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GTA V had a 200 million budget but the models terrain don't even look impressive?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by WillModelForFood, Sep 23, 2013.

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  1. WillModelForFood

    WillModelForFood

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    As a modeler environment artist for over 5 years I bought gta5 mainly to analyze their rage engine updates and artwork.
    The first thing I noticed was how bad the terrain is. It's not even hand done in many places to allow for exploring, I mean trails and things you see in fantasy games. I have used worldmachine with mudbox to make terrain way more impressive, and I'm wondering, how can I myself as a single individual make a terrain thats alot better than gta v?

    Moving onto the map size in general. Many people were fooled into thinking it was a huge open world. But what I realized is the planes are 10-20 times slower than a normal plane should be, and the helicopters too, which make it seem big. People who have played flight simulators understand. It's just not really impressive in scale.

    The architecture is very basic as well. I understand each building was hand modeled to be unique and that takes alot of people, but I cannot justify a budget this big with what was produced visually. From a modeling perspective I see no more than 1 million.

    I can see a group of several talented modelers designing a more interesting world, maybe every building wont be extremely detailed, but something that would impress most people just as much, if not more. And they just pulled from california and real life references, not even designing fantasy from scratch.

    I was expecting to be way more impressed with the art with such a big budget, but am I underestimating?
    I mean I've seen so many individuals from the asset store and art forums make huge progress by themselves, and then I see big budget games and I'm just wondering, where is all this budget going? Certainly doesnt look to be on the concepting / modeling / texturing / environment design side. It seems like 95% is going elsewhere.
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
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  2. Xaron

    Xaron

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    There it goes... 1 million for art, same for programming, $198 million for marketing. ;)
     
  3. BuildABurgerBurg

    BuildABurgerBurg

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    lol funny as it is, I think Xaron has a good point. How much of that money really goes into the game.... hmmm
     
  4. Pix10

    Pix10

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    It's not all about polys and textures. There's all the voice acting, the mocap (and actors), the music licensing, management and co-ordination, writers, etc etc.

    We see a lot of shock comparisons with movie budgets... The game shares a lot of production traits and features you get in a movie... ok so GTA may not be movie quality, but then it's not 90 minutes of linear footage either.

    And yeah, there's the marketing slice.
     
  5. n0mad

    n0mad

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    I do agree about the terrain and textures. You'd have to expect more than that for an ending generation game. Sometimes you could even see the texture block patterns, 90's style ... Good thing that the game still feels absolutely awesome.
    I wonder if they made it slightly lower quality to make the ps4 / XBone versions look more impressive, without having to implement latest VFX tricks we saw in latest engines.
     
  6. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    The split of the project actually was:

    $110 M for production
    $150 M for marketing

    This makes it look much nicer for the art production but I guess a lot of that budget went into optimization and creation of 'distinct looking efficient content' that can work with the streaming and the open world concept (keep in mind we are talking about trash boxes here with 256MB VRAM which even by mobile standards is weak). As such a lot of the art work actually also has to go into benchmarking and refining it, not purely into producing it.
    Also producting the whole audio side of things etc is extremely costly for such 'realworld clones', as it takes a lot of time and effort, be it the audio effects or the voice.

    Its trivial to create impressive looking assets without thinking about the hardware, but its 100 times harder to make assets that look good enough and have a high framerate on an X360 or PS3 (its much easier to create great looking and better performing assets on iPad 3 / 4 or iPhone 5+)

    On top of that we don't know about their staff fluctuations in the light of the bad PR and reputation they have regarding crunch time management, time planning and crediting work properly.
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
  7. Wacky-Moose

    Wacky-Moose

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    As Pix10 stated there goes more into games than just graphics and code. it is really a big project with soooo many things coming together so the 110 mill really isnt that much when you think about it.
     
  8. WillModelForFood

    WillModelForFood

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    The texture resolutions and popping of so much LODs switching is obviously there just so it can even run on 360/ps3. And only 1-2 people could probably handle a tool they have to make automatic lod's, because the lod's don't look very good they are practically boxes along with a very short draw distance and a lot of distant fog.
    I'm sure they have like a batch tool that will convert all those textures and change all the lod settings on every model easily for pc / new consoles.
    They are probably in the process of doing that as we speak.

    The textures aren't much of concern to me because we all know resolution is easy to change. But I also agree, again, just 1 more texture artist would have made even the low resolution ones their using better.

    I'm curious to know how much of the budget actually went into the 3d art pipeline. Maybe I have to re-evaluate my worth if I think I could have made the games terrain 10x better by myself, maybe I should be working at rockstar. Probably not, I suppose many are up to the task, for some reason they just didn't spend enough time on it.

    The overall environment design just seems very novice. The country region of the map is not even laid out and polished to be immersing, I understand its not their strong point and foliage is hard on the system but still, you can tell they didn't run a 2nd or 3rd or polish pass over the outdoor part. If you have ever tried to make a big open world skyrim type mountainous environment you would know what I mean, they just stuck a bunch of big mountain terrains that are barely even playable on, probably made by only 1 person, and the part that is playable is very small.

    If they had 1 more person who specialized in terrain, 1 talented outdoor environment artist, another person designated to making trails and making the terrain more playable, a few talented hard surface architecture modelers to give more diversity and character to the city, and another artist that said, hey we need to open up this map about 30% more and make things a bit more interesting-
    the game would visually look ALOT better. Theres only a few tall buildings, and when analyzing the city from a sky view it looks flat with the "nothing to it" thought.

    I'm hoping I am not underestimating the time it takes to design an environment this big, because a budget like this is just discouraging as an indie. But from the experience and skill I have now It just makes me wonder why they didn't take the above into consideration. 4-5 more artists could have taken this to the level it should be at. And with a budget that big, why couldn't they afford them?

    For example: if I had only 5 Michael O's could they not produce something better?

    https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/9905
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
  9. Pix10

    Pix10

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    Having been a lead on a large open world city based game myself, I can say hand on heart that it's a lot more work than you'd imagine.

    It's one thing to build a city and say "here you go, I built this", but there are so many factors that make it more than a simple modelling process. The composition of the city alone is constantly altered and updated throughout development, as designers need to move elements and the art director is saying he doesn't like the skyline from whatever point in the map. The programmers will most likely want the city to be built from modular components, and you'll have to work with PSV sets AND get the nice line-of-sight stuff that the art director's after.

    Pathfinding and car AI will have strict rules that have to be catered for in the modelling and layout; texture usage has to be smart, and LOD models on a target platform where every single byte is being accounted for, may well end up being boring boxes - you've got to cut your cloth and draw a line somewhere, because you've got to share resources and we've not even talked about characters yet.

    Where it gets hard is when you have a huge team of designers and they're constantly changes things, making requests that involve art updates... likewise the engine guys. You can't make all of those changes yourself, so someone else has to take care of them, a team of lesser paid artists (you don't put your best people on street cleaning duties). Hence a lot of the macro work can't be guaranteed to be as polished as the larger scale look feel.

    Unfortunately throwing more artists at anything doesn't make things better, it tends to have the opposite effect (this is a long discussed and accepted bit of widsom).

    All of this said, artist quality varies widely across the industry, so maybe you are AAA standard (I've no way of knowing!). I think GTA's strengths are in it's execution - the acting and story telling - not in it's visual quality. Which may be a by-product of taking so long to make each game: if you'd started working on GTA V when it started, 5 years ago, could you still make the claims you make today? The world moves on...I'm sure whatever they're starting today will look great by today's standards, but we could end up having this same conversation in 2018 :)
     
  10. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Must be something wrong with you guys criticising GTA 5's visuals. I doubt they can actually be improved on.

    1. it's 8 year old hardware.
    2. with near endless view distance
    3. plus extreme object counts
    4. and very limited video ram
    5. and limited ram

    And you're saying it isn't impressive? Outrageous comment. To put into perspective, GTA5 will run almost identically on the latest iPhone 5S.

    People who work in unity typically haven't got any idea whatsoever about real development and how tight the budgets are for rendering and design on consoles to squeeze a modern experience out of 8 year old hardware. They think Halo 4 or Last of Us magically appears on the screen and they can do better. They think that because they spot one blurry texture that they would sure do better than that. The grim reality is they would crash the hardware with just a few rooms.

    Doing mobile game development and pushing that hard will give people an idea of console budgets. Even the next gen consoles will have budgets that are as tight, because there is always a need to outdo the competition, to make a better looking game or a further view distance or more extreme flexibility for the player. The idea that you can do better must be demonstrated before coming onto a forum and moaning.

    This isn't an observation of the hardware in consoles, it's an observation of the impressive efforts of professional developers to squeeze every last drop from fixed hardware, and that to me will always be impressive.
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
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  11. WillModelForFood

    WillModelForFood

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    hippo we aren't talking about the easy to do optimizations. how do you have 8 thousand posts and you are impressed by simple to do LOD's, culling, fog draw distance? My previous comment describes how easy it is and the techniques they used

    Have you even played the game? the view distance is anything but endless. It's very easy to make a game that looks like this run on 360. I come from optimizing for mobile so I know exactly what I'm talking about, there is nothing new here.

    That is not even worthy of discussing, I mean if it wasnt for the hundreds of those little lights it would just be a bunch of box's with very low res textures in the distance. That is impressive to you?? I dont get it.

    The only thing 'impressive' to me about the rage engine is the ability to fade between 2 different shadow qualities from a dynamic light. 5 feet away the shadows are very low resolution. It seems unity only has 1 shadow quality, not an ability to fade between 2 like this, but if there is a way I'd love to know.
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
  12. Dabeh

    Dabeh

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    Man, how do these people keep their jobs if the best they can do is this on hardware that is comparable to our phones!?


    *sarcasm*


    But seriously, I couldn't even begin to guess if this was easy or hard for them(although I assume it's the latter). I haven't worked on a console game and I honestly have no clue if this is the best they could do or the worst. Show me a couple games that look better that are also cross platform for the 360 and PS3 with the same scale.

    Maybe I shouldn't be posting in this thread, too many professionals with huge amounts of experience with console games saying I'm wrong; just making myself look like a fool I guess tehe.
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
  13. WillModelForFood

    WillModelForFood

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    All of my questions regarding better art still stands, regardless of the optimizing involved. Better terrain that is more playable and polished, a more diverse city with more character, all of this can still be achieved and run on the older consoles, but yet they didn't go that far and to me it just looks like a lazy use of a budget to impress people who don't really know how its made. Just grab a plane, fly over the country side and laugh

    I was hoping to have a big outdoor world to be immersed in but what I got was a country side that looks like it was thrown together in a week or two by 1-2 artists.
    This is NOT due to a limitation from the hardware. An example is when your wandering through the mountains you feel as if you shouldnt even be climbing on them at all, but yet its open and inviting you to do so
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
  14. Dabeh

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    Fair points, but this is a massive game and there are a lot of factors involved. If they were given more time, yeah, they could have maybe made it look better. But can't pretty much anything look better if it was given more time? I was watching some streams of GTA V and for me, in the outdoor scenes, it looked pretty decent. Most people wouldn't notice or really pay too much attention and just go on with their game, but for those of us where it's our job to pay attention to these things it's a little different and we will notice things most people won't.

    I do agree though, if they were given more time the landscapes would have looked nicer.


    When I see someone's code, I judge them. I try not to, but I do it anyway. I always think "it would have been better if it was done this way", but the reality is that they probably didn't do it that way for a reason, they may have had issues I could have never thought of. I'm very guilty of thinking my ways the better way and I have to consciously give them the benefit of the doubt.

    Point is, these people are talented and they have produced games that are fantastic and are of massive scale. Everyone's on a time crunch and they can't do everything perfect and for most people it will look fine. That is one of the hardest lessons I'm still trying to learn.
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
  15. WillModelForFood

    WillModelForFood

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    This isn't any regular game though, this is almost a 300 million budget we're talking about. I think thats enough for a thread like this to not even have to exist. Code is different, if it works it works. If its optimized enough, no one will really see it. You would think even with this budget they can at least make a better country side than what they made, especially since its 5x bigger than the city.

    I don't think its one of those situations where 'everything could be better given more time'. Rockstar had the time, and the budget, they just didn't properly direct a few extra artists where they should have to create a longer lasting world. I got bored of the game before I even finished it simply because of the lack of creativity, environment design wise. I think others will start to feel the same after they play a few weeks of the online mode when it releases.

    Strictly for the short single player that it is, I guess its fine, most people probably won't mind, especially if they aren't into game dev.
    But analyzing it from a strategic multiplayer perspective, something where you are repetitively exploring the world, the map is poorly designed and will become boring pretty quick.
    And I doubt any dlc or map addition will be better.
    I apologize for sort of ranting on this forum but I think it's an interesting discussion for anyone who actually analyzes this game and the fact that just 1-2 million more allotted to the art side from that 300 million budget could have made the visuals much better.

    I suppose it ultimately didn't matter to them because they knew even with cutting corners like this, it would still bring them in $1 billion within 3 days was it? So it coulda, woulda, shoulda, but didnt need to be better.

    I guess I answered my own question
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
  16. Aiursrage2k

    Aiursrage2k

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    I was surprised that the game looked so bad, but i thought it was just because it was running on 8 year old hardware and when the pc or new console versions come out it would look that much better.

    If you look at that video the ground texture looks bad, at night the fog effect looks really bad.
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
  17. WillModelForFood

    WillModelForFood

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    Well its not that its bad, the values are just set to be extremely optimized to run on older consoles. Sure when it comes to pc and newer ones you will have a longer draw distance, less fog, higher res textures higher detailed LOD's in the distance, but then what?
    It's still suffering from all the same flaws I discussed in this thread.
     
  18. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    The complexity of a game project doesn't increase linearly as the size and team size increases. You can't look at your own work, multiply it by 100 and reasonably expect that 100 guys could achieve 100x as much. It's much more costly than that.

    For starters, you need to take a few of those guys out of production to manage the rest of them, so you're already down several percent at best assuming that they're perfect managers with perfect teams. Then there's communication overhead. Some of the guys need to be doing concept art instead of production art if you want it all to look consistent. Documentation, too.

    Then there's optimisation in many, many different ways that you don't even have to give a thought to when you're doing stuff for a one man or small team project. And it's not just rendering performance, there's also streaming performance (which they seem to be hitting the bleeding edge of, given public announcements about how to counter-intuitively not install the second disk to increase performance by allowing the game to read from both sources at once).

    Then you need to consider (as has been pointed out above) that you're building towards a moving target as the tech and the design shift over time.

    So sure, it's easy to look at what they haven't done or what didn't work so well and complain about it. But what about what they did achieve?
     
  19. Aiursrage2k

    Aiursrage2k

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    Probably better shaders,higher res textures, better fog models, better everything really, when they scaled it down to run on the ps3 or xbox360 it does look like S*** to run on 8 year old hardware. I guess it shows most people dont care about graphics after a certain point.
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
  20. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    All I am allowed to say is that you need to accept the developers have done an awesome job. The amount of texture streaming alone on old hardware never mind meshes is an incredible job. There are very good reasons for the decisions GTA 5's team made. It could not have realistically been improved upon because the budget for that area would strip textures and meshes from other areas. I hope you are beginning to understand how streaming works.

    It is not possible to develop GTA 5 large-to-small format ie big media everywhere then cut it down for consoles efficiently because this generally ends up with a much weaker looking title on the lower hardware. This has the flaw of it not being so good once you go up to higher hardware. In this case I think they made the right call and gave the game the best experience it could be on the last generation.

    I'd like to see some of your work under limited budgets. Are you able to improve on it, or is it just a hypothetical discussion given the same constraints?
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
  21. WillModelForFood

    WillModelForFood

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    What they did achieve was already done on gta 4. Only the map is 5x bigger and they cull / crank the view distance way down so its technically not even rendered anyway. Aside from fading between 2 shadow quality resolutions, it seems like Unity could create this same world.
    Reading a game from 2 sources isnt impressing me enough to warrant cutting corners on everything I talked about.

    I mean if a large portion of their game was meant to be a country side outdoor setting, why did they not put enough art emphasis on it? And you're talking about streaming? Again this has nothing to do with optimizations, it is just lazy cut corners.
    Why? Because I finally realize, they simply didn't need to.

    Could they have made the mountain region much more explore-able and immersive? Sure.
    Could they have done everything I'm 'complaining' about and still have it run on consoles? I think so.
    But they simply didn't need to because this was enough to get them their profit. None of what I mentioned is probably going to make or break their figures.

    Thats a typical salesman quality though. "Just look at what we actually managed to pull off!" Instead of "Why wasn't the budget used to make a better game". I guess it just simply didn't need to. Thats it. No optimization arguments or anything. It could have everything I wanted it to have, and still run on the old hardware, but it just didnt need to.
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
  22. Gigiwoo

    Gigiwoo

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    My boss had a saying: "Everything is easy for the guy that doesn't have to do it." My son was watching a 'caster play through GTA5 so I got to see a mix of cut-scenes and game play. I was impressed.

    Gigi.
     
  23. WillModelForFood

    WillModelForFood

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    I really think some people are being overpaid with these budgets instead of investing it where it should be.
    For instance a thought in the back of my mind is maybe they pay 1 artist a good salary to just model 1 building for a week or two. When if it was his own game or his own personal project, he could really get it done in a few days. A 'mechanics pay' if you will. He gets paid 3-4x than what is actually needed. Maybe thats happening all across the studio
     
  24. Kryger

    Kryger

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    I haven't played the game yet, so I cannot comment on the quality, but with sales surpassing $1 billion dollars in three days, I think the money was well spent whatever they did with it.
     
  25. dxcam1

    dxcam1

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    lol
     
  26. Pix10

    Pix10

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    The development budget was 110 million, as pointed out already.

    $1 billion in retail sales - not $1 billion in Rockstar's pocket. Sure, they made their money back, but all game development is a risk, and more money doesn't automatically buy you a sliding scale on quality, just as more artists doesn't do so.

    As Hippocoder says, they did a pretty incredible job - just pulling all those resources together and keeping the ship afloat and on course over a five year period is a crazy achievement.

    Ultimately, if you think they did a rubbish job and you can do better: Show us :)
     
  27. yuriythebest

    yuriythebest

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    While I concur that what they did was awesome given the hardware limitations, saying the above comment is a bit silly - if you give me an insane amount of money only then one could even to try such a venture - I'd still be limited by the fact that I've never organized a company n stuff. It's like saying "oh, the Wii U is not that good you say?? can you make a better console?"
     
  28. BrUnO-XaVIeR

    BrUnO-XaVIeR

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    This.
     
  29. lmbarns

    lmbarns

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    +1
     
  30. chingwa

    chingwa

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    This sounds like someone who has never worked in a creative field... :D

    What most likely happened is that they paid a really experienced artist a good hourly rate to produce quality work in a very efficient time frame. The artist did his job well. Then the Assistant Art Director had him change his work a few times before showing it to the main Art Director. Then the main Art Director had his own tweaks and had the artist do a few more. Then after about 15 iterations everyone in the art department was happy and sent it up the pipeline for approvals. The art was rejected because the project's Creative Director had made some sweepeing stylistic changes that now needed to be incorporated so the artist did 5 more iterations before getting final approvals from upper management. But upper management decided to muck around with it some more because one of them showed it to his 7 year old daughter who's favorite color is lime green and just had to incorporate it somewhere and oh yeah change the windows to pink and put a princess crown on top of the building. So the artist had to incorporate all the new changes on all the buildings he spent the last two weeks on before leaving for the weekend. When he came back in Monday morning, it turns out the Upper Manager's daughter actually likes pink more then lime green, so...

    This S*** happens folks. The artist is not over paid. :D
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
  31. DaneC020

    DaneC020

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    I have to agree with Hippo and I also have a background in art working in the industry for the last 8 years. Yes, if I had to do a better model than what you see in most of the shots, I could. That doesn't mean much since it isn't really a direct comparison. The amount of objects they are drawing in a single scene is still very high with tons of AI that is being processed, as well as countless other rendering effects, particles, and sound.

    Having made a crappy football game on the 360 and seeing how hard it was for our team to squeeze all the performance out of the machine, it is a lot more difficult than we first imagined. Since then all projects I have been a part of follow several phases of development where models are placeholder, then polished, then cut back down when needed. Regardless the process is very time consuming and laborious. The last 20% of the product can be the longest part of the development, and usually is in my experience.

    As a side note, while I think they care about the out of city environment, it us probably not high on their priority due to 90% of the games focus will. E in the city. Go explore more in game and I am sure some of their scenes will be quite impressive if you consider the limitations they were under.

    Dane
     
  32. AHambrick

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  33. KRGraphics

    KRGraphics

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    I had some time to play around with GTA5 and I will say that for the amount of SCOPE that is in the game (fog notwithstanding. And yes if you look into something far enough in real life, depending on where you live, objects will fog in the distance.), the amount of activity going on at any given time, the breadth of detail in the game, I am VERY impressed. I am not in the industry, so I can't really comment on how "poor" the terrain looks, but I am capable of extreme detail in my work. If I had to choose between graphical polish and having a living world with AI, independent people doing their thing, great lighting and sound. And VERY aggressive police officers who now stop at NOTHING to put you down, I am very impressed with this game. I can already imagine the old consoles trying to keep up with this large game... I can saw the same about a few other open world games, but I have never seen anyone else do it better than Rockstar and Bethesda (in my personal experience as a gamer).

    But don't take my word to heart... I am just an indie dev building a game in my vision.
     
  34. Pix10

    Pix10

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    It was of course intended as a joke. Far too serious in here sometimes ;)
     
  35. Per

    Per

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    Tough crowd, personally I thought GTA V had some of the most impressive visuals of this generation. Yes there's fog, but it's pretty natural, it's how California and LA actually look, LA is one of the smoggiest cities in the world! When you get out into the desert the fog effect matches pretty accurately how it looks in real life out in the Mojave, and yes the distances are obviously much smaller than in real life, so the haze and fog are closer, but seriously, that fog to me was impressive, especially the volumetric shadow casting on these pretty ancient GPU's.

    If you want to see a visually beautiful game full of detail on those platforms then check out Uncharted 3 or The Last Of Us. Those games look better than most current gen PC games, they're nothing technically outstanding, it's simply the artwork that's amazing. But you couldn't do that on the PS3 and XBox 360 for a game the scope of GTA. GTA V's city is far more detailed than the city in any other open-world game I've seen on those platforms, just visually speaking. You have an incredibly small texture and polygon limits, very weak processing, and yet they can do all of that in addition to running a pretty effective set of simulations for the cities. The landscape is to me much more explorable than the other behemoth of open world games Skyrim, there are certainly more activities to pursue, more little nooks and crannies and easter eggs, more ways to get around, more things to do, more paths hidden and clearly marked. All this running on something that's equivalent to pretty much a ten year old PC.

    And yes you could make this all in Unity. Making something in Unity isn't a mark of "oh well if you can make it in Unity then it's S***e". This stuff is really the answer to all those people that keep asking "Can you do make an AAAA game with Unity?". Yes absolutely you could make these games with Unity, if you had a great art department. Most of the mechanics are dirt simple in modern games, it's just that most people with the funds and desire to use Unity don't have the patience to refine a game mechanic to that level, nor employ a creative team to generate graphics of that quality at that quantity. Most people just don't have the money and time to do that, yet most people use Unity because it's initially easy. But merely slapping together some presets isn't how you make an AAAA game, nor if you're a modeller simply modelling some buildings or landscape, to make an AAAA game you pretty much need to invest the same amount of effort and follow similar processes to those making AAAA games. Unity game engine can easily handle it, most people though can't.
     
  36. KRGraphics

    KRGraphics

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    +1. This.
     
  37. ChaosWWW

    ChaosWWW

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    Gotta join in on the backlash to this thread. GTA 5 looks generally quite good and overall you guys have very little ground to stand on when it comes to dissing it's visuals. Just because you can see a blurry texture or two doesn't mean the game is "not impressive".

    Also why are people getting into hissy fits about the marketing costing a lot of money? The fact that the game is well marketed is why we're even talking about it at all besides every post in this thread being "What is GTA 5"?
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2013
  38. dogzerx2

    dogzerx2

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    Also it's probably a lot more complex than what they pay a guy to do 3D art... such a huge project must need all kind of supervision and be sure everything fits well together.

    Imagine supervising and testing everything!!... you have to give everything an ok, from simple aesthetics, to legal stuff, I mean you never know.
    But this is just guessing... I'm just saying it's certainly more complex than we realize.
     
  39. Hesham

    Hesham

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    I would like to see someone in this thread come up with an accurate Elite clone, then I might take their criticism about GTA5 seriously.
     
  40. J_P_

    J_P_

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    Huge dense city -- the amount of art made for GTAV is insane. And PS3/360 games have access to less than 512MB of ram!
     
  41. SmellyDogs

    SmellyDogs

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    Maybe someone could do a kickstarter for $1M to improve GTA 5 terrain, saving $149M. They could even get it greenlit, and sell early alpha access, or maybe freemium it.
     
  42. Meltdown

    Meltdown

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    You know what, I would say your figures were skewed, but that was until I saw a GTA V bus on the street this morning. I mean WTF... a GTA V painted bus??
     
  43. J_P_

    J_P_

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    Those marketing dollars obviously paid off for them considering the sales figures they've posted mere days after release.
     
  44. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    But the point is that no matter how much you do, there's always something else you could have done, or something you could have done better. You think the mountains suck, I think it's rad that there are mountains for you to be able to complain about.

    If they fixed all the things you're complaining about and you looked, you could just find new stuff to complain about. You're not interested in the overall experience (which is the only thing that everyone who's not a developer cares about), you're looking at individual technical details out of context and complaining. They could have had better textures? Probably, but that would mean taking resources away from something else, and then you'd complain about that. And the fact that you don't think streaming has anything to do with it shows that you don't really understand the concept of resources through the entire development pipeline.
     
  45. Aiursrage2k

    Aiursrage2k

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  46. TwiiK

    TwiiK

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    A lot of this has been said already, but I hate your attitude so I want to say it for my own sake. It's the attitude of someone who has never attempted something on this scale and/or has no idea of the limitations involved in the targeted hardware.

    Rockstar have stated that every part of the world is handcrafted and it looks like it to me. Why would you claim otherwise? I see places to explore almost everywhere I look when I'm playing.

    I'm wondering that myself. Your terrain is running on the Xbox 360 as well?

    There was ~300 people working full time on GTA 5 and apparently ~700 working part time, but you only need a couple?

    To me you sound just as delusional as all the "I want to make an MMO" people on here, but if you truly believe what you're saying then you should by all means go and round up your wonder crew and make your own game. How can it fail if you can make a bigger and better game for a fraction of the cost. It would be stupid not to.

    Let me sum up where I think the budget went. 300 full time employees @ $90000 a year salary working full time for 4 years = 108 000 000 dollars, so that's almost the entire development budget right there. No idea what their salaries actually are, but I think $90000 is a good average for a game developer in the US. Also remember that the game has an original score that's over 20 hours in length and it has around 80000 lines of dialogue, but I guess your uber talented crew of modelers can do voice acting while they work because they can multitask, right?

    And in my subjective opinion I think this is one of the most gorgeous games ever made. Sure there are some technical shortcomings like lack of antialiasing etc., but the attention to detail is staggering.
     
  47. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    I expect that the average developer/modeller gets paid far less than your estimate but, as you've noted, the difference is pretty easily accounted for by music, actors, licensed assets, rent and utilities, hardware, software licenses, dev kits, the list goes on.
     
  48. TwiiK

    TwiiK

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    I read an article earlier this year that it was $84000 in 2012, which was $3-4000 higher than in 2011. So this year I don't think $90000 is that far off.
     
  49. Photon-Blasting-Service

    Photon-Blasting-Service

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    Optimizing is specific to the game, engine, and platform. For example, how would you optimize a model that can be physically entered by the player and also viewed from 100 miles away with zero LOD popping? Has your experience in mobile taught you how to do this?

    Too many people make claims of "optimized" without giving details of how and why they optimized that asset for a specific platform. And optimizing for one platform can have negative effects on another platform.
     
  50. mokko6

    mokko6

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    I, too, think the artists are being overpaid. They should accept food, and perhaps a tent and an outhouse, as payment.
     
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