I think your comment is wrong and perhaps speaks to your own visual senses than any factual effect.
There’s been so many advancements in the last ten years outside of raytracing. Better character motion, better character AI, spatial audio, audio materials, speech matching just off the top of my head.
Every single thing about games has gotten noticeably better for realism.
One only needs to watch a Digital Foundry video or a GDC talk to see the big uplifts.
10 years is a long time too and spans all the way back to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era. So your comment is nonsensical at best
character motion being the same old animations, just done/interpolated better
the only advancement I know of which got close to be implemented in games is https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation (I think Sebastian worked with EA or some other big company at some point) - still haven't played anything using this though
Firstly, we’ve been doing the “same old animations” for a very long time, and in most areas of content.
Secondly, they aren’t they same old animations, technologies to produce them are becoming higher precision, more efficient, and better in many ways.
Continuing on, the amount of work being poured into dynamic animation, IK, and the like is significant.
Various locomotion systems, including AI4Animation that you linked are becoming significant contributions. Though crazy you single that out as an exception, because it is also using the “same old animations” just a large unstructured set of them. But this work is a direct continuation of motion matching, which also works on large datasets of unstructured animations, and *has* shipped in quite a few titles, and is a very significant jump in how animation is done today.
There’s been so many advancements in the last ten years outside of raytracing. Better character motion, better character AI, spatial audio, audio materials, speech matching just off the top of my head.
Every single thing about games has gotten noticeably better for realism.
One only needs to watch a Digital Foundry video or a GDC talk to see the big uplifts.
10 years is a long time too and spans all the way back to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era. So your comment is nonsensical at best