Complaints about DOF/Blur/Bloom/HDR/Cholesterol etc.etc.

[CHB68 10]

Take a look at this two gunsights....same scenery

M16A4 ACOG

DMR

Well, my eyes suffered a lot playing ArmA 2 the last days, but for me the M16A4 looks blurry, but the DRM looks sharp. And take a look at this.

M1A2 Comander view

...and the same view from the gunner sight

[whisper 0]

agree.

i had to turn head bob down quite a bit and then was happy. the motion blur is great as when in real life turning your head things aren't sharp either.

really enjoy the effect.

edit - one note. when mucking around with my ati catalyst settings i found that disabling a few things made the game a lot sharper. on the ohterhand, enabling most of the catalyst settings + high shadows made everything blurry and i mean everything permanently. shadows normal fixed it for me.

Could you list the changes made in catalyst settings?

[Bad Pilot 0]

I am an HDR lighting, motion-blur and post-processing fanboy.

The screen display simulates your avatar's vision. If those were your eyes, you wouldn't be able to pick up fine details on anything as you spin around or sprint down the road. You might as well complain about a lack of shooting accuracy whilst running.

Turning blur off will be CHEATING against ppl with it on.

The head-bobbing is nuts and I must remember to turn that down somewhat. Sometimes I jig my head left and right just to keep in step with the bobbing.

[Kirq 0]

I didn't played the game yet but based on youtube vids I must say that I love motion blur and head bobbing effects. This and awesome equipement clacking sound while moving makes simple runing a very immesive experience.

[kegetys 2]

IIf those were your eyes, you wouldn't be able to pick up fine details on anything as you spin around or sprint down the road.

The fact that the object is moving on the screen and you cannot see it clearly because of that is enough to "simulate" this in my opinion. In real life your eyes do (or, mine at least do :P) a pretty good job at "image stabilization" and any shaking or turning of my head do not easily affect the blurriness of vision. I think, the eyes tend to always seek for some object to track and look into to minimize blurring*. As I mentioned earlier the effect is ok when the fps is high enough, but when the fps is lower the blurring becomes too excessive and the effect becomes annoying.

* This can be seen in real life when looking at sceneries to the side of you when traveling in a car. When you look at objects passing by at a small distance away, they do not appear very much blurred as the eyes constantly track the motion of the object to try to present a clear picture. If you look at something that is very close (such as the road surface right next to the vehicle) the eyes can no longer keep up with the speed of the motion and everything suddenly becomes blurred, but you need a rather fast relative motion for this to happen and I cant seem to do it by spinning my head for example, unless I by purpose avoid looking at anything.

edit: also, in-game you must always rotate the camera and thus get blurring to look around you (with the limited fov you can get with a monitor) but in real life you can look around at very wide angles by turning your eyes around only. I see zero blurring in real life when I use my eyes to look around, as the brain automatically seems to drop the blurred "frames" between the eye moving from one object to another.

Edited June 2, 2009 by Kegetys

[Scrub 0]

Yes, please make the head bob & blur optional, with server settings overriding. I probably need to turn down the head bob just a bit. Still like it, and the blur effect. IRL, the eyes pivot and lock on to something in the field of view, stabilizing the image. But when locating, turning the head, the blur is there. This is just like the float zone allows. I have the float zone at ~25% and this is pretty acceptable for me. HDR is certainly better in Arma 2, just needs a tweak.

[Alex72 1]

Talked to some friends of mine that has ARMA2 and they said they get motion sickness from paying as well. Even headaches. They like me arent youngsters anymore and it seems from what i see here should be optional in the settings.

My friends have head bobbing to minimal now after reporting huge motion sickness almost to the need of puking (it lasted even to the day after apparently) and it did get a bit better. But still they say they get a bit ill after playing some hours. So that should maybe be the motion blur while running.

I thaught from seeing screenshots that the motion blur (tunnel vision) only came when skydiving (freefall), and maybe small effect when driving at fastest speed, but not when running. Since we run all the time more or less when playing it will have effect on us. Also to note is that when we ARMA guys play - we play! For hours on end.

Would be bad if the community ends up having to eat motion sickness pills and headache pills just to play our favourite game wouldnt it. :dead: :)

Alex

[Commando84 0]

haha :D Stimpacks for Arma 2 fans should be made maybe :P

maybe a plastic box with the sound fx from starcraft when stimpacks are used :D

Wonder if motion sickness pills will remove the motion sickness felt by to much motion blur really? Any1 tested yet?

[cross 1]

IRL...your eyes and head work in sync to get your view to the desired direction immidiately...

ie..IRL..say you are looking at slightly left (330) and you want to look at a point at your right (090).

Now turn your head right fast, as well as using your eyes...

What you get is an an immediate clear focused picture of 090...now how much of the things did you see in between? Probably none...

It happens so fast in real life too that you miss 99 % of details if you turn your head fast as well as using your eyes...

Yet you get the details in the area between if you do scanning ;)

Edited June 2, 2009 by Cross

[twisted 127]

Could you list the changes made in catalyst settings?

sure man.

i am not near my pc now, but i do know disabling adaptive antiailaising (the option that anti aliases transparent textures) helped the most. so did making sure AA wasn't forced in any way (which made things look a little unfocused).

also set Catalyst AI down to performance level. not sure if this last tweak made any difference though.

[hoak 0]

I concur with everyone here that strongly dislikes defocused post-processing effects in games; they are also seriously flawed in terms of realism. Even DOF which some argue 'is realistic because we can only focus to one point/plane of DOF in reality' -- aren't evaluating this 'feature' in full-context of reality and the scale-render of reality on a flat projection.

While it's true we can only focus on one point in our real world depth of field, and only have objects in that plane 'in focus', we can change that focus in fractions of a millisecond, and it's under our control. Game DOF on the other-hand is on an flat anamorphically projected screen, and the game that incorporate DOF force your focus at a certain plane (you have no control), and do so taking orders of magnitude more time to do it.

Moreover, there is already a visual mechanic at work in human vision that emulates both DOF and Blur when viewing flat anamporphically projected 3D images, and it's easy to illustrate: focus intensely on any one letter at the center of this text mess on your screen, trying not to move your eyes. You'll notice all the text peripheral to the letter you're focused on is not clear; this is a visual phenomena that is actually almost 1:1 sale with real human DOF mechanics in both speed of acquisition, and peripheral range/depth when viewing flat projections inside a one meter distance (the distance most of us also sit from our displays).

Similarly if you move the page while staring at it, the letters will Bur, even negating display time constants to keep up, this flat projected Bur is actually more then you'll ever see actually turning your head in the real world, add display lag and you've got more Blur in games from get-go, before any post processing effect is added, then we experience in the real world due to head motion, or relative movement.

Lastly, and sadly many games sacrafice FSAA to offer these false and not-to-scale post processing effects; even if our thinking was completely irrational and magical and we pretended that DOF and Blur were 'realistic' and 'to scale', the presence of alias artifacting is far more dramatic, unrealistic, distracting and out of scale then any simple vision mechanics of focus.

:butbut:

Edited June 2, 2009 by Hoak

[volkov956 0]

as long as I can turn off

Motion Blur

Depth of Field

I will be happy ,I have yet to be able to recreate game dev's version of these things in real life in the field. Depth of field is really overdone in games or improperlly done.

AS long as 505 release has Disable as an option I will be happy I will deal with Overdone Bloom and Post Processing like Arma since it seems its the game lighting engine no real way of turning off even if its overdone.

[hoak 0]

Has there any indication that we will be able to turn off Motion Blur and DOF?

:butbut:

[whisper 0]

Well, Ohara wrote that they know their current HDR is not perfect and has room for improvement, that's the only indication I've seen so far

[scruffy 21]

Post #101

The sights have some effects, it's a small blur for rifles, grain filter for tank commander and color correction for gunner sights.

I removed the blur with a small addon, but not the grain/colorcorrection.

I already posted my opinion, but I thin Hoak put it better:

Post #111

Please make all blur an option, it's too much.

[CHB68 10]

The sights have some effects, it's a small blur for rifles, grain filter for tank commander and color correction for gunner sights.

I removed the blur with a small addon, but not the grain/colorcorrection.

"Danke" for the addon. I was just surprised that there is a blur effect in the M16 sight, but not in the DMR sight.

As for the Tank sight; I showed the commander sight only to have a color comparison to the gunner sight. For me the color of the gunner sight looks terrible and has to be corrected....with or without blur ;)

Have you ever seen the gunner sight of the AAV P7A1 ? Cruel is a compliment...

[bushlurker 45]

Hmmm.... As Placebo said earlier... multiple threads currently going on roughly the same topics.... Doubtles the mods will consolidate things...

I've posted earlier on roughly this topic, so I'm not going to repeat it here...

Heres a link to another thread with my comments which more properly belong here I guess...

http://forums.bistudio.com/showpost.php?p=1294433&postcount=7

B

PS - Wow! that was my 100th post!!! not bad for nearly 5 years on the forums, huh?? :D

Edited June 2, 2009 by Bushlurker

[CarlGustaffa 4]

72;1295106']Talked to some friends of mine that has ARMA2 and they said they get motion sickness from paying as well.

Does it work better with pirated games?

Sorry, simply couldn't resist :D

[Rista 0]

Cameras experience this sort of effect when you wave them around - human eyes DON'T! (well - ok. maybe a TINY bit) - same goes for headbobbing - your eyes track continually and your brain adjusts so it DOESN'T look like this in real life!

That's a good point. To me, the whole thing feels as if I'm watching a video of a camera attached to the soldier's head rather than giving me the feel of "being there". Not only it isn't really realistic, but it will also cause headaches and motion sickness to quite a few people. Just make it optional and everyone will be happy.

[=BIA=Freisar 10]

I hope option in future patch for turn off:

Bloom

DOF

Motion blur

Is not neccessary effect and is a good idea for low PC....

[MBot 0]

I concur with everyone here that strongly dislikes defocused post-processing effects in games; they are also seriously flawed in terms of realism. Even DOF which some argue 'is realistic because we can only focus to one point/plane of DOF in reality' -- aren't evaluating this 'feature' in full-context of reality and scale-render of reality of flat projection.

While it's true we can only focus on one point in our real world depth of field, and only have objects in that plane 'in focus', we can change that focus in fractions of a millisecond, and it's under our control. Game DOF on the other-hand is on an flat anamorphically projected screen, and the game that incorporate DOF force your focus at a certain plane, and do so taking orders of magnitude more time to do it.

There is already a visual mechanic at work in human vision that emulates all both DOF and Blur when viewing flat anamporphically projected 3D images, and it's easy to illustrate: focus intensely on any one letter at the center of this text mess on your screen, trying not to move your eyes. You'll notice all the text peripheral to the letter you're focused on is not clear; this is a visual phenomena that is actually almost 1:1 sale with real human DOF mechanics in both speed of acquisition, and peripheral range/depth when viewing flat projections inside a one meter distance (the distance most of us also sit from our displays).

Similarly if you move the page while staring at it, the letters will Bur, even negating display time constants to keep up, this flat projected Bur is actually more then you'll ever see actually turning your head in the real world, add display lag and you've got more Blur in games from get-go, before any post processing effect is added, then we experience in the real world due to head motion, or relative movement.

Lastly, and sadly many games sacrafice FSAA to offer these false and not-to-scale post processing effects; even if our thinking was completely irrational and magical and we pretended that DOF and Blur were 'realistic' and 'to scale', the presence of alias artifacting is far more dramatic, unrealistic, distracting and out of scale then any simple vision mechanics of focus.

:butbut:

Very good post!

[dracflamloc 10]

I completely agree with Hoak. I can't stand newer games because of this. And I refuse to believe that motion blur doesn't at least indirectly affect framerate, because at some point the computer has to calculate and render the *blurred* frame, hence taking a potentially rendered "real" frame away from computer. It *may* be slight or it may be a major hit, but with the steep requirements for this game, I think being able to turn off anything that could potentially help would be a major plus. Mathematically the frame-rate may stay the same, but as far as useful frames the human eye can see.. it definitely hurts.

At this point I can't see myself playing ArmA2. It gives me motion sickness after a while (and i can go on roller coasters literally a hundred times without feeling sick). Even if it didn't give me motion sickness the game just feels fake now. As Hoak said, having AA and a smooth overall FPS is much more realistic than needing a 75% fillrate, with jaggies everywhere and overdone motion blur and DoF effects.

Those effects IMO only make sense as a reaction to nearby explosions, wounding, etc and not just normal looking around and running. Also, since the motion blur affects lower FPS players even more than high, it adds an even larger disadvantage to low-fps players in multiplayer. They already have to deal with a less than desirable framerate, and now its harder for them to spot enemies, etc because their vision is blurred longer.

Please fix this BI.

Edited June 2, 2009 by dracflamloc

[sic-disaster 311]

What Hoak said.

Exactly what i have been saying since i played the first game involving this shitty 'graphical feature' which is totally unnecessary and totally unrealistic too.

I love ArmA 2 so far but the blurryness has got to go!

[sparks50 0]

Better to make it able to be turned off in options, some people actually like the blur.

[=BIA=Freisar 10]

I understand if any player like DOF, bloom and Motion blur , but is correct if player choose to be able turn on/off this graphic option.

And the gameplay not suffer this change.