Is there a name for the style of F.E.A.R. or The Darkness?

Is there a name for the style of F.E.A.R. or The Darkness?
They aren't exactly realistic, but the lighting, the textures, the shadows, everything adds up to looking almost photorealistic, but the contrast is too high to be real.
Also, why don't more games utilize this style? It's very immersive.

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Condemned: Criminal Origins?

I know that one because Monolith made it right after F.E.A.R., but besides that, FEAR, The Darkness, and Chronicles of Riddick I can't think of games that use this style, which is odd to me because even for a game from the mid-2000s, it looks pretty realistic and gorgeous.

I don't think there's a name for it - before this generation of engines, it was probably considered photo-realistic, but now it looks more stylized/dated.

That makes sense, but I find it very confusing as to me it still looks more realistic than modern games even with top notch graphics. It looks less like a pretty video game and more like real life.
It also may just be my bias towards loving poorly lit abandoned buildings.

I fucking love high-contrast lighting.

I'm glad I'm not the only one, I think it looks beautiful.

I wonder when this graphics hype will stop. Shit looks good enough, god damn. Fix the animations and AI,devs. Stick to one engine and update the props and the number of them available. No wonder games suck these days - takes a gorillion years to make a good one and devs wont take any risks. Just stop the graphics race already.

I miss these kind of atmospheric interior environments

too orange

My thoughts exactly. FEAR looked good enough to me honestly, we could keep that for every game and I'd be happy. I want a focus on animations, 60 FPS, AI, and mission design. It's so disappointing that the the investment goes towards making it look "pretty" instead of designing decent missions.
Art from adversity as they say.

This period of dynamic lighting was awesome when it first emerged.
Everything just worked it was incredible. Some of it aged like shit though.

PREY
Thief Deadly Shadows
maybe Deus Ex IW

I have a few screenshots I took in FEAR that created a good atmosphere. Wish we had more confined, smaller games than huge open world ones.

I think it's the same engine? Riddick and Doom 3 were like that too

didn't games stop having to use that lighting engine cause some cuckold claimed to have the patent on shadows drawn that way?

I love it too. Some aged poorly, but it really depends on how the textures/environments were designed. If textures weren't done well, then the lighting just ends up illuminating how poor they look nowadays.
I'm not sure, I do know that Condemned and FEAR use the same engine/lighting.
I've never heard that, interesting.

The sharp stencil shadows that these games used don't look very realistic now, but I think they really defined this little era of PC shooters.

It's funny, I actually think they look more realistic than some of the shadows/lighting we see nowadays. The only major advancement in lighting I have noticed is ambient occlusion.

It's stylized photorealism. The great lighting is made using per pixel lighting, which is pretty fucking realistic looking even today.

Per pixel lighting, that's the term I was looking for! Thanks.

I don't think so.
I always thought it fell out of use during the transition to deferred rendering, same as MSAA.
There's been plenty of advancements made. stencil shadows just don't hold up for large environments and the shading techniques used were not realistic at all.

Fair enough. I am just surprised because I was replaying FEAR recently and it looks amazing compared even to the games I've been playing lately- The Evil Within for one. It looks more realistic in a lot of ways.

Granted I am partially colorblind and have somewhat poor vision.

>Exanima

Does look pretty good, but it all looks the same.

A big killer for stencil shadows was it couldn't do soft edges well.

It's a non-issue now because graphics hardware is relatively powerful but when FEAR was released turning on soft shadows was an enormous framerate killer because the way they implemented it was to generate multiple shadows with slight variations and overlay them.

Hard edge shadows it did well, soft edge shadows it did really, really poorly.

That's definitely true. I first played the game when it came out on a weak laptop and remember distinctly not being nearly as impressed with the lighting.
I'm just very impressed how well this kind of lighting has aged. The soft shadows nowadays in the game make it look incredible.

You're thinking of Carmak's patented z-fail stencil shadows (z-pass was slower but not patented). I don't think those are even stencil shadows, but a depth-buffer based shadowmap (as opposed to stencil buffer) which is much much faster anyway and modern games don't use stencil shadows.

I miss gothic 1 and 2 style. man, i love those style.

That reminds me, Thief 3 has this style as well.

The term you're looking for is Shadow Volumes. Theyre pretty rough way of doing dynamic shadows, and requirw use of fancy projections out of models. Kinda heavy to render too.

hard shadows?

I think Doom 3 and Riddick games had some good ones too.

These put together seem to be it. Hard shadows look better ingame than in pure renders, for some reason.

Forgot to add that the modern vidya method is known as Stencil Shadows, and was created by Carmack. It's a bit heavy way of doing shadows tho. SH2 utilized lowpoly shadow models to speed up the shadow drawing process.

It wasn't created by Carmack.

Stencil shadows, fast inverse square root, megatextures... Why is Carmack forever being credited as the creator of things he did not create? In some cases he wasn't even the person that wrote the code, much less created the technique.

I know what you mean. I in general dig the mid-00s visual aestetics; everything's very SHARP and unobscured, especially compared to modern games that jam tons of filters and shader-effects on the screen, usually to hide the shitty texture and lighting work. Up until ~2006, devs couldn't use much of that shit, so they instead focused on providing as detailed surfaces and models as possible, and that really shows. Pic quite realted; UT2k4 didn't use stencil shadows, but it still is easy on the eyes. Same thing with earlier Source games.

he didn't invent the old Shadow Volume method it is based on, but Carmack's Reverse was momentarily one of the most popular methods of doing shadows in games. Yeah, there were other similar techs too.

It's funny because the PC version of SH2 uses stencil shadows and they look like ass compared to the softer console shadows.

Everyone claims this, but I'm certain the PS2 original used exact same shadow method! I recall eying those pointy fingers and such in Maria's shadows long before I ever got the PC port.

I got a feeling that people just think that PS2 version had different shadow method, because of the much lower res + native blurring artifacts of CRTs and shitty cables.

The 2005 build of Duke Nukem Forever

Hard and sharp. Now it's soft and blurry

I think the PS2 version had soft shadows.

For some reason the PS2 hardware was really good at shadows but not so good at lighting, that's why SH2 on PS2 has per vertex lighting.

>go to disable blur
>blur is a part of other necissary sfx in the options and can't be disabled without disabling particle effects or something

fucking why

The whole FEAR Prey Doom 3 Nukem Forever Riddick look so basically hard, stencil dynamic shadows, normal mapping, and speculars. It looked weird at the time because Source engine was infinitely more photorealistic looking, but I think I appreciate this look a lot more looking back.

B O N D O
O
N
D
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>It looked weird at the time because Source engine was infinitely more photorealistic looking
...it was? I mean sure, HL2 looked great at the time, and still does, but I always found its lighting to be a bit second-tier compared to Doom 3 and FEAR.

When I am put photographing, I search for areas where I can get this kind of lighting. Later I intensify the shadows in cannon raw. While it does take the perceived reality from a scene I think this kind of lighting often beautifies what you are seeing and makes you pay much more attention to it. Evenly lit environments just don't do it for me, high contrast or I'm out. I don't get a lot of work

brown n' bloom

I'm glad you brought up Doom 3.
I've been playing DOOM and enjoying it. However there is something about the visuals that are just off. They feel flat and muddy at times with such a neutral contrast

I assume you mean the nu-DOOM, not the 1993 one? This is why I hate this "Game, Game 2, Gam3, GAME" naming trend...

Anyway, the new one's a typical product of its era: tons of filters on top of very underwhelming base visuals, and AA methods are all just post-processing filters too.
Devs also hate pure colors this day and age.

Fuck that shit, this is proper style.

Lighting is the key to FEAR's looks and atmosphere

>using the E3 build
the reveal art style was so brown and boring, but the final game was so much more colourful.

Doom 3 uses it.

Doom 4 runs like a miracle because there's a ton of LOD. Look at an object, walk towards it, and you'll easily see higher quality textures popping in. I wish there was an option to lower it.

The Penumbra games use it too

Half-Life 2 was sort of a Max Payne and Silent Hill 2 deal, they achieve that stuff with very neutral lighting and photorealistic textures. I've always liked Doom 3, the lighting, normal mapping and speculars are timeless. But the cone head problem made it pretty ugly while Half-Life 2 was very consistent in overall image quality. I've always thought FEAR was ugly because of the weapon models and bad textures, but now I really appreciate the dangling lamps being blown around and it looks pretty good for a creepy atmosphere.

was just about to come and post this.
Love these games! Still superior than Amnesia or SOMA, IMO.

I think the Stalker series has what you're looking for.

Dynamic lights always look better than static.

Throw a grenade in FEAR and looking at moving lights looks amazing. Most games today can't replicate that "chaos" effect of a lamp swinging after an explosion.

>You could actually pass that off as a PS4/Xbone screenshot

Video games are dying fellas

Nope. STALKER uses fairly modern shadow mapping, just at very high quality. It also draws shadows out of all objects, from all light sources, resulting some super fancy visuals at best.

>how to spot people that didn't actually play nu-DOOM

...

>posting a screenshot from a encyclopedia menu with sharp, white light and no smudge filters somehow proves my point
Yeah, it's a BIT less piss-yellow now in game, but still far from the visual splendor of 90s. In fact, most of nu-Duum is now all RED, with occasional shade of blue.

...

While I enjoyed the look everything was either red or yellow, with the occasional UAC area that was blue/grey.

The Doom 3 wannabe engine era.

D44M is damn dull and muted compared to even some fairly modern games.

It looks good because everything is done really cleanly. This same room, if done by your average art team, would be covered in trash meshes and 'gritty' textures. The FEAR room evokes that gritty atmosphere through lighting with a single source. So few games use lighting effectively, they just put them around randomly with no thought for composition.

brown and bloom

I call it the early/mid 2000s style. Deus Ex Invisible War, Thief Deadly Shadows, Doom 3 etc all did it

Stalker is kinda interesting case in how it would otherwise look like complete ass, but that dynamic lighting engine sometimes looks ridiculously great. Obviously mods improve it greatly, but it still manages to look suprisingly great even with vanilla when it wants to.

that's 7th gen stuff, started around 2006.

STALKER, when you go indoors or at night with flashlight. At least with the basic starter pack mods.

Source engine has literally zero to do with texture quality.

see : Totally different tech. Still impressive today, and I think one of the earliest games I recall that had flashlight as a dynamic lightsource, amongst every other light in the game that is.

How common is it to use photos as textures?
I don't mean base a texture off a photo, but actually use a photo as a texture?
I'm a huge SH fan and I've extracted the textures from the game and it's obvious that quite a few of the environmental textures are actually just images compressed somewhat. I like it a lot, and it seems this was a common technique from 2000-2005 in video games. I actually miss it a lot.

What does that have to do with anything in his post?

Where can I go to research and learn about all these lighting/texture techniques used in games? It's very interesting.

You could try reading his post for starters.
>It looked weird at the time because Source engine was infinitely more photorealistic looking

learnopengl.com
fabiensanglard.net
github.com/id-software

And Siggraph/GDC slides/videos

And you think texture quality is the only thing that determines whether something looks photorealistic?

The number one reason HL2/Source looks more realistic than DOOM 3 is the baked static lights as opposed to DOOM's 100% dynamic lighting which is what gives you those razor sharp pitch black stencil shadows because they couldn't afford more realistic shadows in real time.

Thank you friend!

The main thing that makes me love that looks is the crispness.
>hard shadow edges
>high contrast, rich blacks
>no blur filters, no chromatic abberation
It gives a very clear and defined image.

fucking T H I S

I'm also a weird faggot who disables AA on every game I play and crank up texture resolution to its highest. I don't understand why people love blurry edges on fucking everything.

OP here, you summed up why I love it very well.
There's no filters to trick you, no hiding textures, it's just crisp detailed textures, crisp edges for corners, well defined shadows, it looks perfect. To me it looks more like my experience of real life than a game like The Witcher 3.

game?

What modern games best emulate this style?

Get a 4k monitor and downsample 8k

I think that the general idea of making images less artificially sharp is fine on itself, it's just that technology isn't really there yet to create realistically softened shadows etc. stuff to make the image more realistic and still good-looking. At least in my experience all sorts of contact-hardening shadows look like shit now and same applies to all sorts of DoF effects too.

>I don't understand why people love blurry edges on fucking everything.
only post-processing AA blurs edges.
traditional AA renders stuff at higher resolution, and downsamples it, practically adding MORE details.

It's thanks to the console-specs, and the increased use of Deferred Shading - that renders MSAA useless, that devs have started favoring post-processing AA methods (FXAA, MLAA, SMAA...)

>t's just that technology isn't really there yet to create realistically softened shadows etc
It has been for ages.
it's just not used, because especially AAA devs favor piss-weak consoles, that barely can keep up with PS2-era graphical fidelity in HD resolutions, at steady framerate.

Dude. AA is not about blurry edges. FXAA is a compromise from a long time ago when machines were super weak and resolution was so low that FXAA edges were a massive improvement over edges where you could literally see a staircase effect without trying. A good example is FEAR at a low resolution. Right at the start go to the gate with low res and no AA. It looks awful.

As machines got stronger new AA methods were invented which have less blurry edges and a moderate to high performance hit. The goal was less blurry edges while still eliminating staircase effect.

However, technology has caught up. Resolutions above 1920x1080 are common. We're almost at the point where Anti Aliasing has served its purpose and will cease to exist as anything but a performance increasing tool rather than a visually pleasing performance hit. Now that resolution is so high, there is no staircase effect without any AA because pixels are so small / DPI so high. AA will be for people wanting to run at a lower resolution for performance reasons but eliminate staircase effect, because 1080p + SMAA or even MSAA is still way easier to run than native 4K without AA, since AA ceases to be a factor at that resolution

In short: You're not doing anything strange. You're doing exactly what AA was supposed to lead to. High resolution, no AA.

You use photogrammetry software today to make realistic stuff like that for console. Shit works on cryengine, UE4, frostbite etc. Plus it's easier to pump out now than it ever was before.

Honestly the only thing I notice here is the fence on supersampling.

MSAA is basically the same thing as SSAA so it's not surprising.

yeah, it's kinda hard to spot in it's default size on modern HD screens. I'd suggest opening the pic up in its own tab, and zooming into it until it fills most of your screen. That boat wreck in the water's pretty good indicator of AA happening, and the fence's good example of SSAA doing better work with 2D elements than MSAA.

dude...

looks like Oblivion on low settings

It's called dynamic shadows from every light source. You don't see it anymore because all games all the time are optimized for shitty consoles which are nothing more than low powered laptops.

no, that's not exactly right, but I agree with the rest.