alt Hacker NewsI recall working on a sports game where they hired a new art director who had previously worked in Hollywood on visual effects for movies. One of my coworkers had a meeting where the new art director requested that the player's uniforms have cloth simulation in the dynamic cut scenes.
It was then necessary to explain the difference between pre-rendered scenes and real-time rendering budgets.
It often isn't a question about whether or not something can be done. In pre-rendered scenes, or screenshots, the budget is very different than in game. At whatever target frame-rate you choose, there is a finite amount of visual effects you can achieve. Spending that budget requires compromise.
It's easy to live in a fantasy world where you can demand no compromise. The hard thing is doing the most you possibly can given very real budgets and doing so with the people you have available. Not every studio is Rockstar with the ability to throw unlimited devs for several years at the problem.
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It seems like it was difficult to even get the simulation part of the game (the important part) correct at launch as well.
Only now three years later with Iceflake Studios taking over are we starting to see the game turn a corner and become really solid and having a roadmap with some hope.
Ah, it's fun playing older games with pre-rendered cut scenes, where the camera switches from crisp, 1080p60 images at the best available quality (plus mods/additional shaders), to 360p cutschenes with a fixed aspect ratio. It's true that most of the time they have better lightning, but scenes from that era can have visual noise and some "halo" effect around objects in the cutscene.
Even in high-end VFX (previous industry - working on pathtracing renderers), things were often over-the-top in terms of how things were modeled (polycount) or how the lookdev (shader material definitions) were done.
Some of that was due to just human time resource constraints (and assets being modeled for director validation at full screen turn-table resolution, but then just used at 1/8 size in the film), but other times it was just people losing context as to what was "needed" or would even make any difference (unfortunately, often without considering the "cost" - in terms of memory usage and CPU-time for rendering / compositing) - vs look difference.
Then there are questions from the artists like "Why's this rendering so slow, it's 'only' a load of skyscrapers in a city with the camera 0.5 km away?"
You then have a look at what's actually going on, and all the rooms in the skyscrapers have modeled (and lookdev-ed) furniture and things like lamp shades around lights. Which A: is expensive memory-wise and just silly, but also makes light-transport to sample all the lights and light the scene (even with clever NEE light-sampling techniques) stupidly expensive.
Then again, that same building, this time being rendered from about 300m away was very slow to render, and we looked at the BSDF material stack, and there was a homogeneous volumetric scattering layer on the glass windows. Like - WTF - that's insane for a uni-directional path-tracer (and physically wrong). "What's this for, this is why it's so slow.?"
"Oh, it's to represent the algae/dirt on the glass".
"I'm sorry!?"
I wonder if the dominance of (realtime) 3D rendering we have today is having a bad influence here. I remember old tile-based games (like SimCity or Transport Tycoon), or games with fixed backgrounds feeling much more natural, simply because you can prerender (or simply paint) your desired level of detail without having it affect your runtime compute budget. Of course the cost is less flexibility at runtime, but that cost may be acceptable.
For a modern take on this, look at Factorio. Why can an industrial zone with a population of one look more lively in Factorio than an entire simulated city in Cities Skylines?