Enabling the graphical enhancements from the season 2 trailer in-game?
Now that we're well into the second and a bit year of the new episodic Sam & Max games, this also means that the engine that powers it is also two and a bit years old. Don't get me wrong, it's great that Sam & Max can run on "modest" machines, and being able to re-use assets is certainly a great... Well, asset to Telltale's buisness model.
But here's a thought: why not give players the option to enable some of the effects that were seen in the season 2 trailer? To the best of my knowledge, said trailer used all the game's assets, but there was a few extra effects that the game does not use. For example, soft lighting and reflections. You can see examples of the former on Max when he and Sam are standing outside the office, and you can see examples of the latter on the Desoto and the office's door knob.
Now I'm no game creator, but how difficult would it be to enable these effects in-game? Sure, it would chew up the framerate a bit more, but that's the point, to make the game look just that little bit nicer for those of us whose machines far surpass what Sam & Max is asking for. What do you think, Telltale?
But here's a thought: why not give players the option to enable some of the effects that were seen in the season 2 trailer? To the best of my knowledge, said trailer used all the game's assets, but there was a few extra effects that the game does not use. For example, soft lighting and reflections. You can see examples of the former on Max when he and Sam are standing outside the office, and you can see examples of the latter on the Desoto and the office's door knob.
Now I'm no game creator, but how difficult would it be to enable these effects in-game? Sure, it would chew up the framerate a bit more, but that's the point, to make the game look just that little bit nicer for those of us whose machines far surpass what Sam & Max is asking for. What do you think, Telltale?
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I'm not expert, but I'd expect you'd need quite a powerful multi-processor machine, and would wind up with the game chugging along at one frame every five minutes.
I'd much rather see higher resolution textures and less compressed audio before any additional effects. Though that's unlikely to happen as both textures and audio have been compressed a lot to keep the downloads small, and Telltale probably isn't interested in supporting different versions. (I don't blame them)
Aw, don't be so modest. Something like that in realtime would be a piece of cake to run in realtime now days.
I wouldn't say that... it doesn't have a negative influence on the looks in the trailers. I'd even say it'd push the games more towards a "Pixar"-look.
As for a Pixar-esque look, I suppose that's a matter of taste. Pixar is trying for a peculiar type of realism, not as in accurately depicting reality, but in giving their characters and environments a look that makes people believe they could be real, like a puppet or a sculpture.
For what it's worth, I don't think that's the kind of look I'd want for Sam & Max, even if resources weren't an issue.
Not a piece of cake compared to our current system requirements. The super soft character realtime shadows, and realtime full screen color grading aren't things that video cards were doing reliably at a reliable frame rate two years ago, which makes those system requirements extremely high for us. That said, as I always say, we are working on upping the awesomeness of our graphics system. As I always follow that up with, that doesn't mean you'll see it any time soon!
I'm not a graphics programmer and I'm not a game artist, but this is my general understanding of how this stuff works... It's not a simple matter of "turning on" graphical updates -- they do have to be written from the ground up to work with our tool, they have to be scalable in a way that doesn't make your game look like total rubbish on a lower-end system (see: Crysis looking worse than Far Cry does on a PC from 2 years ago), and you have to build all of the fancy new doodads in a way that the artists working on the game can actually control them. There's no such thing as a "make the rendering tech better" switch, and it's definitely not a matter of just "enabling" something which we've been holding back or something.
Also, even if you do have beautiful shadows and lighting, it's not going to look good if the artists can't manipulate them with ease. One of the big reasons we're able to make games so quickly is that our toolset, while it does have its problems due to being constantly in development, does allow the artists and writers to put good looking scenes together very very quickly. You can't just "turn on" realtime shadows and not expose any of the controls for how they work in a scene, or expect artists to light scenes via editing a config file or entering script commands in a console window, and still expect a good looking game every 4-5 weeks.