Red Dead Redemption‘s world is in a new time-lapse film that makes it hard to discern what’s real and what’s not.
Aside from setting 2010 sales records and getting a slew of DLC, Red Dead Redemption is making even more waves. This time, the game’s world is featured in an amazing time-lapse movie that is, for lack of a better word, stunning in its realism.
The movie was created by Digital Foundry (which has done other such videos based on games like Assassin’s Creed II, Fallout 3, and Crackdown), and it certainly adds a lot of fuel to the fire that is the “videogames as art” debate. While Red Dead Redemption uses the same RAGE engine that Grand Theft Auto IV did, the sheer amount of detail in the natural environment is jaw-dropping. This, combined with an astounding draw distance, often makes it hard to tell this virtual world from the real one.
For Digital Foundry, creating this movie was exceptionally challenging. “Putting this video together required… patience,” the group explained. “A full 24-hour cycle in-game amounts to an hour of real time, but you need to record more than that to ensure you get a full uninterrupted capture of the crucial dawn and sunset periods.
“As just one minute of HD capture footage usually weighs in at over 1GB, we opted to capture at just one frame per second, massively reducing the space requirement and requiring so little CPU that the workstation could be used for other things at the same time. 49 shots were taken in total, with 39 making their way into the final edit.”
While the sequences with buildings and people in them are easier to discern as CG environments, the ones featuring only natural settings look like they could have come straight out of a nature documentary. While Digital Foundry did a great job of capturing this footage, the real credit should go to Rockstar San Diego for creating such a beautiful &mdash and thoroughly convincing &mdash world.
Source: Eurogamer
