Anarchic Fox on 13/1/2021 at 06:43
Quote Posted by Starker
If you think this is surreal, imagine it popping up in your video recommendations one day as a video about Sonic 2 and all the comments being full of people who were incredibly confused, angry, exhilarated, and, dare I say it, at a loss. Cause that's what it was billed as when it first came out. I think it was even titled as
Serious Lore Analysis: Is Sonic 2 About Capitalism? or something like that.
Hehheh, sounds like a good time. There's something about HBomberguy that provokes conservative viewers of a more delicate sensibility, namely those who get offended when others get offended by problematic content.
Cool, I'll give it a look. And yeah, Youtube's recommendation algorithm is terrible. My best guess is that it has been thoroughly corrupted by SEO.
Anarchic Fox on 25/2/2021 at 11:29
My latest discovery is Civvie 11, who's the closest thing I've found to a contemporary Spoony One. He does comedic, abridged playthroughs of shooters, ranging from obscure 90s-era Wolf3D clones to the current genre renaissance. He quickly endeared himself to the developers of this renaissance, and gets a callout easter egg in every new shooter as of late. His videos have an overarching MST3K-style narrative, but with a much lighter touch than either MST3K or The Spoony One... brief appearances by recurring characters, rather than painful, extended skits. Here's one of his better videos:
[video=youtube;OVl8rX6v6jg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVl8rX6v6jg[/video]
Here's how he handles Duke Nukem Forever:
[video=youtube;rSv8J6mpKLw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSv8J6mpKLw[/video]
Anarchic Fox on 13/5/2021 at 06:46
I found a couple more.
(
https://www.youtube.com/user/HIIMCAPSLOCK) Shammy
An entertaining psychopath. His review of
No Man's Sky degenerated into a rant about the Biblical book of Judges, and in his review of
The Surge 2 he claimed that his previous review was responsible for the sequel's improvements.
(
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSDiMahT5qDCjoWtzruztkw) Ambiguous Amphibian
He does challenge runs of simulation games. (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDzQ82juOlA) This, for example, is a Kenshi playthrough using only quadruple amputees, led by "Torsolo." Has a solid sense of humor and whimsy, but some of the series are duds, due to the self-imposed condition not always leading to interesting gameplay.
henke on 13/5/2021 at 08:48
Not so much a channel as a single video, but check out this project that enhances photorealism using neural networks. :O It changes the mood of the scene quite a lot but apparently that's because the image data the AI is trained on is from cloudy Germany and not sunny California. For more accurate results I guess they'd need to feed it images from California, with different weather conditions as well. But anyway, this is the future of photorealism in games, ain't it?
[video=youtube;P1IcaBn3ej0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0[/video]
More about it here: (
https://intel-isl.github.io/PhotorealismEnhancement/)
Thirith on 13/5/2021 at 09:16
This does kinda remind me of this idea I had as a teenager (yep, that's my excuse): games that would use hypnosis to make players do the hard work of improving the graphics past a certain point. Obviously the game would have to present an approximation of what the game's supposed to look like, but the hypnotic suggestion would be to add all the bells and whistles that a player might expect, with the result that you could reach higher framerates.
In this case, it's sort of as if the computer was hypnotised into making the graphics more photorealistic. :cheeky:
demagogue on 13/5/2021 at 12:28
Looking at that, I immediately started thinking about the writing on the wall for game design. It means for some environment, you don't have to perfectly texture it. What you do is just label a brush or an asset as an object type, pavement or building or tree or whatever, and then you pick the aesthetic you want that's already had a deep neural net run up on it (or they make it easy to collect 1000s of images to learn a net the aesthetic you want), and then the net takes care of just filling in the textures for you. And then at most an artist might have to go in and touch up a few brushes or assets.
I mean at that point, it's not only the texturing, but you can have deep nets dynamically coming up with the geometry, the landscape and architecture (and while we're at it models of anything you could imagine) according to whatever style of place it's learned up on. And while people could make their own aesthetics, I think at a certain point modders will have made their own aesthetic sets such that there will be hundreds or thousands of free ones to choose from.
I don't want to say that kind of development wouldn't also have some costs involved. It'll be like pro-tools for music making, i.e., a glut of crap coming out of people mixing music from their bedrooms, where the slapped together crap aesthetic isn't only tolerated but actually becomes the standard. (I'm sure I don't need to go off on the whole boomer diatribe against modern pop music because you're all well acquainted with the idea.) Anyway, I see that as an inevitable part of democratizing the tools to create in any art form. But the point is, while you get a glut and championing of crap, you also get some real jewels coming out too, and because I know how to scrounge around for the jewels in the muck, I think overall it's worth it.
I'm talking about games again. I think there are a lot of good ideas out there that never find an outlet just because the barrier to entry for game-making is particularly high. So this kind of neural net led generation I think can take care of the artistic parts so devs can focus on the gameplay and story, etc.
I guess we'll see one way or another soon enough.
henke on 13/5/2021 at 12:51
Quoting on page 4 so everyone sees what we're talking about:
Quote Posted by henke
Not so much a channel as a single video, but check out this project that enhances photorealism using neural networks. :O It changes the mood of the scene quite a lot but apparently that's because the image data the AI is trained on is from cloudy Germany and not sunny California. For more accurate results I guess they'd need to feed it images from California, with different weather conditions as well. But anyway, this is the future of photorealism in games, ain't it?
[video=youtube;P1IcaBn3ej0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0[/video]
More about it here: (
https://intel-isl.github.io/PhotorealismEnhancement/)
Yeah, dema, I was thinking the same thing RE: the default geometry not needing to be terribly complex. Hell, just think about remasters of old games using this technique. Photorealistic Deus Ex or Thief? :D Of course these things can only interpret a frame at a time so things like character-animations won't be improved (I'm guessing). It'd still be the same slightly-wonky animations but photorealistic textures and lighting.
Aja on 13/5/2021 at 13:43
Quote Posted by demagogue
Looking at that, I immediately started thinking about the writing on the wall for game design. It means for some environment, you don't have to perfectly texture it. What you do is just label a brush or an asset as an object type, pavement or building or tree or whatever, and then you pick the aesthetic you want that's already had a deep neural net run up on it (or they make it easy to collect 1000s of images to learn a net the aesthetic you want), and then the net takes care of just filling in the textures for you. And then at most an artist might have to go in and touch up a few brushes or assets.
Sounds like a proto-holodeck. And it makes sense that game devs would eventually go in this direction because who wants to hire hundreds of artists to draw every pebble on the ground?
Thirith on 13/5/2021 at 14:03
I'd imagine that the results are better if the original material has reached a certain quality level. Low-poly would probably result in monstrosities that are somewhere between the uncanny valley and Thumper-style nightmares. Which would be interesting, granted, but I'm not sure I'd want to play an entire Thief remaster that is more unsetlling than the latest Kitty Horrorshow short. At the very least it'd push entirely different buttons than the original Thief dud.
