[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Is photorealism the goal? ( was Ray traced environments)

[Tess Snider]

On 4/17/07, Jeffrey Kesselman <jeffpk at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thing is, depth of field is an artifact of *photography*, not of human
> vision.  Thus it actually makes the game look more cinematic but less
> real.

Human vision does, indeed, have depth-of-field!  You just generally
aren't aware of it, because whatever you're interested in is always
in-focus.  That is, unless you need glasses. :)

There are a couple of differences between visually focusing on
something, and photographically focusing on something.  The most
important one to consider, for our purposes as game developers, is
that visual focus is controlled by the viewer, but photographic focus
is a passive experience.  Photographic focus is used by the
photographer to draw the eye into a part of a scene, and to soften
distracting elements in other parts of the scene.

Obviously, we don't want to wrest control of the focus from a player
who is in the middle of playing a game.  So, cinematic focus should
only be used for cut scenes.  Some developers have experimented with a
sort of procedural or situational depth-of-field.  This *can* work
under some circumstances, but it should be used judiciously.  One
place where it works well, for example, is when a player zooms the
camera on a character in Little Big Planet.  It is clear, in that
case, that the player wants to focus on the character in question, so
the background isn't very important.