“The Wrestler”
All I can think of when looking at this guy is wrestler-turned-’actor’ Tor Johnson in Ed Wood’s Night Of The Ghouls. Amid all the furore over the dev build of Dead Island going out as retail – one moment while I chuckle to myself – plenty of videos turned up on YouTube ripping into the game’s ‘abandoned thirdperson mode’. These people clearly have no idea what a world model is. What they will have an idea of, though, is how blasted hard it is to get any kind of thirdperson shot from the game that doesn’t resemble the ring entrance of Luke and Butch, The Bushwhackers. (Note the callback to the opening wrestling reference there. No half measures on this site, thanks.) Tools and tricks: free-camera; modified bloom, saturation, fog; 2160p rendering; custom FOV; antialiasing (2xMSAA + injected FXAA w/ texture pre-sharpening); timestop.
“Blood Bowl”
Tools and tricks: free-camera; modified bloom, saturation, fog; 2160p rendering; custom FOV; antialiasing (2xMSAA + injected FXAA w/ texture pre-sharpening); timestop.
“First Sign Of Trouble”
Tools and tricks: free-camera; modified bloom, saturation, fog; 2160p rendering; custom FOV; antialiasing (2xMSAA + injected FXAA w/ texture pre-sharpening); timestop.
“The Beach”
A great man reminded me the other day that a bad workman blames his tools. Is Techland’s Chrome Engine bad? ‘Picture says no. Is Dead Island really oddly configured? Four hours of tweaking says I’m just about ready for bed, where I will dream about killer bikini zombies and Notepad. Luckily, just about all the obvious features of Chrome’s renderer are exposed through various scripts. So, I’ve had to tweak bloom, (de)saturation, specular, fogging and a few other things I’ve forgotten already. Then, in a fit of frustration over the game’s draw distance and LODs, I ran my finger along the F-keys and discovered that F8 (in the original dev build, at least) uncaps the former and sets the latter to maximum for the entire scene. That leaves a combination of driver level multisampling, aggressive FXAA, texture pre-sharpening and sharp Lanczos downsampling to fix the game’s grungy image quality. I like it when they play hard to get.
“Twin Peaks”
Tools and tricks: unrestricted camera, 2160p rendering, antialiasing (injected ‘ultra-quality’ SMAA), HUD removed in Photoshop.
“Let The Right One In”
I’m still getting to grips with actual zombie shots, hence the trouble-free nature of these first few. Tools and tricks: original dev build, restored developer menu, free camera, AI disable, custom FOV, 2160p rendering, antialiasing (2xMSAA + injected SMAA).
“Wave Zero”
Is Dead Island really that bad? I don’t know, I haven’t properly played it yet. But I’d like to. I like that feeling of having to over-kill the zombies – though maybe that’s ’cause I was smacking them with the oar of a canoe. And I think I can put up with half the NPCs looking like Poser porno models. Not that I’d know what such a thing looked like, of course. Tools and tricks: original dev build, restored developer menu, free camera, AI disable, custom FOV, 2160p rendering, antialiasing (2xMSAA + injected SMAA).
“Formulaic”
Tools and tricks: in-game free camera tool, antialiasing (in-game 2xMSAA + high-quality in-game FXAA), timestop, custom FOV, 2160p rendering.
“Battlefield: Earth”
Ah, object motion blur. Takes me back to the days of Dead Or Alive 4 and Fight Night: Round 3. Only here it’s not fists and feet but… whatever those are. I’m going to call them Optiballs. I did say I wouldn’t post any more of the Effect until I could post all the Effect, so I’m going to cut my losses and point you to this set on Flickr which I’ll put any further demo stuff in. Tools and tricks: Gibbed’s ME3 Coalesced tool, 2160p rendering, antialiasing (in-game FXAA + injected SMAA), free camera, custom FOV, timestop.
“Finish The Flight”
What you’re looking at here is a scene from Christian Bale-introducing coming of age movie Empire Of The Sun – a scene so iconic that you don’t even have to watch the movie. So iconic that it then became the intro to Hollywood WWII pastiche Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway. So damn iconic that I’m pretty sure it ended up in a Michael Bay movie or two (as much as any Michael Bay movie can be remembered). In fact, it’s now such a cliché that it qualifies for inclusion in a Mass Effect game. On a roll, ME3 then quickly shoves the kid in an air duct for a scene nabbed from The Chronicles Of Riddick: Assault On Dark Athena. Now, I love it when Mass Effect is inspired by other people’s sci-fi, but not when it’s designed by other people’s sci-fi videogames. I’m hoping this third one strikes the same agreeable balance as the second. Tools and tricks: Gibbed’s ME3 Coalesced tool, 2160p rendering, antialiasing (in-game FXAA + injected SMAA), free camera, custom FOV, timestop.
