Uncharted 4: A Thief's End [PS4]

[Laa-Yosh]

I believe they would ve made something even more impressive with a new brand engine, but that would just ve been a waste of ressources to spend and as the engine was mae specifically for the series or PS3 at the time they don't need a new engine before changing to a new IP maybe ? We ' ve seen the difference between AC Black Flag Engine and AC Unity.

I don't think it's right to compare the two cases.

Ubi's anvil engine needed a serious overhaul: the materials system, the lighting and the post processing all had to be upgraded to support physics based rendering with linear lighting and proper HDR. These new systems enabled a huge leap in the visuals.

ND's engine on the other hand was one of those that lead the introduction of these new systems; even Uncharted 2 has already had a linear lighting pipeline and they've been adding mostly finer or setting-specific features in UC3 and TLOU. So the perceived leap is perhaps not as great, but it's because they were ahead of Ubi years ago.
With UC4 they seem to be focusing on scale and speed (if they're still aiming at 60fps) while increasing overall detail thanks to the step up in hw resources. They're also sticking to a non-photorealistic art style which also helps them to stand out from the crowd.

 

[Graham]

It's really wonderful what they have achieved with this upgraded " Uncharted engine " with the PS4. I believe they would ve made something even more impressive with a new brand engine, but that would just ve been a waste of ressources to spend and as the engine was mae specifically for the series or PS3 at the time they don't need a new engine before changing to a new IP maybe ? We ' ve seen the difference between AC Black Flag Engine and AC Unity. There's somewhat a gap between the two in some areas. If I remember lots of devs since last gen are using Engines made from the previous gen. Guerilla did with KZ SF. I believe they have a new engine for their new RPG-scifi game. Same for Santa Monica n maybe they ll use GOW Ascension's engine ?
Can't wait to see what ND could do with a new brand engine specifically made for PS4.

It's naive to think that a large scale developer will create a new engine for a new game. Engine development for these projects is always an iterative process, you take your existing tech and adapt it to changing hardware and game requirements. Improving what you can and throwing out what no longer makes sense.
The most extreme case is when a developer switches to a different licensed engine, say, bioware going from UE3 to frostbite.

ND, Guerrilla, etc will never make a new engine from scratch for a large budget game. It just makes no sense financially and the end result will likely be worse as a result.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

the quality of the sub-surface scattering (assuming they are using this) raises the bar higher than anything else. Really stunning work here.

I still don't like how the game industry has messed up definitions here.

Subsurface scattering is a quite specific technique to render translucent materials, to calculate the effect of light bouncing around under the surface. There are multiple implementations for the tech but all of them are very computationally expensive, usually involving ray tracing of some sort.

Realtime renderers use different, more efficient and less expensive techniques to render translucency. But none of them are doing proper subsurface scattering, they're only approximations.

But to answer your question, yes there's skin translucency, and it's quite nice.


Another interesting point is that Final Fantasy Spirits Within has not used SSS or any other translucency tech, as it was not developed at the time. Which is why Dr. Sid works the best, as elder people's skin is less translucent and so the lack of the effect isn't as important.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

ND, Guerrilla, etc will never make a new engine from scratch for a large budget game. It just makes no sense financially and the end result will likely be worse as a result.

The other reason is that most of the advanced engines today are very close to being 'feature complete', as in they're doing the underlying math for shading and lighting properly, they have full shadowing, usually some sort of bounced lighting, they all have complex animation systems, streaming tech, and so on. Id's tech could be perhaps one where Rage or Wolfenstein didn't have a lot of these (like linear lighting and PBR) but I'm sure it's already been added for Doom 4.

The main issue is that many of these features have to use less computationally intensive approximations compared to offline rendering, which usually means lack of raytracing for GI, shadows, reflections and SSS and such, and also no proper volumetric particle rendering. Instead they're using shadow buffers, lightmaps and ambient occlusion, reflection maps or screen space reflections, alpha textured polygons for particles and so on. But most of the advancements here in the future are probably going to be about replacing these systems with more and more advanced ones.

However, as sebbi has mentioned, the introduction of GPU Compute has opened up an opportunity for far more efficient technology and this would require some more extensive rewrites to either parts of the renderer or perhaps all of it. But that's still only part of the entire engine.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Although, as I've already brought in offline rendering... There is of course a lot of academic and studio research on new techniques and approaches, which means CG is still a moving target.

For example there are possibilities to introduce changes to the rendering pipeline by moving to spectral colors from RGB, or rethinking shading which for now separates diffused and direct light reflections into diffuse and specular/reflection components. Like, even in PBR you use two separate models for dielectric materials (metals) and insulators (wood, cloth, skin etc). Maybe in the near future someone will come up with a truly unified model for this. It's actually getting a bit too complex for me to properly understand but once again, these are only going to introduce really fine steps in image quality and realism, as the current solutions are already very close to real life. On the other hand, changes like this could simplify content creation even further (one of the biggest 'unknown' gains of PBR), which is not to be understated.

 

[SumoSaki]

I still don't like how the game industry has messed up definitions here.

Subsurface scattering is a quite specific technique to render translucent materials, to calculate the effect of light bouncing around under the surface. There are multiple implementations for the tech but all of them are very computationally expensive, usually involving ray tracing of some sort.

Well it's what everyone is calling it right now as far as l can tell, l don't know if the gaming world use another definition.

 

[Nesh]

99% of all smoke effects this gen are and will be 2D still.

It sticks like sore thumb next to the rest of the visuals. They should have made something about it so that at least is not that obvious.

 

[SumoSaki]

Looks nuts.

http://s1.postimg.org/7bsz54s5p/uncharted.png

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Well it's what everyone is calling it right now as far as l can tell, l don't know if the gaming world use another definition.

Skin translucency.

It's wrong just as calling global illumination 'ray traced light' would be wrong. The results of GI in a game may be similar to those achieved with ray tracing, but the tech to achieve it is very different. Similarly, the results of translucency shading may look similar in shaders to subsurface scattering but they aren't actually using that tech.

 

[TEEDA]

Looks nuts.

http://s1.postimg.org/7bsz54s5p/uncharted.png

it is http://a.pomf.se/qvjzsk.gif
it looks as if even Drake's brother had a more complex or higher model than Drake in this particular scene.

 

[HTupolev]

For example there are possibilities to introduce changes to the rendering pipeline by moving to spectral colors from RGB

This is a mind-blowing one. We spend so much time talking in RGB that it's easy to forget that the entire 3-primary-color system is basically a cheap hack based on the way the human visual system buckets frequencies; there wouldn't really be anything "less natural" about using 2 colors, except that we couldn't independently trigger all (3) of the human color receptor types.

For playback it doesn't really matter, but for image generation, these days we're worrying more and more about frequency-dependent subtleties.

 

[TEEDA]

Credits to GravityInsanity & MarquesZero from neogaf

from the "bringing Nathan Drake to PS4" pannel
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=142286569&postcount=4094

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=142286569&postcount=4094

NaughtyDog said that "a considerable time" has passed between UC3 and 4.

"Every single hair moves with wind and water. Hair has true physics, can get wet, move around the head as you run..."

Drake on PS4 has 800 facial combinations. Drake on PS3 had only 120. There's a video down below.
http://www.mobypicture.com/user/TheGhostSix/view/17629724

 

[Laa-Yosh]

"Drake on PS4 has 800 facial combinations."

Should probably be more like, there are fixes for 800 combinations... PS3 drake should have very similar facial range, but less of it is fully controlled and art directed.

 

[Billy Idol]

Laa-Yosh, do you also see a difference in character model quality between the recent UC4 gameplay (plus the cutscene at the end) and the reveal trailer? If so, wrt to the character model, what are the differences?

 

[DavidGraham]

So in hardware terms...?
If you going to troll console threads with your PC master race bullshit, at least be specific.

Obviously you are too thickheaded to understand that this has nothing to do with PC supremacy, I just filled my previous post with console exclusives which had more advanced lighting and shadowing schemes. Hardware has nothing to do with it at the moment.

http://a.pomf.se/aqakkj.gif

Edit: Just wow... (FYI: The lady on the right is from ACU, being compared)

 

[Globalisateur]

Uncharted 4 demo technical analysis by NX Gamer

The guy is very impressed by the demo with the lighting, global illumination, physics, interactions with the environment, everything is top notch. Framerate of the demo is still only 30fps, but completely locked during gameplay.

 

[Sigfried1977]

What a tired looking game this is. Even Nolan North sounds bored in it. Looked nowhere near as good as the teaser either (compared to what's happened to U4, the Watch_Dogs downgrade was pretty damn slight). Seriously, if this had been an Ubisoft game, every single person in this topic would have gotten out their torches and pitchforks.

 

[Deleted member 86764]

more advanced lighting and shadowing schemes.

Those screenshots don't look anywhere near as nice as the UC4 shots posted here.

 

[AlNom]

Uncharted 4 demo technical analysis by NX Gamer

I don't see anything tessellated about the ground tbh. And... the grenade explosion is pretty clearly 2D as it follows the camera. Tessellation and volumetrics are probably the last things they'd want to do if they're targeting 60fps. *shrug*

The best of it seems to be the baked GI, the foliage interaction, the shadowing (I wonder how much that costs them), and the DOF (very nice).

The cut-scene skin shaders look a step up from PS3 scenes. Real-time is great, but show me doughnut Drake to justify it.

 

[ultragpu]

Um, UC4's model is far more advanced than AC's. It has some fancy muscle simulation going on which adds more realism, it's rendering strands of beard, chest hair, hair gets wet and hanging down, wet shaders on the skin, normalmap blending and possibly silhouette tessellation. Yeah it's not even close.