this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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Has the person who invented the depth of field effect for a video game ever even PLAYED a game before?
I mean, it works in... hmmm... RPGs, maybe?
When I was a kid there was an effect in FF8 where the background blurred out in Balamb Garden and it made the place feel bigger. A 2D painted background blur, haha.
Then someone was like, let's do that in the twenty-first century and ruined everything. When you've got draw distance, why blur?
Yes, it makes sense in a game where the designer already knows where the important action is and controls the camera to focus on it. It however does not work in a game where the action could be anywhere and camera doesn't necessarily focus on it.
Yup, or if they're covering up hardware deficiency, like Nintendo sometimes does. And even then, they generally prefer to just make everything a little fuzzy, like BotW.
It works for the WiiU games where Nintendo used it for tilt shifts. That's pretty much it
Well, not exactly, but they were described to him once by an elderly man with severe cataracts and that was deemed more than sufficient by corporate.
it works great for games that have little to no combat, or combat that's mostly melee and up to like 3v1. or if it's a very slight DOF that just gently blurs things far away
idk what deranged individual plays FPS games with heavy DOF though
Yeah, especially games with any amount of sniping. Instantly crippling yourself.
the problem with dilf is that you need to put the subject of your life in the middle
What is the depth of field option? When it's on what happens vs when it's off?
Side question, why the fuck does everything in IT reuse fucking names? Depth of field means how far from character it'll render the environment, right? So if the above option only has an on or off option then it is affecting something other than the actual depth of field, right? So why the fuck would the name of it be depth of fucking field??? I see this shit all the time as I learn more and more about software related shit.
No.
Depth of field is when backgroud/foreground objects get blurred depending on where you're looking, to simulate eyes focusing on something.
You're thinking of draw distance, which is where objects far away aren't rendered. Or possibly level of detail (LoD) where distant objects will be changed to a lower detailed model as they get further away.
Gotcha. Thanks🍻
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field
It's not "IT" naming. It's physics. Probably a century or few old. That's what they're trying to emulate to make things like more photographic/cinematic.
Same with almost all the other options listed.
In this context it just refers to a post processing effect that blurs certain objects based on their distance to the camera. Honestly it is one of the less bad ones imo, as it can be well done and is sometimes necessary to pull off a certain look.
When it's on, whatever the playable character looks at will be in focus and everything else that is at different distances will be blurry, as it would be the case in real life if your eyes were the playable character's eyes. The problem is that the player's eyes are NOT the playable character's eyes. Players have the ability to look around elsewhere on the screen and the vast majority of them use it all the time in order to play the game. But with that stupid feature on everything is blurry and the only way to get them in focus is to move the playable character's view around along with it to get the game to focus on it. It just constantly feels like something is wrong with your eyes and you can't see shit.
It's like motion blur. Your eyes already do that, you don't need it to be simulated...
For depth of field, our eyes don't automatically do that for a rendered image. It's a 2d image when we look at it and all pixels are the same distance and all are in focus at the same time. It's the effect you get when you look at something in the distance and put your finger near your eye; it's blurry (unless you focus on it, in which case the distant objects become blurry).
Even VR doesn't get it automatically.
It can feel unnatural because we normally control it unconsciously (or consciously if we want to and know how to control those eye muscles at will).
No, your eyes can't do it on a screen. The effect is physically caused by the different distances of two objects, but the screen is always the same distance from you.
You don't know what focusing on things is?
Yes, but you still get the blurry effect outside of the spot on the screen you're focused on.
Not in the same way. Our eyes have lower resolution away from the center, but that's not what's causing DoF effects. You're still missing the actual DoF.
If the effect was only caused by your eye, the depth wouldn't matter, but it clearly does.
Yeah I get it, I'm just saying it's unnecessary. If I need to see what's going on in the background, then my eyes should be able to focus on it.
There are very few scenarios where DoF would be appropriate (like playing a character who lost their glasses).
Like chromatic aberration, which feels appropriate for Cyberpunk, since the main character gets eye implants and fits the cyberpunk theme.
I'm not sure I agree. Just like Motion Blur, DoF is a real phenomenon, and we notice when it's absent. There are lots of good artistic reasons to use it.
But just like Motion Blur, it's really hard and costly to implement properly. Unless you have close-to-perfect eye tracking, it will be annoying because of what you describe. So until we've got that working well, having no DoF is much better.
to be fair you need it for 24fps movies. however, on 144Hz monitors it's entirely pointless indeed
My Dad showed me the Avatar game on PS4. The default settings have EXTREME motion blur, just by turning the camera; the world becomes a mess of indecipherable colors, it's sickening.
Turning it off changed the game completely.
Depth of field is basically how your characters eyes are unfocused on everything they aren't directly looking at.
If there are two boxes, 20 meters apart, one of them will be blurry, while aiming at the other.
Your example is great at illustrating how DoF is often widely exaggerated in implementation, giving the player the experience of having very severe astigmatism, far beyond the real world DoF experienced by the average... eyeball haver.
Put your finger in front of your face. Focus on it. Background blurry? That's depth of field. Now look at the background and notice your finger get blurry.