Feel free to get technical. I'd like to hear it.
Sure, but I warned you!
One of the biggest limits on the visuals in games right now are consoles. Just as much because excessive work needs to be put into the console versions in order to match modern expectations as the limit they place on art. Making ultra high resolution textures and then downscaling them doesn't look as good as making textures targeted for a specific lower resolution, so we'll automatically be stuck with whatever the consoles can handle in that area. Fortunately for meshes and polygon density making ultra high poly meshes and then reducing them
is how it's done. Often the details lost from the reduction are used for the normal map. But with Direct X11 and the idea of displacement maps the original higher polygon meshes can be stored and reproduced without a lot of trouble, so we'll have that.
Another limiting art factor is the construction of the world itself. Variety in the textures used for a given place, how many models and their variety can be used at once, how many npc's will be onscreen at once. All will be limited by the console, they'll only be making one world. Which is why I've repeated that the visual target would be somewhere within the realm of nice looking open world console games. That being said there are things that can be done for the pc. Write once, apply everywhere. This would mostly be limited to shaders or "effects" as most people might term them.
As for basic technology that everything can use.
This is almost ever white paper (lots of math) from http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2010/. The talk from Crytek (Crysis 2, etc.) on making sure deferred rendering works on consoles and better texture compression (meaningbetter looking textures without using more ram) is something the folks at Bethesda might appreciate. Essentially they lower the amount of color in a texture for better compression, then expand it back to it's original using a shader.
Of course http://www.crytek.com/cryengine/presentations page has all of Crytek's publication's. Their technique for 3d (stereo) could bring Skyrim to 3d both on consoles and the pc with relatively minimal cost. Essentially they're taking the single viewpoint you render normally (what you see), turning it to simulate what the other eye can see, and then filling in the blank spot that the first eye couldn't see.
That and their implementation of virtualized textures, while not up to what Carmack accomplished, could still help a lot. Essentially allowing only the parts of a texture you see to sit in the RAM, though only for terrain if memory serves. Normally the entire texture is stored in ram, even the parts you can't see (and is thus essentially wasted space.)
I'm also looking forward too GDC 2011 and http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-halo-reach-tech-interview review of how they managed dynamically take 3d models and turn them into impostors. Essentially taking an entire model and turning it into a 2d image (think of the leaves that turned with you in Oblivion). But since they're far away they don't turn that much and it's hard to notice.
And advanced, pc pc only effects:
The same guy that was in charge of making Red Dead Redemption look so stunning on consoles worked with a bunch of other people to come up with a way to display dozens, or hundreds, of point lights (think candles, fireballs, etc.) with soft shadows at once. A link to screenshots http://www.wolfgang-engel.info/blogs/?p=141 though of course Bethesda will have to shell out $60.00 or whatever it costs for GPU Pro 2. Still, just about every light in the game could have a shadow.
There was, at one point, a paper describing all the Direct X10 effects shown http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/52320 but my googlefu seems unable to find it. Anyway, for rain they essentially point a camera at the ground to get a texture of what falling rain might "see". Then they project a shader that makes things look "wet" (making the texture darker and more reflective) onto that area. As for the shiny god rays, if I recall correctly they take the sun shadow map (a texture of what the sun can "see") and use Direct X10's geometry shader to dynamically create the same sort of godrays used in Fallout 3, shooting out from the sun.
Research is still not that advanced for Direct X10 or 11, as many triple A looking game companies still have their attention on consoles. But of course http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfbT1aWjM64&feature=channel has done things simply to show off their new video cards.
» Wed Mar 17, 2010 11:34 pm 
