Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Motion Blur

cliffski

After a few minutes playing Arm-A II today, it was obvious that camera-motion-blur is really cool, and I needed to get on with putting it into GSB. Half a day of monkeying around with poor documentation and I have it in and working, and togglable etc. It needs some fiddling to get it right still. The nice side effect is that when a big explosion makes the camera shake, the blur kicks in automatically. You can’t really tell with a small jpg, but it’s quite a nice effect in motion. Of course it does have a drawback, in that if you freeze the game in mid-shake-blur and then move the camera, everything is blurred, because you were near the explosion when it happened. I think thats quite acceptable tbh.

I also got some more optimising done today, which means I can consider adding in a few more gratuitous effects for peoples whose gaming PC’s are as good or better than mine, and want the game to look as gratuitous as possible :D

8 thoughts on Motion Blur

  1. I’m weird about shakiness and effects on the ‘camera’.

    You’re the viewer in this scenario, but to make it more interesting, especially in movies, they’ll put in lots of shake or blur or whatever. This can make a scene more interesting or it can make you realise you’re watching a movie or playing a game, rather than being immersed in it.

    Children of Men (great film set in the UK, world is in tatters in the near future) went too far with their shaky, documentary style camera. In one shot the camera is following the main character, totally believable, then suddenly blood hits the camera lens. I recall being in the cinema and realising I was watching a film. Ruined it.

    Anyway, effects like this can be cool, but why? Is there a camera watching the battlefield or is the effect just be added to make it look cool? If it does make it better – great; but me, I prefer a good reason why it’s there.

    Rant over.

  2. indeed, the effect is a bit ‘gratuitous’, but that makes it all the more justified here :D
    All these are graphical options you can turn on and off, as desired.

  3. So what do you think of ArmA II ? I’m curious because it’s made by some Czech guys, like me…

  4. I really like arma-II in terms of features and ideas and scope, but Jesus Christ guys, learn to optimise your graphics engine! Compared with COD-4 it does *not* look vastly better, yet runs at about a quarter the speed (at best).
    Hopefully they will improve the performance in the next patch, but increasingly developers seem to assume everyone has $2,000 gaming PCs and assume that by the time they ship, hardware will be faster.
    lazy lazy thinking :D

  5. I like that you’re taking the time to implement all this code and letting the user decide whether it gets used or not :)

    Keep it up, the picture makes me want to see the blur in motion!

  6. Yeah, I figured since the title has ‘gratuitous’ in it, then anything is allowed.

    Needless to say, looking forward to playing this…on the Mac! :)

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