Alright, here it is:
What is your favorite graphical effect used this generation?
To start off, I'll say mine is Screen Space Ambient Occlusion. Really gives a lot of weight and grounding to objects you see in game worlds.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
I love to see a game that has a good lighting system. I really don't like the visual style of adding a bloom effect to everything like a lot of games do. I realize Alan Wake isn't even out yet but it is a great example of a great lighting system. Crysis and HL2 also have fantastic lighting as well.
When you get light to absorb or bounce off different surfaces they way they are supposed to I think it adds a lot to the overall visual quality. Shiny skin is the worst thing ever, people don't glow.
A great way devs get skin to look real is by using sub-surface scattering. It mimics the way light particles get reflected and absorbed under the topmost layers of an object or human body. Much better than any mapping (parallax / normal / bump). I'm pretty sure SSS is used in Uncharted, Crysis, and a few others I can't recall at the moment. I'm pretty sure that's the effect that Ted is driving at here. Although the reference to Alan Wake is more regarding dynamic world lighting and dynamic shadows, which play a great part in creating the proper atmosphere for the type of game that Alan Wake is. To this day, I am still befuddled as to why monolith isn't giving FEAR a dynamic shadowing system...doesn't make any sense for a first person horror game to not have one.
I would have said SSAO but since you said it ill say Parralax Occlusion mapping, Takes a 2d Flat Texture and incorporates Occlusion methods to make the texture actually appear 3-D and react to the angle and distace the camera is looking. Kinda Like DX11's Tesselation But with no additional Vertex/Geometry data
I think Perfect Dark used it heavily, And i know Crysis Does :)