What does it take to make more interactive environments on the xbox 360

[Neb]

CryEngine 2 does all of that. Extremely well too. I don't know if its in the game or not but its possible to create some incredible wind effects in the editor that interact with everything, trees, grass, objects, smoke, water etc... You can even create hurricanes that will rip trees right out of the ground.

It is all in the game, and i am not talking about small amounts of it either... unless 4-6 hurricanes are classed as little.... at the same time

 

[Hazuki Ryu]

gears of war + a lot of others use precalculated lighting, thus if u could sudden destroy a wall youre gonna be left with its shadow lying on the ground
would would look terrible. the only way is to have a dynamic shading method which typically take quite a bit more performance to achieve

Oh that sucks is halo 3 engine also based on the same lighting technique?

 

[zed]

Oh that sucks is halo 3 engine also based on the same lighting technique?

yes i believe halo3 also uses lightmaps for the majority of things, perhaps the characters/cars etc are using shadowmaps or projected shadow textures.

shadowmaps are fast + look good (but only if the object or the lights dont move), by switching over to a more unified shading approach (so u can have destructable environments) is gonna cost geow2 a performance hit.
from what ive seen of the videos/screenshots drakes fortune/alan wake seem to have more of a unified approach

 

[Hazuki Ryu]

yes i believe halo3 also uses lightmaps for the majority of things, perhaps the characters/cars etc are using shadowmaps or projected shadow textures.

shadowmaps are fast + look good (but only if the object or the lights dont move), by switching over to a more unified shading approach (so u can have destructable environments) is gonna cost geow2 a performance hit.
from what ive seen of the videos/screenshots drakes fortune/alan wake seem to have more of a unified approach

How high would be the cost of that change any idea? like measured in fps or % something.

 

[Mobius1aic]

CryEngine 2 does all of that. Extremely well too. I don't know if its in the game or not but its possible to create some incredible wind effects in the editor that interact with everything, trees, grass, objects, smoke, water etc... You can even create hurricanes that will rip trees right out of the ground.

And then there's the nuke effects...

Don't get me wrong, FC2 looks very good aswell but and don't think its particulary beyond Crysis in terms of interactivity and environmental effects.

Ooh that's right, I completely forgot about Tornadoes! But except for them, were there really any other wind effects of sort? And what about fire spreads and what not? Honestly I don't want to see CryEngine 2.0 get trumped in anyway............especially how Ubisoft took such a great property as Far Cry and started pooping them out. Crytek would've never wanted to see it that way.

 

[flipswitch]

What's more expensive on the GPU. Stencil or shadow maps? Saints Row uses stencil shadows for just about everything ( and they are of good quaility) and shadow maps for the tress. You can get up to 3-4 shadows of the one object ( moon light,street lights and car's headlights) GTA IV on the other hand looks to be using pretty low res shadow maps.Actually, from the latest videos they appear to be the static. can anyone confirm this?

About destructable environments, don't forget red faction 3 is in the works.I didn't like the series much myself, but I know there are a few fans out there.

 

[Neb]

Ooh that's right, I completely forgot about Tornadoes! But except for them, were there really any other wind effects of sort? And what about fire spreads and what not?

The vegetation is affected by wind effect, e_foliage_wind_activation_dist= in the sys_spec_physics file. Though nice looking fire in Crysis it doesn't spread like in Far Cry 2.

GTA IV on the other hand looks to be using pretty low res shadow maps.Actually, from the latest videos they appear to be the static. can anyone confirm this?

Yeah pretty low res but I dont think it does use static shadows, unless the game wont have day/night cycle.

 

[Hazuki Ryu]

I guess we can blame GTA4 being a multi-platform for those issues?
Saints was only for xbox right?

What game engine do you guys think would be better to have destructible/interactive envoironments (other than source)?

 

[pjbliverpool]

Ooh that's right, I completely forgot about Tornadoes! But except for them, were there really any other wind effects of sort? And what about fire spreads and what not? Honestly I don't want to see CryEngine 2.0 get trumped in anyway............especially how Ubisoft took such a great property as Far Cry and started pooping them out. Crytek would've never wanted to see it that way.

You can definatly have wind (without tornadoes) in the editor but I haven't played the game so couldn't speak to that. I don't know about spreading fire either, at least not over foliage but I have seen fire spread across oil slicks (with the slicks themselves spreading acriss the ground).

 

[Hazuki Ryu]

I have been looking at Battlefield: Bad Company vids on gametrailers.com I'm really impressed with it not only the graphics look very nice but the destruction is amazing.

 

[AlNom]

Gosh, you two are making me hook up my xbox again to play it. (I wish I could find the second game )

 

[Hazuki Ryu]

Gosh, you two are making me hook up my xbox again to play it. (I wish I could find the second game )

And making me wanting to buy the game lol I'd have to buy an xbox too to play it you guys are terrible wish they would make that game compatible with the 360

 

[Hazuki Ryu]

The only answer that i could came up with is even better animations better AI more interactivity with everything, then i thought is that possible on the 360? What kind of resourses does it use?

I think this 3 things would really make more difference in the game than even higher resolution textures, shadows or higher polygon counts and use something thats not the gpu for doing it am i wrong?

Looks like this wishes of mine are going to be granted http://www.gametrailers.com/player/30824.html

 

[repi]

Would it take more processing power on the CPU or it's all about the programers wanting to do it?

I'm not sure if this phisics and destructible/interactive environments are connected to the CPU only that was just a guess, I would like to know more about this.

Are you talking about single-player or multi-player environments/game? It's a huge difference. For single-player games you are limited more by the raw HW constraints (CPU, GPU & memory) and efficiency of your engine. While in multi-player games the single biggest issue for interactive environments is network bandwidth and latency, everything else becomes secondary additional problems (wrt to interactive environments).

 

[Hazuki Ryu]

Are you talking about single-player or multi-player environments/game? It's a huge difference. For single-player games you are limited more by the raw HW constraints (CPU, GPU & memory) and efficiency of your engine. While in multi-player games the single biggest issue for interactive environments is network bandwidth and latency, everything else becomes secondary additional problems (wrt to interactive environments).

I was thinking more about single player xbox live is not prepared to handle that at least i dont think it is unless they start making public servers instead of gamers hosting everything.

 

[catisfit]

I mean all types of envoironment not only big ones like crysis.

Do u guys think that Gears of War 2 could mantain the same graphical quality of the first one while having alot more interactive environments?

If by interactive you mean destructible, as in see a wall, tree, house and blow a hole in it or raze it to the ground, then there are two issues. The first is of memory. Everything you do needs to be stored somewhere, so indiscriminate destruction rapidly uses memory as you have to store all the damage that has been done and the new models that are generated as debris or whatever.

Secondly, you're going to be generating more polygons, so either the game will suffer slowdown, or the levels have to be designed with a budget each frame to account for any polygon/detail increases which take place. So let's say in GeOW case, either everything gets uglier to save on poly counts and memory to allow the destruction, or destruction causes the game to begin to stutter.

There's also a hit on the physics system etc if you're going to realistically model the debris, but not so much.

You can special case it (i.e. have a set number of 'debris' objects spawned whenever something happens) but players see through this quite quickly, as every destruction looks the same.

If you're taking this destructible environment online, then you have to transmit all of this data to every player, things could get out of hand very quickly. That's why truly destructible environments are a rarity, and that's before we even go into the whole "what does it add to the gameplay/how to we prevent the player doing something unexpected and ruining our scripting etc" arguments...

 

[Hazuki Ryu]

If by interactive you mean destructible, as in see a wall, tree, house and blow a hole in it or raze it to the ground, then there are two issues.

By interactive don't mean only destructible, in the first gears of war for example there were some chairs tables and other very light objects that should move if we touched them and didn't I mean that kind of interactivity too not only destructible.

 

[Geoson]

I think it's possible but not to the same extent. It is because the 360 doesn't boast as much RAM as the PCs do. Again, the CPU and GPU are powerful enough to run the game but the major bottleneck is the RAM size. I wish MS would've put 1GB RAM at least in their 360s. Same thing for PS3. But we will see, I mean devs can find a way out, by using streaming.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Battlefield Bad Company is doing destruction in a big way, so we'll see in the not too distant future.

 

[Mobius1aic]

Battlefield Bad Company is doing destruction in a big way, so we'll see in the not too distant future.

Judging by some of the videos I've seen they're obviously chopping the draw distance down via fogging I guess to try and save on some video use memory and prevent frame stuttering.