This game looks MILES ahead of the rest of the Xbox 360 games I looked at. BTW, Battlefield 2, and several other games for the Xbox 360 are at the mercy of the "Jaggies" as well. I can post pics if you like. ;-)
WTF? There is NO way to tell if a game is prerendered or not from a screen shot. That was a real dumb thing to say. Don't you think it's possible to render something with a little less datail to look convincing? Jesus Christ. OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK There is no way that's real time. Honestly.
sorry im terrible at explaining things...in the pictures it looks like they are using a heavy amount of normal mapping. normal mapping leaves you with the blocky outlines...right? displacement mapping could get rid of that blocky outline, because displacement maps add polygons to a model? i was thinking that some prosses of depth-adaptive tessellation on displacement and normal mapped objects would fix that problem. i get that the lowpoly model is the base, im just thinking they could hide it better...i dont know...it just seems to me that increasing the polycount and/or detail in relationship to distance and focus would help a lot.
As I understand it, Normal maps are just higher poly models layered over the lower poly ones, with the lower poly ones used for collision detection. In the case that this is true, then normal mapping would allow them to get rid of the edges for the most part. But then again, I havn't actualy messed with normal mapping myself yet, and as such could be completly off on how it works.
You pretty much have it right. You could call normal maps a 3D version of bump mapping. Where bump mapping deals with single degree perturbation (i.e. depth), normal mapping covers XYZ perturbation. It doesn't add any polygons, so it still has the drawback that the edges can look blocky if the object has a low polygon count. Maybe getting this degree wasn't a waste of time and money after all... :-D
