Sweeney's had a hard-on for software-based rendering for going on fifteen fucking years now and it hasn't ever led to anything. He's a smart guy for sure, but he really should know a lame duck when he sees one...and he just don't. Or won't. For whatever bizarre reason.& also if that was the case why would Tim Sweeney talk about going back 100% "Software" Rendering & using CUDA to do it on a GPU without using DirectX ?
Ahhh... Outcast.
Sweeney's had a hard-on for software-based rendering for going on fifteen fucking years now and it hasn't ever led to anything. He's a smart guy for sure, but he really should know a lame duck when he sees one...and he just don't. Or won't. For whatever bizarre reason.
Perhaps people need to define what they mean by "Software (Based) Rendering"? A lot of programmable solutions to rendering can be performed on the very programmable modern GPUs (eg. vertex prepass as described by Cerny), but that's not adhering to the principle of the software renderer wherein there are no hardware functions applied and processing is by generic computation units. We effectively have a middle ground.
Is their any info on The Witness for the PS4? I have a feeling that it's using Software Based Rendering & also didn't Flower for the PS3 use Software Based Rendering ?
I don't quite remember The Witness. Did a quick google. If it's a multi-platform game, then I doubt it will use extensive software rendering techniques. Where did you read The Witness tech info from ?
I remember Flower uses the SPUs to render the grasses and petals, which is basically everywhere (plus the wind controller physics). It is a beautiful title.
EDIT:
http://www.thatgamecompany.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2296
Read the link I posted above.
I haven't read any info on The Witness I just said I have a feeling that it will be using Software Based Rendering. I don't know why it's just the look of it that says to me Software Based Rendering, also why did multi-platform make you doubt it's using software rendering techniques?
& about Flower I think PSN games like that will be the type of games that we will see the most software based rendering in ,stuff like Minecraft but using Voxels will more than likely make it's way to the PS4 & Xbox 3.
I think you have misunderstood.
The video you linked to does not look like a voxel renderer to me in the traditional sense (ie, raytraced SVO) - it looks like a triangle rasterization based renderer where the triangle geometry is generated from a voxel scene (with grass/tree instances placed about, etc). It does look very nice, but I doubt it is a 'software' renderer.
[Edit] Yup, " voxel to polygon transformation pipeline" etc; http://voxelfarm.com/vfweb/engine.html
Also the term 'software based renderer' is so loose I don't really know where to begin. Please be more specific.
I expect the use of SPUs in Flower was almost certainly triangle setup and instancing, animation etc.
The video was a example of using voxels for a game like that I didn't check for the details on it but I'm still talking about Software based rendering, maybe I should have used Voxatron but I was just talking about a game like Minecraft using Voxels.
I expect the use of SPUs in Flower was almost certainly triangle setup and instancing, animation etc.
First, we divide the world into 256x512 cells. Each cell has 16 bytes of grass data for things like color, height, etc. Our artists specify most of the data, but we procedurally generate some stuff, too, like an ambient wind force based on Perlin noise. We don't store any data per grass blade, instead generating all the blade-specific attributes, such as position and orientation, based on seeded random numbers.
Shading is done per-vertex on the SPUs, so the vertex and fragment programs are just pass-throughs, lightening the load on the PS3's notoriously underachieving graphics card.
We frustum cull grass on a cell basis and calculate density per cell according to a highly voodooed version of 1 / (dist to camera). One trick is to draw the grass that is farther away, and therefore less dense, thicker. Grass in the distance is still screen space thinner than grass up close, but just not as much as it should be given realistic perspective. In practice, people don't notice that the thickness isn't exactly right, so we get away with less grass to cover the same amount of terrain.
For high detail wind effects (such as the wake left by the petal swarm, or the little disturbances caused by flowers growing), again, we pretty much just rely on the power of the SPUs. We have a "RippleBarn" containing 128 ripples. A ripple is a ring which has a thickness and a strength. Ripples push the grass they touch. We cull ripples on a grass cell basis, so not every single grass element is testing against all 128 ripples, but there are still a ridiculous number of tests going on, and the SPUs just eat right through them.
It's normal polygon renderer which uses irradiance caching for lighting.I don't quite remember The Witness. Did a quick google. If it's a multi-platform game, then I doubt it will use extensive software rendering techniques. Where did you read The Witness tech info from ?