jetrii said:
There is very little difference between a FPS and TPS. In a TPS, the engine has to render an additional character that is fairly close to the camera and therefore requires higher resolution textures. Sure, in a FPS the character can get closer to a wall or whatnot, but the same can be said about games like GoW In which weapons can be zoomed in. personally, I don't think there is much of a difference, and if there was, I think the exact same game would be easier to render in first person compared to third person. |
This doesn't make much sense to me.
In a TPS like Uncharted or GeOW I'd estimate that the main character has approximately the angular size of a human caught by a camera floating between 2 and 10 meters behind them (further in some scenes, closer up for over-the-shoulder shooting etc).
Thus we can optimize for _this particular model_ to be _very_ detailed, but it is rare for any other model to be much nearer to the camera than the main character, because camera moves away or the interposing object is faded to avoid occlusion.
In an FPS when you're crouching behind cover or peeking from behind a wall you're like 40 cms away from the surfaces.
Being a coder I trust that you are familiar with the explosive nature of the tg(x) function involved in the projection, thus you know that 0.5 meters is a world and half different from 2 meters, whereas 2 meters is not that different from 8 meters (4x factor each time).
This means that in the FPS you're incredibly more exposed to texture resolution and geometry details issues.
Maths aside (sorry but it's my own field of expertise), the proof is in the pudding:
- look at say 30 screenshots from various TPS and the same from various FPS, then try to find let's say a vertical surface 1.5 meters high and look at the view angle (=>pixels) that is necessary to represent them at various distances
- take the example of Uncharted, that is a _beautiful_ game, but that swapped highly detailed model of Drake for a less detailed one when transitioning from cut scene (on-screen sizes closer to those of say a Heighast in KZ2) to TPS gameplay. This was declared from Naughty Dog themselves, btw... can't look for source right now.
- look for really near (FPS-like ie 1 meter away) close-ups of some GeoW enemies: again a beautiful game, but in those close ups the texture work with an "etched" style made to simulate low-poly geometry becomes apparent, with texture distorsion and blur.
