Since that first beta-demo thing dropped I keep trying to temper my hype for this game, but aside from a slight eh @ controls then, it remains incredibly “got my 3rd eye locked on ya!!!” and I kinda. Can’t. Wait. Guess I should go and consume every bit of info released, or something.
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Re: the upscaling … the amount of computer-vision-driven behind-the-scenes post-processing that’s involved in all mobile photography is shocking. I don’t know for a fact how much of it is driven by AI, and to what degree, but it’s not too paranoid to assume that the most optimistic view is that this videogame upscaling is a parallel hobbyist track of research, and not a wild game of catch-up.
I don’t intend this to sound as alarmist as it does but the degree of artifact removal and detail recovery that’s necessary – and this is in a photoreal context, remember – to make an iPhone X picture look as good as it does is, at the very least, slightly uncomfortable.
Yet the ability to wring a fantastic image out of a shitty lens and a sensor smaller than a fingernail is super cool. I think my point is that we must maintain an up-to-date media literacy about what an image in 2019 is and how it is changed not just by the sensor but also by software.
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well, and it almost doesn’t matter, right? “AI” is basically an umbrella term for a black box operation performed by anything from “an SVM implementation” to “any feature of dedicated compute hardware that is not the main CPU” at this point
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The difference here is truly staggering.
tbh I think I might prefer this kind of process to any kind of fancy upscaling.
I wonder if my computer can handle PSX emulation + fancy crt shaders.
Are cellphone lenses and censors really not that good, though? Because I thought that’s where like half the money goes, in the top end phones.
Of course, some auto image processing can do a lot, if done well. I kind of doubt anyone is yet doing true AI/cloud assisted post processing. I would guess its probably more just some intelligently/carefully tuned auto post processing. Done right on the phone’s hardware/software.
Relative to mirrorless systems and SLRs they’re pretty bad, but the image processors in those tend to not be as state-of-the-art as those in phones (and you’re likelier to shoot in raw there anyway so I guess that’s why they don’t bother as much)
The Google Pixel line does and the difference is pretty staggering if you manage to load up the image before the server round trip, especially in low light. iPhones philosophically do not do any processing that can’t be done on device in real time so what you see in the viewfinder reflects what the final picture will actually look like.
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The development of the three Famicom Castlevania games has long been shrouded in mystery. Recently, a developer who was mentored by director/creator/programmer Hitoshi Akamatsu in the 90s began sharing memories of their conversations in a series of tweets. This developer, who worked with Akamatsu on the Playstation fishing game Tsuridou in the late 90s, happened to be a huge Castlevania fan and talked with Akamatsu at length about the series’ design and development, sharing bits and pieces over the last few years.
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Comments:
- Sometimes this thought creeps into my head that everything I love about castlevania 1, especially the precision and the tempo, was just a big accident, so it’s nice to know that it’s very much an auteur game with a lot of thought put into it
- Extremely heartening that 2 was made by the same guy, instead of a B-team like you might expect
- It turns out Tim was extremely on point with his assumptions about cv1’s developers intent in his action button review of bloodlines (iirc)
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It’s honestly pretty remarkable because that kind of vision and authorial intent seemed to me to be fairly rare in that era of game development, too.
The stuff about all the details with dracula’s death and what his second form is supposed to represent is kind of mindblowing. I wonder if IGA was even aware of all that during his run.
What happened to this guy? Did he just bow out after CV3?
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In the text it says that CV3 didn’t sell well so they demoted him to an attendant at a Konami Game station and then he quit.
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One of the really interesting takeaways for me here is that Konami seems to have a history of devs with extremely strong visions for games and then pushing them out.
I wonder if that’s why the Treasure folks left and founded their own thing?
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The translator says the guy and the subject met at “vingteum” in the late 90s but I’m sure that’s a mistranslation of vingt-et-un systems. It looks like the bass fishing games he worked on did come out in the US.
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yeah, I definitely get the impression of a corporate culture where management is so cynical that it’s a good place to get experience and maybe do some good work only if you have no intention of staying
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aren’t some konami devs still cleaning toilets?
I’d meant to mention, with recent convos on Retroarch and shaders - I started experimenting with supersampling in Vagrant Story, BoF III and Silent Hill - that smooth, authentic blended effect is mighty fine. Everything ends up just a step below the kind of definition/res I wanted to see during VS though, so I didn’t stick with it. Combined with the right shaders it probably nails a certain ideal, I’ll def play something that way eventually.
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Nice to hear today (through a Kickstarter update) that Crypt Underworld is still progressing. I watched only about ten seconds of this video because I don’t want to spoil too much, but I liked what I saw in those ten seconds.
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PORT 3D WORLD YOU COWARDS
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