Fixing The Graphics Of Pokemon Legends: Arceus
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 พ.ค. 2024
- Many Pokemon players ask the question: Why does this game look bad?
Well, no, they don't ask that question; they just leave a bad review and move on with their day. But, regardless, in this video we go over the technical problems present in Pokemon Legends: Arceus and how they could be improved for a better visual experience.
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References:
• The small detail behin...
catlikecoding.com/unity/tutor...
catlikecoding.com/unity/tutor...
Music:
New Game - World Of Horror OST
During The Test - Persona 3 OST
Afternoon Break - Persona 3 OST
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:21 Preamble
01:38 Empty Landscape
02:45 Terrible Trees
03:25 Disappearing Shadows
05:09 Gross Grass
06:17 Shiny Terrain
07:05 Lake Verity
09:21 Conclusion
Thanks for watching!
This video is dedicated to my friend, Alotryx.
also please subscribe haha please man please just subscribe dude please just like one sub I swear I'm not addicted please man please just one sub please
#acerola #pokemon #graphics #unity #unity3d #indiedev #unity2d #gamedev - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
The tiling of the water at a distance is solvable by using stochastic texture sampling, which is a pretty straightforward thing to do, though requires a few extra texture samples. In this case, I think it would have been worth it.
You're totally right, I'm not sure how I haven't heard of this.
The extra texture samples wouldn't be that big of a deal I don't think, I assume they're already doing this for the terrain texturing too.
@@Acerola_t It's such an easy thing, and I'm always so surprised at how many AAA games fail to use it in really obvious instances like terrain or water texturing.
@@tdif3197 I'll have to implement the effect sometime soon! Thanks for telling me about it.
Another cheap method is to just sample the same texture multiple times and just scaling up the uv coordinate by a non-even scalar. And then averaging. It means you can break up the pattern a bit. There's an awesome video that talks about how nintendo has done similar stuff to this in the past. /watch?v=8rCRsOLiO7k&ab_channel=Jasper
Not as nice as a stochastic sampling but helps a bit.
EDIT: Didn't see the post immediately underneath this one XD...
This can be a lesson not to make stupid statements like "this is unfixable" and "this it the only way to solve it".
I think it's reasonable to be upset at a pokemon game looking this bad considering there's better looking games on the same console, and Pokemon as a franchise rakes in obscene amounts of money. No hate on the developers themselves, this disappointing graphical executions could probably be blamed almost entirely on higher ups not wanting to part with their money bags because they know a Pokemon game will make a return no matter what. Pokemon has incredible potential that just isn't being realized because its already succeeded too hard.
absolutely, unfortunately even if the graphical stuff is fixed the gameplay is still arguably no more engaging than the original pokemons and in my opinion worse than the originals.
To be fair, botw take 5 years to make, while this game only took 1
@@banned2638 SwSh took 3 and the group that handled let's go made legends so 3 years for this lines up nicely. The issue is the core development team is really small and has to use lots of outsourcing. They probably aren't given a AAA worthy budget despite Pokemon games normally being in the top 3 for best selling games of the year.
@@jamesalexander5559 not to mention the development team is small by CHOICE, which makes things even worse
@@sylvyboi given how the intern "team B" has made good looking stuff and decent games over the Core "Team A" with only a 3 man difference and no outsourcing just reusing old assets. Gotta say Core team is the bad team.
Honestly the whole game just kind of has that first time game dev feel (which I'm assuming doesn't come from the incompetence of the devs but rather a lack of resources/time given by higher ups) which is a shame considering how huge the franchise is.
that sums up my gripe pretty well. spot on.
it could also be that, from what i understand, lots of leople got laid off after the fiasco of SwSh
The size of the franchise is the games downfall imo, Pokémon has outgrown Gamefreak several times over. They are chained to a tight release schedule alongside all of the other merchandise like TCG, plushies, anime etc and because of that they can never delay the games to improve them or set their own timeframe. There's a common trend these days of 'good' games generally being games that delayed their release, but Gamefreak will never get that opportunity because Pokémon is a global franchise with many components. All of the mainline games since Gen 6 onward have telltale signs of cut content. Its a shame because I love the games.
For me, there is no excuse. Bitches be selling 2 versions of the same game every time. They got enough money to throw at their problems.
@@JoeDraws5 Nah I blame the "Lets split up our main team and interns." mentality the Main team worked on XY and SWSH while the interns did ... every other game and it shows. This game was a rush job after they decided to drop this mentality after SWSH imploded hard. Far better game with no stupid gimmicks just a new good looking engine.
I have worries that they returned to the Split teams shit again with SV especially since new gimmick is back and worse than ever. The Gameplay of battles in PLA was a huge improvement visually but it looks like we are returning to tiny spawned arenas of old again.
Game was so hard to go through if you understand how lighting, shadows, yada yada works especially. The caves are the worst in my opinion with the white static around the models.
Yeah I randomly discovered the white static is actually an MSAA artifact and happens on default Unity projects if you dont disable their built in MSAA. It was causing my bloom in the elden ring video to freak the fuck out since the white pixels would appear and disappear and get bloomed.
Yeah, the white static on the models really got to me. Especially when Ingo was walking in the cave since it was so heavily pronounced around his black uniform.
@@stingrae919 dude it looked so bad, I tried so hard to ignore it because I enjoyed the game but damn did it look sloppy 😭
The biggest problem with the graphics is the fact that pokemon has a yearly release schedule
I agree!
Time is the biggest budget. People keep bringing up BOTW but also seem to wonder why it's sequel is taking so long. Almost like you don't get crazy graphics without basically being a once per generation project. (and BOTW2 confirmed to be using the same overworld, so "most of the work is already done" as they would put it... Yeah, that's not how it works)
@@raze2012_ Well, I wouldn't mind to have only 2-3 pokemon games for generation instead of 3 different pokemon games in just over a year. Just like any other videogame franchise does...
@@armandostockvideos8386 I'm sure many would. But pokemon, COD, and yearly sports franchises are basically the only projects that can not only stay yearly but practically guarantee 10m+ copies per main game. We'd see a lot more licensed games and spinoffs if other studios could get away with it. Instead most seem to have tried experimenting more on one big GaaS, GTA style.
The only real difference is that COD works on "main games" every year staggered between 3 studios. Pokemon doesn't technically have main games every year, but instead 3+ spinoffs per year between the generations. The "main" pokemon games are technically 3 years apart because of that, but I guess people considering LGPE/BDSP/Arceus as main status is up for debate.
@@raze2012_ LGPE, BDSP, and PLA are main series games. It’s not up for debate.
Aside from the rendering, the colour choices are also abysmal. I also think the environment textures have too high of a contrast, it makes things look really unnatural, whilst not really fitting the art style I think they were aiming for
I think part of the design of the trees (and much of the game) is meant to reflect traditional Japanese and Chinese ink art that was more minimalist but if they were going to go in that direction, they probably should have exaggerated it even more.
Exactly! You don’t have to have stunning graphics for a game to look good! take Zelda Windwaker, because of its style, it looks good even as a GameCube game. The problem with a lot of modern Pokémon games is that they half ass realism, creating almost an uncanny valley effect
There was a moment in the trailer where it transitioned from the game's style to the cover art's style (much more painted,) and I feel like there was a point in that spectrum where it *hit it.* I kinda like the style of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game on the switch.
@@AppleIPie exactly like mystery dungeon!
Okami did it very well, but the map is very small.
@@pippastrelle apart from mystery dungeon does it whilst also looking good
Besides poor texture quality and lighting issues, the game is absurdly lacking in detail and aesthetic sense. It looks like an early alpha because that's pretty much what it is; The game needed at least another year in development, possibly more.
And if they are struggling due to an in-house engine, maybe it's time to start investing in an external engine.
The reason the shadow maps aren't baked is because the game has a dynamic day/night cycle, since the sun moves slightly each frame, the scene is redrawn to the shadow map each frame. The unfortunate consequence is that when trees are culled by the view frustum they are not being drawn to the shadow map. The solution is to cull based on distance to the camera when drawing the scene to the shadow map, and view cull when drawing the scene to the framebuffer / swapchain. They may have opted not to do this if looping all of the cullable geometry was expensive, or they might have just decided not to bother and felt that it wasn't something important.
Interestingly ambitious for a pokemon game. But it probably wasn't the best tradeoff.
It probably would have saved a lot of resources in the lighting using some older trickery, like how Jak and Daxter in 2002 simply had 8 or so different lighting phases with a short transition to mimic dynamic environmental lighting.
The thing that bugged me the most was the character textures. The clothes, and even hair of some were just terrible. Especially Adaman. I can't even look at him. Even of handheld they look bad. It's like they didn't realise that at some point you'd have cutscenes where you get closeups of certain characters and didn't think to accommodate for that.
I can assure you they're well aware of it lol
Textures are tough because the larger they are the slower your game's performance and the file size of your game will increase exponentially
@@Acerola_t What bums me out with something like Adaman though is that he's a new character, in the third Pokemon Switch game they've created. They should have known their limitations by now.
There was no reason to design him in a way that makes him so hard to texture well, within their limits. The Pokemon for the most part look good, the normal NPCs look alright, but then you get someone like him where they added all these details in his outfit that require a higher texture and look blurry or choppy, it just sticks out more. Especially when it's a defining feature like his hair or his jacket.
Liam's clothes might not look great but you get drawn into his face and head with that goofy hat, and you don't really spend much time with this character anyway. Adaman shows up constantly and his most defining features are some of his worst ones. It sticks out much more. They should have done better.
They could've made a separate model with better texture (or just swap the texture), and use it exclusively on cutscene. GTA SA did exactly this and that was 2004, so there's no excuse.
@@Acerola_t yeah, but it's not like this game is some massive, unprecedently large game. There are games on the switch with more textures, higher fidelity textures, and made with a lower budget
My take on the graphics for this game (and possibly Scarlet and VIolet since the environments there also looks iffy):
1. Gamefreak needs to hire more people for environment design and rendering
2. The developers really need to be given more time, they've been releasing these huge games back to back and it's starting to show in terms of the quality
100% agree they keep forcing out unpolished games :(
Scarlet and Violet look much worse than Arceus
The water can actually be solved VERY easily using micro and macro variation
It's also fairly low cost
Essentially, Instead of using a single sized displacement map, you can make variations of it at different sizes and rotations, and layer them on top of one another
It does a pretty fine job of breaking up the pattern at a distance
Yup: Texture Bombing is the way to go
4:47
I say: Don't do culling just based off of objects, do it also based off of shadows; so if the object isn't in view but the shadow is, don't cull it.
...if they can figure out how to do that
I'd really just appreciate it if Gamefreak hired some more people with the insane money Pokémon brings in so they CAN optimize the game and push the system to its limits without having it blow up in smoke
I know BoTW had almost twice the development time but it really doesn't make me feel better when BoTW, a launch title, can have higher and more consistent graphical fidelity than PLA
SV looks like it'll be better with the new 3D models actually made to be used without an outline on them and HOPEFULLY any cave sections will have the assets properly placed so I cannot see into the white void the entirety of the cave's map is sitting in
Fair but they get most of their cash from plushies anyways, i think that that would make them lose money
The thing that bothers me the most about this game's visuals is the extremely over-pronounced fresnel effect on everything. It just has that look of 'realtime lit unity game without proper reflection probes set up'
the lightning in this game just feels off. watching your video made me realize it’s the ambient lightning!
In terms of color choice, I think the water, the sky, and the fog could all be more saturated, otherwise it’s like the sky is always kind of overcast
seeing the edited tall grass made me gasp, it looks so much better
also, about the low quality textures:
my issue is not that they exist, but where they are used.
like on Laventon’s coat, there’s an EXTREMELY blurry Galaxy Team icon, despite higher resolution icons being present _all over the game_
To fix the disappearing shadows, how about making objects stop rendering by distance from the player instead of camera angle? Or just doing that only for the trees and tall objects?
Depends on the graphics budget. This and SwSh seem to aggressively LOD/cull it's assets, so maybe they legitimately couldn't handle it without tanking the framerate
Player-Distance could work. You could also increase the MeshRenderer Bounds to include the shadow (if the sun isn't moving maybe?) or give it an offset based on sun angle to avoid the culling when the shadow is in view.
I think better lighting on the water would go a long way to making it look better from afar. It's weird that the glare follows the camera so much and that's so massive and bright.
I'd love a second part to this where you go over the other issues you highlighted at the end of the video, great work.
I have hundreds of hours in legends Arceus at this point (I go outside I swear) and there are two other things I would point to as big visual issues, that I’m a bit surprised you didn’t talk about.
1, the absolutely dogshit render distance. I know you talked about the trees, but it’s not just that. Everything has that issue. Things will load in a few feet from your face, pokemon will make noises but not be visible, and the landscape forms behind you on braviary. In the literal first few seconds of gameplay, there’s a rock that loads in right as you walk past. The issue with the water happens to the cliffs as well. The textures either don’t scale well and look weird, or entire mountains will suddenly change how they look as you get closer. This sort of thing has been the biggest issue for me playing. Your note about the lake being the only issue with water isn’t true either. After braviary, almost all the water in the game has the exact same problem. It’s distracting and pretty ugly.
2, the drab colors. The most colorful area is the first one. And that area feels dull already. This might be just my opinion, but every time I looked out over the landscape it felt dull and kinda gross. The greys and browns are everywhere and the greens feel dead. Not to mention the mud areas look like crap (literally). The colors are so visually uninteresting and it made me frequently annoyed.
So yeah, the game really doesn’t look great imo. Not to do the overdone thing and compare it to zelda, but like, dude. Come on. BotW is such a beautiful game. Even other games like Genshin Impact look wayyyy better. Even comparing it to pokemon, the map in USUM looked so much better. That might not be a fair comparison bc they aren’t open world, but legends isn’t either. You would think the area system would give them more room to make each area visually interesting and instead they’re all so boring. That’s just my opinion though. I think that people complaining are fully in the right to do so, because pokemon has the resources to do better, but they just don’t. Here’s to hoping Scarlet and Violet address these issues.
Amazing video! what is really frustrating is the fact that some of this solutions seem really easy to fix at least for a game studio that has more than 10 people working on it.
You make a great breakdown of this. thank you.
8:30 you can imply some noise on shader level and will be looking much better
Stupendous video that introduced me to your channel. Love your design taste and in-depth knowledge! Subbed, and would love a continuation of this series
I think the issue with shiny terrain is more to do with normal maps than it is actual specularity. When you have extreme normal maps, you can end up with pixels whose normals are facing away from you, or that have normals that are perpendicular to the camera. Normally this can't happen, so it causes weird shader artifacts when it does, which tends to make things look shiny even when they aren't
It's exactly this, there aren't any specular highlights in the terrain shader (or really any other shader in the game) and you can even see the craziness of the normal maps in one of the screenshots
"the next game will probably look much better"
that aged lol
Really thorough explaining! So happy I found this channel, several of your vids have been super informative
The tiling issue of the water is also visible when looking at the ocean, although it’s less distracting because at least you have a horizon to create some immersion
Jasper has a video explaining how Nintendo addressed the water issue back on the GameCube. By creating storing custom textures in the mipmaps, different textures can swap in and out based on distance for "free". Effect could also be done in a shader.
th-cam.com/video/2wpQ8dVXum8/w-d-xo.html
I feel bad for the developers of this game, cause they obviously put a lot of love into it! Even with the new style, it still feels like a Pokémon game, but not just *a* Pokémon game.
I'm willing to bet that they wanted the game to look better, but were being rushed, leading to them focusing more of the game play and story.
This would explain why the grass gets lighter at the bottom, maybe they planned to do something like what you mentioned, and made the grass lighter at the bottom so they could blend the texture color into it.
Very pleased by how the vid approaches these topics. Usually in the Pokémon Fandom it feels like people tend to either love a game and deny any flaws or absolutely hate a game beyond reason, so its genuinely pretty great to have a vid that looks at the game's flaws and approaches it with a "Here's how I think they could've done better, but some of it is not so big of a big deal" point of view
Wonderful video! I hope you make more of this series, I found this one very interesting :)
im so glad to find a video about this game that reconises its faults and gives sulotions in a calm and organized way
Acerloa? Why didnt you mention all the low quality textures?
I'm fairly new to 3d stuff and this video answered a lot of questions i had about the game. i'd love if you delved deeper into the pokemon series. I see quite a few games on the switch with really nice lighting, shading and textures and then there's pokemon... (excluding snap and pokken tournament, which look great in comparison)
Really great video! This shows what's justified about the criticisms of the graphics - sure it's not gonna look like an Xbox or PS game, maybe it's not even fair to expect it to look as good as botw, but the things you mention seem to be pretty easy to fix and they make the game look quite a bit better!!
Lake Verity issue is actually pretty simple to fix: Use 2 normal/distortion map based on the distance to the water: One for when seen close/very close, and one for viewed from far away. Make it blend accordingly to the distance to the camera and you get a pretty good result
I thought about the detail map solution but it would have the same tiling issue, the water looks fine when viewed close up but for far away you would need an absurdly large texture to avoid noticeable texture tiling.
Other comments have proposed the proper solution, stochastic texture sampling, which I was unaware of.
@@Acerola_t Oh yes! I completely forgot about this method. I used it once on a Blender project for rendering an animation. It's the one that "projects many textures on a plane and makes a kind of collage" effect to avoid tilling? Pretty clever!
@@Acerola_t An alternate solution that is frequently used is octave tiling, where you also just upscale the texture being repeated and blend, you can do this multiple times (i.e multiple octaves) and you get fine grain high detail repeating frequently with larger detail repeating more sparsely. This is usually sufficient to trick the eye because it does just enough to break up the repetitive patterns. This is also significantly faster than stochastic tiling.
Just found your channel but this is actually really cool it’s nice to find likable content like this
Unironically every time i saw something about this game i thought "i wonder what acerola's take on this is?" thanks for the answer.
a solution ive found for the water texturing tile issue that works somewhat effectively is fog effects or depth of field, such that from far away the texture cant be seen as well when it repeats.
I like this idea as it can give me some insight of what not to do and what I can do to improve if I come across these problems by accident
Please do more, this was great and I subbed!
This is what I've always wanted, for someone to break down why some games look awful from a technical point of view and suggesting possible improvements -- it's why I like Digital Foundary. But honestly, I _was_ expecting you to actually _implement_ those improvements and was waiting for either a mod for the game that fixed those issues _or_ a simulation/video editing to show the improvements. Other than the edited grass root gradient (which made the grass look 10x better already!), there's a lot to desired 😅 But thanks for making this, I just can't fathom how GameFreak can make such obvious "bad decisions" when you made that grass look so much better by literally just changing the colors.
My next video is going to be this same type of video for final fantasy xiv and I actually do mod the game to fix it, which is what I wanted to do for this vid but idk how to mod switch games lol
Thank you for watching!
@@Acerola_t Thanks for the effort and thought, that's what counts 😇
I'm wondering if using an out of step tiling effect for the water animation would work, where its neighbors on the right and left are a second or so out of sync. Then you play each copy at that time difference, so there's less apparent repeating patterns but only one animation
I noticed a spotlight on the lake while the camera was moving it made the lake more visible but also made the water look bad, if it's not necessary then simply removing it would help the issue.
I appreciate the actual measured critique of the graphics of this game.
That was such a great explanation for me, a casual person with no graphics experience. I think if someone showed this to GameFreak they would fix the issues immediately and that would be amazing. I can only hope that they would patch the game so that it looks a bit better
Thanks! The goal of my content is to introduce a wide variety of people to the complex world of graphics so I'm glad you enjoyed.
I hear Japanese game devs kinda live in a bubble and don't want help from westerners or other Japanese studios. That's probably why it took Game Freak this long and the graphics look like ass. If they were given enough time and consulted with the studio responsible for BOTW, it would have been a better experience.
However, my guess is that they would be counting on making improvements gradually every after their annual release schedule just like the other pokemon games before it.
@@triadwarfare in other words: some japanese developers are stubborn
Ha, you wish. All devs wish this. You don't really get to unless the game is a live service.
But as of now that team is probably either crunching on SV or the inevitable DLC expansions after SV's release.
Wonderful video, a super great watch - but the example image at 5:40 is from Fortnite, not WoW.
I'm pretty sure my friend took the pic in wow lol
@@Acerola_t Not to be a bitch, but the character is holding a machine gun. The skin used is Cube Queen from Fortnite Chapter 2 Season 7.
@@Acerola_t It is most definitely Fortnite 😅
5:05 An easy solution would be to still render objects offscreen, but _only_ within a certain radius of the player, so that shadows within their view will still appear.
The fact that you clearly like Asano's work perfectly makes sence. Inio Asano is probably ma favourite mangaka, and i also like your content.
Great video btw.
That water problem is something that i see for many open world games on the Switch. Somehow Crysis from 2007 still has better water.
Crysis did a lot of CPU intensive operations to prepare the data used to render its water. Unfortunately, mobile CPUs are horrible even compared to decade old desktop CPUs, so you'd be surprised at how limited you can be doing stuff on them. It's partially because later CPUs (and pretty much all mobile CPUs, for heat reasons) went multicore, but parallelizing some of these techniques is either impractical or doesn't actually get you faster results.
We're just getting over that hump in the 2020's hardware wise, but it's still a common bottleneck. And the Switch is stuck with 2016 hardware. Maube next generation (if they are sticking with hybrid).
Thank you :) i enjoyed this and learned useful things i can take into my efforts to create things :D
This was an incredible video! I can definitely see this channel becoming huge one day!
An egregious thing I saw about the water was that the huge specular highlight was completely static!!
-Even Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric didn't do that.-
Nice video! and you got it right, low res texture problem is more like a switch's problem tha pokemon game's itself, switch got only 3GB of ram shared by cpu and gpu (actually it has 4gb, but 1gb is dedicated entirely to OS so games can only use 3GB) and so with that low space textures gotta be small.
Best channel nickname ever. Interesting content, funny videos. Good 3D creations.
This guy, is a amazing guy.
For the water texture issue, when looked on from afar, couldn't we introduce some kind of secondary distortion to break apart the tiling?
I know basically nothing about visual art, let alone 3D computer graphics. That's why it's so much fun to hear someone who DOES know break down why one of my favorite games falls short visually. PL:A was a blast to play, so hopefully Scarlet and Violet carry that over and look better to boot!
Looking forward to SV as trailers do seem to tackle at least few of those issues.
Yeah I'm excited to make a comparison video
I haven’t seen a comment about it but I think maybe a reason for the grass being lighter at the bottom could be due in part to grass when sprouting tends to be lighter at the bottom. I’m not sure if this applies to every type of grass or only some but I’m growing some cat grass in a pot right now and it’s white when it first sprout then becomes a yellow and a green the higher up it goes, though it is very close to the dirt where the white and yellow are so it’s not as though the amount of light colour there makes sense especially in comparison to the height of the grass there.
Side note: I do agree that your solution looks better
Great video, also "I expect he next game to look much better"... ouch
there's a lot that improved graphics wise, I'd make a vid on it if I had the time but unfortunately I do not.
That's the kind of content i like to see. nice video.
I'm sure their shadows use the same technique as you described. The main difference being how they cull the objects drawn in the shadow map. The thing is, a directional light like the sun usually uses an ortographic projection as shadow, which has two problems: You need to specify where it begins and ends, and if the beginning is too far from the camera, you need to limit what things are drawn because many will probably not be visible on camera. The crude solution is just to put it some arbitrary distance away from the camera and call it a day. Which is a rather small distance when trying to run it with a very low spec hardware...
I love these video's where you teach us the right thing, instead of a whole tutorial about HOW to do it. You provide the WHY.. THere's a lot of value in combining that with humor, and you do that very f'ing good.
With the tree shadows they probably are still using shadow maps, but they're probably pre-culling the objects to the camera frustum, which is a very common mistake to make.
and easy to miss if you don't often stand in place and rotate the camera while looking at the ground!
"...or can they?" *vsauce music starts*
about the UV distortion, is this the same thing jasper described in his video about Mario galaxy water? with the grays ale texture pulling and pushing pixels of another one?
I've got a question about that, if a pixel is being pulled or pushed away from its original location, what is this location filled up with? I tried implementing this in Java recently and most of the image usually looked fine, but it had a lot of black pixels scattered all over it because of these spots being empty
Acerola é muito bom, meu avô tinha um pé de acerola e eu adorava
Great video dude I'm definitely subscribing!
Tho the water critique isnt a cherry pic or nitpick
And the textures in other Nintendo Switch games are much better Xenoblade 2 (2017) is a great example of that
8:05 Is it possible to "cast" another animation on top on the entire lake ? It doesn't need to be a high-res and it should blend a little this tiling effect?
Absolutely. In my game I have two water planes with two shaders. A simple script fades in the distance version based on the player's height/altitude. After fading the opacity I switch of the detail water altogether. Since I am using a single giant plane I couldn't use the distance from the objects origin. This way I can remove some of the expensive features like foam and set the tiling to whatever looks good at max distance. For lakes and ponds you could just use a level of detail system which swaps based on distance in any direction. But the built in Unity LOD doesn't have pleasant transitions.
Could you fix the tiling problem by having two 'layers' of the noise pattern? Apply one at the current ratio, then apply (optionally the same) pattern again at like 10x the scale, and the distortion should hide the tiling to some extent.
7:14 what is that sound effect? I hear it in music a lot and i feel it's from a game or anime
It's from fnaf
This is the first and only PLA criticism video I've seen that presents both an understanding of how games are made + genuine criticism + possible solutions in a calm and measured way, while not just dunking on the game completely. PLA is an excellent Pokemon game and I don't feel like the graphics take away THAT much from the enjoyment, so it's nice to see someone calmly point that out while also acknowledging that it does have some issues.
Would be really cool if this was a series, but what other games would you cover?
My next video coming out soon is about fixing Final Fantasy XIV's graphics!
@@Acerola_t Neat, thanks for the info, didn't even know the game was out already.
@@nintara3746 the mmo not the new one
@@Acerola_t shit misread it as XVI, oops
Lmao, shoutout The Yard!
I saw that at the beginning 😂
new to the channel, i thought the intro card said areola at first.
i think its more on the performance of the console, i remember when playing the 3ds pokemon games, it was looking very good, but when it comes to the multiple pokemon battles, especially with big pokemons, the performances were really struggling, and i hated that so much because even though it was looking good, a battle with low framerates is really frustrating, so the devs didnt risked pushing the graphics to the max to the cost of the graphics, and by having a game with low framerates
thats my guess
9:32 "I expect the next game in the series to look much better"
gamefreak: yeah about that......
There's a lot better about the new games, textures and grass for instance look much nicer.
But yeah, still a lot left to be desired lol
As the problem with water texture appears only afar, would it even matter if it had low resolution? If the texture is made to be viewed right next to it, wouldn’t it look similar if you are further away even if it was twice the size.
You might say that “well, when you get back close to it, it would look awful” but if you are able to switch stock images of trees in place of actual models, would scaling a texture really be a problem?
Yeah it would look much worse if the texture was lower res
I think the shiny ground issue was an attempt to do some kinda fresnel-based cell shading, since it looks a bit too large to just be specular and only really appears around the edges of objects. I'm only going off of screenshots though since I still haven't played the game yet. From what I've seen though it works in some areas but looks horrible in others.
Would have loved to hear you rant about those horizon lines
I still think they should have used outlines in the graphics for this game. It seems like they wanted to go for a painterly look. But idk if that would have been too much for the Switch. That one commercial they did for this game with the outlined art style looked great, though I know that was really small scale and made only for the commercial. I'm kinda scared for Scarlet and Violet because those are gonna be fully open world and judging by PLA (and the footage we've already seen of Paldea), a lot of areas will look pretty bad.
I heard they says if you comments on a video, the algorithm will works. Please works, Acerola needs to blows up!
I'm so glad there are many people out there fixing the graphics and issues, showing the pokemon company what they're missing out on.
I overall quite liked the grapihcs of the game, but I definitely had some gripes. when I first saw the shiny pink on every surface in Obsidian Fieldlands, I thought it surely had to be a graphical glitch
I think the game should do random calculations to generate the water surface and look instead of using a texture. Sometimes things work better when using simulation.
Also with the water, why does the highlight from the sun/moon move to stay in the middle of your camera, that isn’t how light works in real life
They are specular highlights, which is light that is reflected into your eye aka the camera, it is in fact how light works in real life it just looks bad here
can't they use generative texture like blender do for the water map ?
Do games have the tech to in real time use a procedural noise to blend 2 repeating textures to hide were they repeat? I know you can do that sort of thing with substance designer, and I feel like it might be possible to make a shader do something similar, but I'm not experienced in shaders
calculating noise in real time is really performance intensive so it's not really ideal
I have no experience with shadows and all, so this might be totally off the mark, but maybe there's a cheap way to retroactively fix the disappearing shadows: apparently all the objects that cast shadows need to actually exist in the world, so why not just keep exactly those objects active that would cast a visible shadow in screen space?
To find out which objects those are, how about using something like shadow mapping, but maybe just rendering a rough bounding box rather than all the shadow detail. While one of those bounding boxes is in view, that object can't be unloaded. There could even be a cheaper rendering mode for those objects that are off-screen but still need to cast a shadow. Maybe even the opposite, where a large object that's partially on screen, but where the shadow WOULDN'T be, can skip those calculations!
I have no idea if this would be feasible, if the bounding box calculations would be cheaper or if the algorithms required would add too much overhead... Just thought it's an interesting idea.
Couldn't the water problem be alleviated by having a second noise displacement of a different size, that animates in a different direction?
the tiling in unreal can be handled amazingly well with some tricks. but maybe not all engines.
would love to see more videos like these! And its really good that its not from some super negative perspective or "I can do better" angle but its actually genuinely insightful and helpful
9:32 Uhmmmm.. Yeaaaa....
Jokes.. Aside I stumbled in your channel when I got curious about this same topic on why does BotW/TotK can render decent grass and foliage while mainting decent enough performance and resolution while Pokemon can't even be bothered. Your humour was really refreshing since alot of this stuff when explained can be really "Term-heavy" and can be boring for people like me who doesn't know alot about this stuff, but you explained it really well imho while keeping it entertaining. 👌
the big difference is that these pokemon games are made in like a year, while botw and totk took 5ish years each lol
@@Acerola_t Yea.. That's fair I guess. It's just sad that the Pokemon games are treated like a cash cow rather than a passion project these days..
@@vivid8979 It's the unfortunate reality of being a multi media franchise. Games have gotten way harder to make, but pokemon still has multiple other release schedules that the games have to abide by like new seasons of the anime, new tcg sets, etc. In order to create a truly good game then the anime and tcg would have to be delayed by several years.
AWESOME Channel!!! Keep it up man!
Be ready for render repair of upcoming scarlet and violet I can totally say they will have some issues with draw distance
The grass in it looks great tho
I'm expecting Scarlet and Violet to look much better than Legends Arceus, but to be a much worse game
@@Acerola_t yes after watching the trailer I can say that grass looks good but issues might be possible with draw distance because there was not a good ammount of fog present in it
@@cleverman383 man a game with pokemon always becomes fun with time , this one is an open world and will have a multi-player system in which 4 players can connect , I think that there is nothing less in this game other than battle animations with comparison to LA
And also catching system
on certain areas there are these like flickering white noise around you, probably a rendering issue?
i say this as someone who has only used unity for making vrchat avatars so of course i'm no expert
i'm also just pointing it out because i saw it on a video, i don't really even plan on playing the game myself or care that much, it's just something i've never seen happen to any other game
here's what i'm talking about, not really the biggest issue honestly
th-cam.com/video/Wq6J7wbSH9s/w-d-xo.html
I have no idea what could be causing that lmao
Maybe an issue with alpha blending somehow but I doubt it
If they're using deferred rendering (which would probably be unnecessarily slow for a switch game, but *shrug*) then there's several different images (render passes, if you want ot get technical) combined to make the final image. The only thing that'd make sense to me is that either one of them is funky or they're being combined in a funky way. Especially if some of those images are lower resolution so on a pixel level stuff may not perfectly align.
Alright sorry it's been a month but I just figured out the problem while debugging something in Unity.
It's an anti aliasing bug, specifically MSAA. In Unity, having MSAA enabled causes the same white pixel flickering on model edges.
forum.unity.com/threads/white-pixel-aliasing-from-directional-light-on-edges.520378/
@@cheldardo off topic, that's a super cute pfp
Actually there is a technique to fix the texture repetition issue of the lake, it's called "texture bombing", and it works really well.
I think it looks pretty good for an N64 game ;)
lots of other people have already mentioned this but the water is a very solvable issue. Layering another distortion map at a different scale, or disguising the texture tiling with random rotation offsets, or blending another texture (or even the same texture) at a larger scale, or some combination of these or other techniques could all have made the water look a lot better for no, or very little, additional memory and performance cost. The reason that people are miffed about the water is because it is something which is very clearly fixable, it should be an easy fix, and so it feels insulting that a very large company that grosses billions of dollars would fail to apply polish in this very straightforward case. Again, in many other games on the switch you can see water for high up. Breath of the wild has many high cliffs that look down on large bodies of water, and they look great. Xenoblade Chronicles, which was on the Wii, has an area where you look down at a large lake. It's a really impressive scene, one of the best in the game. Notably, that game doesn't even have specular highlighting on the water at all. It instead fakes the look-- I think the technique at use is blending two scrolling textures at different scales.
The point is, the limited graphical power of the system and its memory is not a good excuse here. If games from more than a decade ago could solve this problem with much smaller texture sizes at their disposal and fewer shader effects available to them, then Pokemon could certainly have solved this problem. The reason they didn't solve it is not totally clear, but it seems, to the outside observer, at least, that is was an act of hubris and greed on the part of an extremely profitable company which made the calculus that it did not need to produce a product which was of high quality and polish. Ultimately, that calculus was correct. Many people still purchased the pokemon game, and the pokemon company made huge amounts of profit as a result. This is, understandably, frustrating to consumers who want high-quality products, and particularly frustrating to consumers who are aware of just how disgustingly profitable the pokemon company is, and how little it would cost them, in relative terms, to hire a larger staff, or even outsource some of their development to other experienced studios, in order to deliver a more polished product. All of this is, of course, speculation. We can't know for sure why the pokemon company makes the decisions that it does. but we can see their end-of-year earnings reports. And we can see the glaringly obvious, amateurish mistakes in their games. And by combining these two observations, there are very few explanations that make sense, other than unbridled corporate greed, total disregard for the intelligence of the consumer, and creative bankruptcy driven by the profit motive. I think it is understandable, then, that consumers are upset with the seemingly trivial water issue, as it is emblematic of underlying patterns of behaviour which are deeply anti-consumer and have a measurable negative impact on the quality of products provided to them.