have some paths for your car to take.

What do you want? Even the real world expects you to walk and drive along paths. That's just architecture dude. It exists just as often in "open world games" like Red Dead Redemption as it does in "sequence of setpieces" games like Call of Duty.


I appreciate it because of how well it captures the look of a real world location. I've seen a lot of games attempt to capture the spirit of a real place and not get nearly as close as this.

I agree it's not an example of massive improvement technically, but I think it's pretty good work that pushes incremental improvements in a forward direction.


That may just be a reflection of the kinds of games you’ve been playing. Forza Horizon has been doing an incredible job of creating convincingly real locations at high frame rates for a while now, for example[1]. In terms of busy, detailed urban environments that feel solid and alive, look at Half Life: Alyx. Others have pointed to the Matrix unreal demo that shows off some truly gamechanging techniques for environmental modeling and realism.

[1] https://youtu.be/r1xK6PRk1DU


It is absolutely brilliant world modelling. I'm looking at it on a small screen, but the level of detail and accuracy blows my mind. I've never seen anything this detailed and accurate.

The only thing that makes it immediately obvious that this is from a game, is the clunky movements from the people. They should really start putting some effort into that.


Some things to look more carefully at, then, if the only thing you noticed was the character animations:

- the screen space reflections are broken in the left-hand 10% or so of the screen

- early in the clip there is some weird z-buffer error where reflections from the boat’s roof are showing in front of the car windows

- although the water surface has reflections that make it appear not to be flat, its geometry cuts off along the side of the boat in a pure straight line

- there are tearing artifacts a couple of times where we are seeing the top of one frame and the bottom of another (may be a screen recording artifact rather than a rendering one though)

I don’t think these are merely being ‘nit picky’ - these are clear ways in which the render is a long way short of ‘realistic’.

As I say, great modeling and texturing with environmental PBR clearly does a lot of work convincing a viewer a place is ‘real’. But it seems a bit sad to present that in an engine which has such glaring flaws and ignore them. Other engines exist that do this better.


I was commenting primarily about the modelling, which is absolutely amazing with the exception of the way people move. That the rendering is not perfect is a different issue. I still maintain it's incredibly good at first glance. That there are details that betray it as a render is hardly surprising, but by far the most glaring thing giving it away is the way people move.

I just watched it again on a bigger screen, and I didn't really notice any of the details you mentioned. It's clear it's a render from the slightly artificial look many things have, which is especially the case for people. But the city scene in general looks absolutely fantastic. If you know games that look more real than this, I'd love to know which.


Where you see negativity and hate, I see constructive criticism and an honest conversation about flaws out of love for the craft and a desire to get the best we can.

We don't improve things by gushing over how great they are already. We improve things by pointing out where improvement is possible. Clearly there are game devs (past, current and future) reading these discussions. Maybe just one can be inspired to solve one of the technical challenges mentioned?


This type of criticism sometimes seems to capture the spirit you're describing, but sometimes it seems to verge on entitlement when talking about video games.

I think it was John Carmack who bemoaned the fact that the video game audience quickly accepts any advancement in graphics as the new status quo for gaming, and complains about any game which doesn't immediately match it.

I think consumers of the medium don't always appreciate the technical achievement which modern AAA video games represent - it's maybe one of the few domains of computing which demands the people working on it to use 100% of the hardware, and to pull tons of dirty tricks to eek out every last bit of performance.

So sometimes it seems the audience attributes something to laziness, just because something is missing they have seen in another game, while what they are seeing is the result of very talented engineers working overtime to deliver a miracle.


Well yes and no. If general tone of most discussions is just critical, overall mood is crappy to be polite. If you are in crowd of complainers, even if they keep saying its constructive, its a properly depressing place to be. Life is not just numbers, points, striving for perfection. What makes us humans is much, much more.

This short video looks amazing, specifically because its not state of the art in engine work and current level of tech. Yet you feel like you are there, on one of the canals. Many games these days use better meshes and have higher count of triangles and other techniques yet they don't deliver these emotions to those who visited Amsterdam.

And games were, are and always will be about emotions.


I’d consider the criticism more uncanny valley type stuff - because it looks of a certain quality the flaws are more evident. It seems for the most part the excellence here is in the art design taking advantage of modern GPUs and the criticism is warranted from a technical perspective.


> uncanny valley

I think this is it. When the games are less realistic overall, the mind can still suspend disbelief. And in fact it often does; so low-fi everywhere is all accepted and forgotten.

Who hasn't read a book (or in the HN crowd, also played a text MUD) and become completely lost in the fictional world?

But once we hit that near-perfect, we stop suspending our disbelief (or the bar is raised near the top); so the imperfections which are detectable become jarring.


Poster of the waves and squelch comment here. I probably should have added that I too find it an incredible achievement before listing the things I noticed that were off. I listed those things because I know that the people who work on these games and engines frequent hacker news so if I point the main things out that I’ve noticed as being off then it’s feedback for those guys as to what to work on next. Things like the NPC animation are pretty obvious but stuff like the lack of squelch are easy to overlook.

I also like to hear from people involved in these things, who may post a comment or reply about efforts going into solving these challenges. I’ve learned some cool things about Far Cry 2 which I didn’t know about after posting that comment.

Nothing should be above criticism. The Titanic was an amazing achievement for its time but thankfully we have learned from its mistakes and now build better and safer ships as a result. We need both praise and criticism in the world in order to succeed. Whilst it is tempting to “bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone eat and be happy” it does not lead to happiness or successful outcomes in the long term.

To paraphrase Ferris Bueller, we should “stop and look around once in a while, else you might miss it”. We should especially do this after our successes. But nonetheless, the world spins ever onwards and we should aim to improve with every iteration of that spin lest we fall backwards.


> As a Dutch citizen I was simply happy about the fact that they were able to recreate Amsterdam in such a beautiful way.

But if you live in New York, San Francisco or London you would be tired of seeing your city in games. Even games like Assassin's Creed Valhalla, supposedly a Nordic setting, it mainly focus on England and the visit to North America is as important as the time that you spend in actual Scandinavian land.

So, some people is not impressed by the settings while others are grateful just by being represented at all.


Me as an European on phantasy RPGs. Stone walls? Any historical center of part of town/cities. Villages? Villaremota de Arriba from Nowhereland with wheat fields for kilometers.

Rural town in thethe US with dinners and odd gas stations or some Manhattan clone like Max Payne? That's exotic.


> But if you live in New York, San Francisco or London you would be tired of seeing your city in games.

Huh? I live in NYC and I don't think I've ever played a game set here. I know vaguely there's a Spider-Man game set here, that I never played, and at least one GTA inspired by but not actually set in NYC.

I'd love to play a game set in NYC that looks this great. It'd be my first time.


The original Deus Ex (1999) takes place in NYC for about 1/4 of the game, and the city is really recognizable.


The GTA game is set in NYC in all but name. I have played a lot of games set or partially set in NYC. It’s sort of the default “we need a big city”.

Wikipedia has a list [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_set_in_N...


I don't recall playing in a London setting ever since some PS1 game from the 2000's.


PS2 - The Getaway.

Very impressive for the time!


Watch Dogs Legion?


Have you seen the Matrix demo from a few months back? If not, you might appreciate it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29533685

Blew my mind!


I had a less than positive impression of this trailer, while simultaneously acknowledging that on objective merit it surely deserves a quite positive impression. And I think there's a very specific reason for this! The uncanny valley [1] is caused by things looking realistic, but not quite right. But the important thing is that in many this often causes a sense of discomfort or even revulsion.

This scene in particular is aiming for realism in an everyday scene, and likely relying heavily on photogrammetry (which makes it look even more realistic). But it's far from perfect. And so some may be able to simply appreciate it as a step forward in technical achievement, but for others it's going to be triggering uncanny valley effects. I suspect this may be a driving factor in the negative responses.

If this is the case this is going to be a major bottle-neck for graphics going forward. Even something as small as a character's eyes being in some indescribable way 'off' can trigger uncanny valley effects. So there's a long road ahead to trying to overcome the uncanny valley, but one where each step forward may not be able to be appreciated for the technical progress that is.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley


I don't think the the Uncanny Valley Effect is as much a problem, because I believe it's a moving target. "The Avantgarde" in media will always suffer, but the next installments will profit from the public getting used to it and the "new avantgarde" moving the goalpost again.

Have a look at the Final Fantasy movie. A lot of moviegoers decried the Uncanny Valley, especially regarding Aki, but if you watch it with today's eyes, there is no such effect.


I didn’t read that as spewing hate at all, especially compared to what cesspool forums are capable of. They listed a few things that are still not up to a realistic level, which started some interesting conversations around why that stuff is still hard.


Actually, you are right. Looking back at the comment, I didn't provide constructive criticism to my fellow HN commenters.


Perfection through negativity is a thing I am guilty of. "Wouldn't it be better if..." is often a phrase that runs through my thoughts when evaluating something artistic.

But like you, I was thinking, is that a video with actors pretending to be computer characters or actually a thing.


Funny story: I got deja vu working along the Seine in Paris due to first experiencing it in Battlefield 3.

That came out ten years ago! At a glance, this looks like it is using ray tracing, which is a big improvement in rendering.


Being a CS player, I had the weirdest dejavu feeling ever when I went to Venice. The level of detail is so much better now its not even funny.


I don’t mind a spectrum of opinions. I never played video games and it’s hard to tell har far ahead this reel is compared to other modern games. It looks appealing, at the same time there’s clearly a room for improvements. I don’t have a trained eye, but I’m really curious what gives it away.


I'm as impressed as you are but telling people that the graphics are realistic is basically a challenge. Nobody complained about the unrealistic graphics of Super Mario 64.


Yes I criticised the technology in my comment that got flagged, while saying that the artists did a great work.

If you only want praise I recommend LinkedIn.


Yeah, I don't understand negative comments. I don't care if it uses the most state of the art whatever mapping, fact is I used to live on the square where the main part of the video is shot and I was shocked by just how close to reality everything looks. I think it's the most immersive environment I've seen in a game.

The human models aren't as convincing, but there's also dozens of them on screen at once, the developers are still bound by what a pc/console can do.


> Why is HN so negative about amazing things?

There's nothing "amazing" about this. Graphics don't make a good game.


But this is about the graphics, and good graphics pretty indisputably do make good graphics.


These aren't good graphics though, they're realistic graphics. "Good" is subjective, and most people who have been playing games for a decent amount of time have moved past their "realism is the most important aspect of game visuals" phase.

In recent years I've been way more impressed by the visual design of highly stylized, anti-realistic games that, instead of simply trying to look like real life, instead create environments with distinct looks that you don't get anywhere else.


Smart comment


Hacker News became Nitpicker News a long time ago. Might be a dysfunction caused by employment. In software development a "nit" (i.e a bug such as as null pointer dereference) ruins the whole experience. In most other fields such a nit would be wholly irrelevant.


[flagged]


Would you go to an art gallery with a friend and expect to look at every piece and both be in complete agreement about how wonderful every piece of art was? Do you expect them to all dress the same as you and eat the same foods and drink the same drinks? Or would you expect your friends to have individual likes and dislikes and to notice different elements in each art work according to the way they perceive the world? Would you diagnose any friend who disagreed with your perception of an artwork you consider wonderful to be suffering from narcissistic personality disorder?


These examples are not applicable and thus straw man arguments, because I limited the scope of my observations to those that are most often and typically critical and unimpressed, and did not include, universally, anyone that happens to not care for something. The symptom is not that they don't like something, rather it's that they don't like anything.

Clearly this new version of CoD is graphically superior to previous versions, yet the criticism is focused on less than perfect minutia that probably also existed in or was inferior in previous versions. The graphic realism is better than any previous version of CoD, yet that still isn't good enough for narcissists. Even if it was absolutely perfect in every way, this still would not satisfy them because they are mentally ill and suffering from specific symptoms that cause them anxiety, to feel like nothing they do is good enough, to feel threatened by others' accomplishments. When they dismiss and denigrate they are really focused on their own fragile ego.


I will admit that I missed that you had limited your scope to those who are “most often and typically critical and unimpressed”. That said I think the main thrust of the argument still stands. You can’t assume that people are comparing this to previous versions. It’s perfectly within the realms of plausibility for someone to comment who’s never played Call of Duty in their life. They might have just been intrigued with the post title, looked at the video and then just stated the details that broke the immersion for them. Would you prefer they just didn’t comment at all? Are they not allowed to voice their experience?

It is also rather wild to throw around narcissistic personality disorder diagnoses based on one aspect of behaviour. I’m not a psychologist but I’m pretty sure you’ve got to match several behavioural criteria consistently to warrant such a diagnosis.


I was replying to the general question,

>>>>> Why is HN so negative about amazing things?

And as that is my experience also, I shared my theory and supported it. Further, NPD is diagnosed through observation of behavior or reports of behavior, and regardless of NPD diagnosis, any symptom of NPD is necessarily narcissistic. My slim hope is that narcissists will become more mindful of their behavior, recognize that they spread misery, get evaluated, treated, and either be cured or mitigate their disorder below detectability, and narcissism will become extinct, because there are few things in this world that completely and utterly suck as much as narcissism, and it is everywhere.

I'm not sure who made pride popular and decided that it can be harmed, because it is an indulgence. The virtue is the opposite of pride, namely, humility, and in general, virtues are the antitheses of narcissism, beyond humility including charity, modesty, gratitude, temperance, patience, courage, accountability, commitment, courtesy, cooperation, empathy, forgiveness, respect, reliability, sacrifice, sincerity, and so on and so forth. Rather than the Golden Rule, narcissists subscribe to egoism to act only selfishly and in self-interest, as their ego is central to the motivation and goal of their own actions. By and large the political ideology of narcissism is conservatism and libertarianism, focusing on exclusivity and their wealth and their interests and their rights against and in contest to those of all others, in contrast to liberalism, which is an ideology of tolerance, liberty, equality, and promoting general welfare.


If I went to several art galleries and they always criticized everything there, I would consider them bad company. Or at least the wrong person to take to an art gallery.


Everyone who doesn’t like what I like has a mental disorder. Come on, let’s grow up.


This is a lovely straw man.

While dissent is of fundamental importance to progress, as nothing would advance if everyone always agreed, those who are consistently negative and somewhat terminally unimpressed reveal far more about themselves with their criticism than what they reveal about the target of their criticism. If criticism is validly supported, this is not what I'm referring to, but instead condemnation, exaggeration, labelling and nitpickery.


But who is to decide what is and isn’t nitpickery? There is a famous story about Senna, the formula one driver who drove round a course and crashed into a wall. When he got back to the pit stop and was asked how he crashed Senna was adamant that the wall had moved. Everyone thought he was mad but nonetheless they went out and measured it and it turned out that the wall was a few millimetres out from where it should have been.

Everyone perceives the world differently. What is nitpickery to one person can be the difference between success and a car crash to another.

https://www.essentiallysports.com/greatest-f1-story-when-ayr...


Your example is not one of nitpickery. In situations of high performance tolerances are tighter and tiny details can be critical. A better example is someone being unimpressed with a formula one racer's performance because of their sponsors or team colors when even the driver finishing in last place has rare and enviable driving skills the observer lacks.


No, the Senna example above is not nitpickery. However if I raced with one of my friends and he crashed into a wall and then blamed it on the wall having moved and we then went and measured the wall and found him to be correct, yes he would be right but he would also be nitpicking as I doubt that either me or any of my friends have the ability to drive with millimetre precision. He would have crashed into the wall regardless of whether it had moved or not.

I was trying to use that example to highlight the fact that we don’t know the skills and perceptions of anyone who is posting on Hacker News. One person might say that the immersion is ruined because of the lack of accurate sounds when walking. To the average person that might be nitpicking. For someone who is a sound designer or a musician or someone with a generally heightened auditory sense it could be the difference between immersion and the breaking of the illusion. The same person might even be fine with the previous generation graphics if the sound was spot on. We just don’t know who is commenting on the post and we don’t know how much their internal perceptions differ to our own. To label them nitpickers, narcissists and some of the other unsavoury stuff that is being levelled in this comment section is really unfair. I feel we should try and give charitable interpretations and give everyone the benefit of doubt where possible.


> I was trying to use that example to highlight the fact that we don’t know the skills and perceptions of anyone who is posting on Hacker News.

This is arguing an appeal to authority. It doesn't matter what their expertise is, what matters is their claim and whether it is relevant and validly supported. While the OP title claims realism, what they meant were that the graphics are improved and exceptional, leaving the naysaying criticisms along the lines of, "that doesn't look realistic, it has weird artifacts everywhere and the animation is unnatural" more revealing about the observer than what they've observed.


Respectfully disagree. It’s not an appeal to authority at all, it was highlighting neurodiversity. It is quite common for autistic people to have heightened auditory perceptions, that does not make them authorities in the field of audio unless they have studied it and become a recognised authority. Everyone perceives the world differently. That’s exactly why a detective interviews multiple witnesses in an attempt to gain a more accurate perspective of the objective reality.

You’ve taken a tweet and you’re now trying to define a narrow window of acceptable discussion about the tweet based on it’s title. How many conversations are you having in real life that stick to such rigid parameters? That’s not how conversation works. This isn’t a formal paper that must be laser focussed on a single topic. It’s a much more relaxed space that allows for discussion of things that may even only be weakly related to the original content. Someone could post a story about their time in Amsterdam with no relation to Call of Duty or video games and I would still consider it valid discussion.

You can’t just just pick and choose that all technical discussion of the topic must now be about the improved graphics and nothing else. You also can’t assume that your interpretation of the title is the correct one or the one the author intended. Doing so is arrogance, which ironically enough, is one of the nine diagnostic criteria of Narcissistic Personality Disorder according to the DSM-5.


> It is quite common for autistic people to have heightened auditory perceptions, that does not make them authorities

Notwithstanding the contradiction and equivocation, this is an appeal to authority.

> You’ve taken a tweet and you’re now trying to define a narrow window of acceptable discussion about the tweet based on it’s title. How many conversations are you having in real life that stick to such rigid parameters? That’s not how conversation works.

Ad hominem, focused on me for some reason. Straw man, by inaccurately rephrasing my argument in order to attack it. And fallacy of control, apparently a belief that you control definitions of terms and how things work. This was followed by going beyond the scope of our discussion to other discussions you deem valid.

> You can’t just just pick and choose that all technical discussion of the topic must now be about the improved graphics and nothing else. You also can’t assume that your interpretation of the title is the correct one or the one the author intended. Doing so is arrogance, which ironically enough, is one of the nine diagnostic criteria of Narcissistic Personality Disorder according to the DSM-5.

More control fallacy, straw man, ad hominem, but I believe this also includes the mind-readers fallacy. Apparently I am being scolded for what I secretly believe and my argument has been completely lost to the void. To avoid fallacy, one must ignore the person, focus on their argument without molesting it, avoid attempts to control them or assert what is in their mind can be known. What is said is the realm of valid argument. I did none of these things and my right to my opinion, whether correct or incorrect, is absolute.


Congratulations, you’ve read a book on rhetoric and misunderstood half the definitions.


Anything I may have done is irrelevant. All that matters is the argument, and for discourse to be logically valid it must only address the argument. To be vague is to be unconvincing, and any attempt to personally characterize me is fallacious argument.


By my understanding of the definition of the fallacies you're quoting, you are using many of them incorrectly. This would be OK if you explained them in context along with the statement that you believe has caused the fallacy as I could then get a general feel for what you mean. It’s entirely possible that my interpretation of the fallacy is incorrect and I could be enlightened by your sage wisdom. But it’s impossible to debate with you because you won’t do so. You just quote a line, say it’s a fallacy and then refuse to hear otherwise. You consider none of your statements fallacious and consider everyone else’s are nothing but.

If you think something is ad hominem, tell me how you think I have attacked your character. For example, it is not obvious to me how you consider the following sentences to be ad hominem:

> You’ve taken a tweet and you’re now trying to define a narrow window of acceptable discussion about the tweet based on it’s title. How many conversations are you having in real life that stick to such rigid parameters? That’s not how conversation works.

It is impossible to have a debate with you because you’re not engaging in good faith debate. A definition of Good Faith [1]:

GOOD FAITH: A “Good Faith” argument or discussion is one in which both parties agree on the terms on which they engage, are honest and respectful of the other person’s dignity, follow generally-accepted norms of social interaction, and genuinely want to hear what the other person thinks and has to say.

So in turn, now I will engage in some bad faith debate. I’ve been through your comment history and you frequently repeat the same tactics, most often on comment threads to do with mental health. Now I’ll use the fallacy argumentum ad populum: many other people have called you out on this boy-who-cried-fallacy strategy and your general lack of good faith argument. Finally, here’s a fallacious appeal to common sense with a nice smattering of ad hominem:

'If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.'

Seriously dude. From your comments, you seem like a clever guy with a wealth of knowledge and a lot to share with the world. Why are you acting this way?

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2020-07/Good_Faith...


It's quite simple, and has nothing to do which character. Any mention of the person, focusing on the person, what they have done, what they have misunderstood, what they are doing wrong, rather than their explicit argument, is ad hominem. Pretty much anytime the word "you," is used, it's nearly always the start of an ad hominem. Straw man is changing the original argument in order to attack it rather than the original argument. Appeal to fallacy usually follows the form, "I know this is the case because it is my job," or along those lines, but in the case above, the claim was commenters may have knowledge of a subject that we're not aware of, and the only point here is that it does not matter. Control fallacy is assuming inappropriate control, such as asserting authority that something is not allowed. Mind reading fallacy is any assertion or speculation on what another is thinking rather than focusing on their argument.

Basically, by focusing on the argument alone, comprehending it simply and accurately, ignoring all else, there is less likelihood of going off into fallacy. The argument was in answer to a question, and was simply, paraphrasing, that any that are never impressed, typically always put down, dismiss, belittle, any others' achievement likely do so to compensate for their anxiety of self-worth, and have a fragile ego. The rest of my comment talks about narcissism, by definition; it's not an argument.


> Pretty much anytime the word "you," is used, it's nearly always the start of an ad hominem.

To me, this is nonsense. Your definition of ad hominem is way too broad. The sentence was:

You’ve taken a tweet and you’re now trying to define a narrow window of acceptable discussion about the tweet based on it’s title.

From the Wikipedia page:

> Fallacious ad hominem reasoning occurs where the validity of an argument is not based on deduction or syllogism, but on an attribute of the person putting it forward.

The sentence is not based on an attribute of your character. It is stating that your logic is as follows:

1. There exist sets A, B and C.

2. Set A = { a, a, z }

3. Set B = { a, b, y }

4. Set C = { a, c, x }

5. The title of the tweet is “a, z”.

6. Therefore, all discussion must be about Set A.

That however, is both a pain in the arse to read and write so we just say:

You’ve taken a tweet and you’re now trying to define a narrow window of acceptable discussion about the tweet based on it’s title.

Claiming a fallacy and saying I’ve attacked you and not your argument because I’ve used the word “you” is bad faith debating. We don’t have days to sit around writing all our arguments out in formal logic, especially in an online forum.

In my opinion, your straw man definition is accurate but again you’re using it with a scope that is way too broad. You’re using the control fallacy to try and restrict the scope of the debate to the very first point. Any criticisms of the defences you use to defend your original position, or my criticisms of your criticisms of my defences, you are labelling straw men because they are not about the very first point you made. We can’t get back to discussing the original point because we’re disagreeing about our disagreement. This doesn’t make them “straw men”. In order to get back on track the disagreements need to be resolved first.

An analogy might be two archers firing at a target. You hit the target, but I notice that you’ve stepped over the agreed upon line in order to do so. You then say this is a straw man because it’s not about hitting the target. I disagree because the rules of the game are that you need to be behind the line to take the shot. You then claim this is another straw man and that I’m using the control fallacy because I’m stating one of the game rules. Meanwhile you’re guilty of the control fallacy yourself because simply by disagreeing with the rule you’re setting your own rule which is that the rules don’t apply to you.

On to, the mind reading fallacy. You state:

> While the OP title claims realism, what they meant were that the graphics are improved and exceptional

If this isn’t an example of mind reading then I don’t know what is. But I call you out on it and you dismiss it an ad hominem, straw man, and control fallacy.

Finally, to your misapplication of fallacy of authority:

> Clearly this new version of CoD is graphically superior to previous versions, yet the criticism is focused on less than perfect minutia that probably also existed in or was inferior in previous versions.

As far as I can see it, people are debating what matters to them. What matters to you is clearly graphical superiority. If you became visually impaired tomorrow and were playing a game, would you care about the graphical superiority? I highly doubt it. You’d be much more focussed on the sound. Asking to consider other people’s experiences as being valid isn’t an appeal to authority, especially when the discussion thread is filled with subjective experience of a video game. If I’d have said, “you must consider sound of utmost importance because Hans Zimmer said it was the most important thing in video games” it would be an appeal to authority. But I didn’t. I simply stated that people value and perceive different things and will comment based on that and we shouldn’t be labelling them nitpickers, narcissists or haters without first finding out more about how they perceive the world.

No doubt you will dismiss this final argument as ad hominem because it’s got the word “you” in it and because I asked you to put yourself in someone else’s shoes which is irrelevant to the argument apparently. And of course I’ve committed the mind reading fallacy by assuming you wouldn’t care about graphical concerns if you were blind. And of course, according to your definitions, I’m also guilty of the control fallacy and a straw man because this isn’t about your original point but your defence of your point which is apparently above all criticism.

Are you enjoying this style of debate? Or shall we agree to speak like normal human beings again?


You are expressing your opinion and rejecting everyone else's. It's not more complicated than that.


When the argument is ignored and all focus is only on the person, this is ad hominem fallacy. In discussion and in debate what someone does is irrelevant. What is argued is all that matters.


It looks very good but in 10 years everyone will think it looks awful. Remember when people thought Skyrim on Xbox 360 was good looking? lmao


Why are any comments listing criticisms of the realism of this video being flagged? This is not what I would expect from Hacker News and is very worrying.


These flaggings are because we're saying things that are too obvious, other flaggings are because we're saying things that aren't obvious enough.

Pretty soon they'll demand that there just be a menu of approved viewpoints you can choose from.

False flaggings should shadow-ban your account. Let the deletionists feel important without bothering the rest of us.


The unrealistic flaws of the video are fairly obvious and don't really need pointing out, and sometimes the endless nasal pedantry takes its toll on the mind


Some of the flaws are obvious. Some of them aren’t. Either way they can lead to very interesting conversations and get the mind thinking. You should be flagging blind hatred not observations and criticism.

You’re literally shutting down free speech. Metaphorically you’re creating a walled compound where all the “happy” people can pretend everything is fine and dandy meanwhile on the opposite side of the wall is a bunch of unhappy homeless people who literally had their house taken away by the people in the compound just because they happened to disagree with something one of the powerful people said at a dinner party.


You can vouch for comments to unflag them by clicking on the timestamp. I have done so multiple times when it was clear the author had made an interesting point but did so in an unduly hostile manner. However, the ratio of flagged comments that didn't deserve their fate is incredibly low.

The free speech martyrdom angle makes sense on paper, and it's true that there are users that act as commissars, but the practical reality is that no interesting discussion actually flows from the flagged content. This is something every online community eventually learns through experience.

Most of the time, the abstract idea of free speech is the only merit these comments have, and from that we can also ask if flagging is not an expression of speech in and of itself.


Well I’d be interested to know what part of the Hacker News guidelines this comment I made has violated and why you have deemed the ensuing discussion uninteresting and adding nothing to the discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33297520

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Your comment seems fine to me and it's still standing at the time of writing, so there's no issue there.


Thank you. It’s really not a nice feeling to be silenced, especially when it feels completely unjustified. Makes you question reality itself. I hope the powers that be unflag it.


To clarify my earlier point as I now realize I sounded more hostile than I intended to. Sometimes, people will flag for aesthetic reasons even if the comment doesn't technically deserve it. They might be tired of negativity, and click the flag button in a moment of weakness just for the experience of being excited about things again. There also is a separate phenomenon of dead or removed comments usually meriting it, even taking into account trigger-happy moderation.

In this case, your comment spawned helpful discussion so I'll happily vouch for it if it is ever killed.


Thank you for vouching and giving some insight. The moderators have got a tough gig!


Call of Duty and realistic should not be allowed in the same sentence. Utter non sense narrative glorifying war and conflict. Many kids these days are stupid enough to get themselves recruited, after growing up with these games and having been fed a twisted picture of reality.

Shows you how our moral compass is based on nothing but thin air, when society thinks shit like that is fun and cool, while games depicting a naked human for example is completely unacceptable.


Bro there are anime skins on the guns that shoot purple tracer rounds…




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