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Report RSS Our screenshots are no "fakes". Promised. But what are fake screens anyway?

My article on the German / Austrian Laws and restrictions triggered a mass of reactions I hadn`t expected at all. I got questions for interviews, interesting phone calls, one lawyer from Germany wanted to replace my current one and so on. The most interesting feedback was not regarding the article, but regarding the screenshots. Basically, two guys (with one of them knowing me for almost 5 years now) accused me of "faking" our screenshots. A topic I find very interesting...

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Allright, I got some accusations, and they made me mad. Frankly: If someone accuses me for the stuff publishers I worked for in the past have put out as "genuine", I can tell it was never my fault, but I can understand that people are suspicious. However, no Homegrown Games screens have been faked.
Ever.

To cut it short, our screenshots are 100% genuine, they are no only not "faked" in any way, they are also not "directed". Both of the complaints referred to this screenshot here:


One of them said it couldn`t be FPSC, because FPSC doesn`t support true normal, nor parallax / relief mapping on architecture surfaces (= segments). I can understand this argument, as FPSC was for a long time really not capable to have shadered segments at all, I tried myself during 2007 and 2008 and failed. Bond1, one of the most creative and dedicated members of the TGC community and creator of various commercial model packs, came up with a solution 2 or 3 years ago, and I incorporated the routines into my work. Later, when I learned shader coding, I tweaked the existing ones. Basically FPSC is now capable of having ALL shader effects imaginable on ALL surfaces. But the good men couldn`t have known that.

The second one was a little bit more detailled in accusation.

To cut his doubts short, I`ll list them bold / italic:

"FPSC Games never look like that:


...they look like that:"


Reply:
This was true in 2006 and 2007 and it`s still true when absolute beginners try their first creations. But if you take a look at Euthanasia or Thanataphobia, both FPSC games that can be found here at IndieDB


(Thanataphobia)

Then you will see that evolution has gone far. And we`re pushing it further now.

"When you take a look at the lightsourcing, especially the light casted by the desk lamp and the shadows projected by the statuette and the cover of the lamp, it`s clearly visible that this is not only no FPSC game, it`s no game at all. It looks like raytraced / prerendered and then photoshopped.


Also the reflections on the water with refraction calculation seem to be too exact for a realtime 3D-engine."

Reply: Bullshit. We have very small levels compared to UDK-generated open-world games, so we can afford to put a by far more detailled lightmap in without flooding our game with LM data. FPSC has had a very sophiscated static lightmap renderer for the past few years, it`s only a matter of putting the right settings in. This is nothing but a 95% of possible LM quality prerendered LM with a Lm texture size of 256*256. Nothing special, but it looks really great walking around in such an area. And the reflective water is a pretty new feature in FPSC, and we tweaked it to the max to make it useful in our games without affecting the performance too much. It takes down 40% of the fps right now, and I`m still not satisfied with that dropdown.

As you will also see in further videos and playable demos, everything is not only 100% real, it`s also non-directed. And that`s also an important point.

What does that mean?

You`ll often wonder (or perhaps you already stopped wondering) why the game you are playing never looks the same (in 99,9% of all cases by far worse) than the fancy screenshots you have seen online or in your favorite gaming magazine. I have been with huge companies in the past, and I can tell you that when it comes to AAA titles, you`ll NEVER see in official screenshots

I would say, there are 5 categories of Screenshots:

1. 100% raw & random: Screenshot captured with a random routine throughout playign the game, not edited, not polished.
2. Selected screenshot: The player plays the game as he would anyway, but in certain areas he takes a position that makes the landscape or environment looking more impressive, he tries to trigger as spectacular combat scenes as possible before capturing.
3. Directed / cheated Screen: A PR / Marketing guy defines what they want to see. The tester cheats and summones via console everything in order to satisfies those demands and then they direct the situation. Monsters are frozen in certain animation states and put where they would never appear ingame e.t.c. These screens are also often heavily polished and manipulated in PS to enhance colors e.t.c.
4. Partly faked screen: Screens that ere not even taken ingame as shown. Most often gifted Photoshop gurus take together the best parts from different screenshots from cat 2) and cat 3) and put together something fancy, most of the time accompanied with flashy lens flares.
5. Total fake: A Max / Maya Renderer with the HighPoly Models in HighPoly Environments, with some Photoshop Motion effects, perhaps inserted Hud to make it look more like a game.

Most of the screens you see in Magazines and online that are pushed out by the PR departements by the publishers, are from section 3. and 4., in 2D Adventures also cat. 2.

Only few publishers dare to put out total fakes anymore, and when they do, they declare it as "Artwork" or "HD renderer" for magazine covers.

"So, Ivan, what are your screens?"

I believe that a screenshot should reflect what the players really can see and WILL see ingame. Therefore we use 1 & 2. And the only thing that is polished is that we sharpen by 10% in Gimp IF the screenshot has been rescaled and has lost sharpness due to that.

What you see is what you get.
Promised!

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stupidgamedev
stupidgamedev

Lol that's definitely fpsc hahaha, who ever told that well errrr... Hahaha funny... They always down fpsc games, what they didn't know is that the engine is good it just depends upon the user. And I 100% agree that the screenshots are fpsc taken..

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Elementalist
Elementalist

I'm kind of curious whatever happened to FPSC-DX10? When it was first announced/came out it looked pretty neat, with graphics that at least touched at Unreal Engine 3 capabilities (graphics, not necessarily optimization or other features, also Unreal Engine 3, not 3.5+). But it never seemed to really catch on (I'm sure partially because at the time, DirectX 10 capable cards had not really penetrated the market).

Any feedback on that?

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Serygala
Serygala

I take that one, FPSC X10 turned out to be less powerful than X9 and less supported by the community so the support from TGC has been dropped.

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IvanErtlov Author
IvanErtlov

FPC X10 was a quite interesting piece of software, I bought it, worked with it and even modded it for some time. However, it had certain flaws:

1. You needed a overwhelming GFX card to make it working well, and by that I mean a geforce 8800 during times when this card was the best and most expensive on the market. I had a GF 8600 then and it was really on the lowest sysreq range of X10. When X10 was released, only a few people could create games or play them.

2. Although the GPU instancing allowed for a great amount of shadered enemies running around, the architecture (segments) rendering was pretty slow. Open worlds were still out of the question, and even in in indoor locations you had lower poly possibilities than with X9. You would have to add all details necessary via Shader / Textures, and only few of the people working on FPSC have the possibilities to do THAT.

3. When it turned out that several of the X10 features will be included in X9 via Code migration, many X10 user went back to x9. The annoucnement that X10 users will get the X9 license for free was the last nail in the coffin.

Today, a decently modded and re-written FPSC can beat out X10 in all key features and optics.

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stupidgamedev
stupidgamedev

Yep, very much agree with that one. What more can I say you break it all down. =)

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SPY-maps
SPY-maps

interesting part of text IvanErtlov!!
i did play your demo and i can say that it does look like the screens shown, so, no fake at all!!
it fact you could see those 2 comments as compliments, because they say in fact that your game looks so great that it couldn't be made with that engine. it is great to see that the FPSC engine did come so far, now the AI and then it will be a 100% successful engine.

i think this game will go a long way, considering all the hectic it is causing now, early in the dev stage!!

keep up the great work!

leon

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IvanErtlov Author
IvanErtlov

Gwih, the demo you played is still inferior compared to how the game looks now ;)

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