Capcom's "Panta Rhei" engine

New details!

http://www.dualshockers.com/2013/07...clusive-or-not-more-info-on-panta-rhei-shared

The original Game Watch article in Japanese is worth a look too, for the slides and probably more details that weren't translated.
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/series/3dcg/20130731_608483.html

Stolen from gofreak

 

From dual shocker piece:

TBDR on a PS4 !!

Also Capcom won't say if Deep Down is an exclusive to which I say, doesn't that answer the question ?

 

It's what Battlefield 3 does on the PS3 and the X360, don't get too excited.

 

Voxels for lighting live on

So voxel cone tracing will act as emitters, applied to emissive materials.. like the dragon fire. And it's view dependent with lower resolution voxels the further away from the camera.

Also, 3D textures are used to look up the voxels rather than the traditional octree way in SVOGI, which makes it faster somehow. And with potentially huge 3D textures representing the scene, they can use PRT to help.

Not sure if this is all known stuff, but I thought this part of the article was the most interesting. Maybe someone with some Japanese skills can parse the original text better.

 

so is that the same kind of stuff that epic was doing with ue4?

 

Yeah, I guess it is, but faster. And not applied to the whole scene for GI like UE4 did.

 

They actually started with the exact same thing, but creating and updating the voxel octree proved too costly and they decided to use voxels as a 3d texture instead.

That's a lot faster to create the voxel structures but it also has it's share of problems:

- Since you are storing a volume even empty space inside that volume costs memory. They avoided that by using far less and bigger voxels to represent the scene then Epic was using in the UE4 demo (which means the light would lack finer detail). They also said that the PRT capabilities of GCN could be useful to tile a 3d mega texture and so bring the memory usage down a lot (Ms also showed a tiled shadow map demo on build. How mega texture works for real time generated assets? You just discard the unused parts?)

- Searching a volume is a lot slower than searching a tree, so I guess they also limited the number of light bounces (I have no idea if they even have indirect lighting, or just used it for direct lighting by having the entire fire as a "emissive object").

I actually got surprised that creating and updating the voxel octree is actually more expansive than cone tracing it... I wonder how a vector capable cpu would fare at that... Perhaps SVOGI might make a return later this gen once developers get their hands on the HSA capabilities of those machines...

 

It apear they prefered doing a severely jittered conetracing over a full-res buffer, over good per-pixel sampling on a half-res buffer. The actual conetracing cost can be the same, but it takes a buffer 4x as big. Depending on how good their final resolve is though, it mihgt produce more acurate results than a discontinuity aware upsampling of a half-res lighting.

 

Part 2 of the article.
http://translate.google.com/transla...docs/series/3dcg/20130801_608484.html&act=url

Mostly about fluid simulation.

 

Awesome particle/fluid work, truly nextgen stuff.

 

Impressive fire simulation.

http://www.dsogaming.com/videotrailer-news/new-tech-demos-revealed-for-capcoms-panta-rhei-engine/

 

Yes. Also, its impressive that I got the credit for videos, even though I was far from 1st who linked them on GAF.

 

Wow, I never realized how much visual "cheating" goes on in games.

 

It's not so much cheating as doing as little as possible in order to present the visual illusion in the most convincing way possible. With finite resources, the less you need to do for a given effect then the more things you can do. As long as there isn't some huge corner case that breaks your illusion then even better.

For example, smoke is often just a flat texture (sometimes animated, sometimes not). It has a huge gaping hole of a corner case though in that the texture either has to rotate with the player's view (which looks odd) or not rotate and the player will see it on edge (which also looks odd). But it's far cheaper to do than volumetric smoke comprised of particles. The illusion is good enough for most developers and most gamers and performance can better be spent on other things which have a greater impact on the game presentation.

As time goes on, hardware gets more powerful which allows you to use less cut corners and/or you find a new way to present a more believable illusion with less obvious corner case breakdowns at minimally increased resource useage. Or it can now use a resource that was once extremely limited but now isn't (going from 512 MB of memory to 5 GB of memory, for example) even though the other resources haven't improved as significantly.

Game development is sort of like Magic. It's all about fooling the viewer into thinking something is happening that isn't actually happening. That grass you see? That isn't really modeled grass, it's just a flat texture. Looks great head on, looks like arse when viewed from the side. Just like magic tricks, looks great if seen from the right perspective, looks like arse if it isn't or you know what is going on. That nicely POM'd cobblestone street? Looks great at the right distance and angle. View it too close or at a bad angle and the illusion falls apart.

Regards,
SB

 

Hence the quotes. I know its just a limitation of the power available. I don't fault developers for it. I'll be interested to see if these graphical effects are just eye candy or have actual gameplay implications as well.

 

Kind of OT, but doesn't one of the powers in infamous involve smoke? Blow stuff up to make volumetric smoke that the character can start moves from inside?