Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2019]

Maybe we'll get a next gen sequel featuring rays. Not just light, sound rays, too. That would be cool, if the xeno reacted to actual realtime sound rays bouncing off different surfaces. And in a vacuum, of course you wouldn't have to worry about that.

 

Do you mean sound ray tracing for propagation of sound? I mean effects like occlusion, diffusion, bouncing, etc? For a game like Alien Isolation that sounds like a great addition to have. Something different about the game is that it isn't just you listening to the sound, which is typical, "others" are listening to you! And that's a unique aspect of the game.

A couple of weeks ago I just completed Doom 2016 but I got slightly bored mid-way and wanted it to end -the story is a bit like Halo, too much technical mumbo jumbo-. It's Doom but I still prefer the classic.

However, with Alien Isolation, I enjoy every minute of it, in a way that I am memorizing the places without actually being my intention, just because I enjoy the game and going slow. And that silence....

Typically, when I play a new game and don't know the stages my mind goes like "darn, I gotta learn the stage". With Alien Isolation I just go with the flow and learn the levels in a natural manner.

I started Alien Isolation on the difficulty level recommended by the developers -hard, the way the game is meant to be played they say- and even in the most difficult parts, if I die I don't feel bad for having to restart a section.

What a difference when you are truly enjoying something. The voice acting is also really good in Alien Isolation, specially the protagonist, Ripley.

Day one for me if a second Alien Isolation game ever comes out, it's a truly creative work by Sega.

 

Clearly the best Alien game ever produced and a superb game overall.
It is unfortunate that sales did not reflect the quality of the game.
It deserves so much more, plus we need a sequel to explain Ripley's story and connect it with the Alien 2 movie

 

That gives me some hope for console gaming. I'm glad that Avalanche studios opted for a 60 FPS experience on the Pro and X versus a crippled 30 FPS experience as is the case with the base systems. An option for higher resolution at 30 FPS for those that prefer graphics over gameplay wouldn't be out of place as well, but if development only had time for one or the other, 60 FPS is definitely the way to go, IMO.

I hope more developers choose to offer a 60 FPS experience on the next generation of consoles. It's one of many features they would need to truly entice me to go back to consoles.

Regards,
SB

 

https://www.eurogamer.net/amp/digitalfoundry-2019-red-dead-redemption-2-patch-109-adds-excellent-hdr



Tommy McClain

 

The SDR footage in that video is literally fucked up and not representative at all of what the game actually looks like in SDR...

 

true that. How is it so over saturated?

 

The video is in HDR so youtube probably tonemaps the SDR bits wrong.

 

having watched some recent DF videos featuring games with Raytracing and my own experience.... I wonder....

Haven't videogames killed the video star?

I mean, don't games look better than videos? (never ever I thought I'd said this, I come from a generation where things were vastly different)

I recently got Gears of War 4 (Windows 10 version), which my laptop runs at 1080p 60fps. The game takes up 134GB of HD space, and I blame it on the fact there are videos. The reality is that it looks better ingame and much more fluid than the videos!

In fact there are times when my HD can't follow the streaming quality of the videos and there are some interrupts. Then you get back ingame and...... Oh wonder, ultra textures, 60 fps, 1080p....!

I guess it reads texture data and so on for ingame stuff while they play the videos but....they can't compare with ingame visuals.

 

Resident Evil 4, Remake and Zero on Nintendo Switch are competent ports of brilliant games
And handheld play makes all the difference.



Ultimately, I do feel that the quality of the conversion work here is unremarkable, and at the very least I'd hope for a performance optimisation push on RE4 along with gyro and IR controls. The Origins titles are fine, but really need their loading time issues addressed. However, certainly in the case of RE4 and RE Remake, the ports are competent enough that the quality of those genuinely brilliant games still shines through, while the opportunity to play in handheld mode is not only unique to Switch, but also serves to disguise the age of the art to a certain extent. Hopefully we'll see improvements over time, but for now, I still enjoyed revisiting these truly excellent games.

 

anything less than that is really a pita. When you play a game at constant 60 fps and you increase the resolution by quite a lot and if looks good but you see frames stuttering and "jumping" around, it is quite annoying. All console games ran at 60 fps back in the day.

 

And with beautiful flicker and disapearing sprites.

 

Not the good ones!

Flicker was due to overloading sprites on a scanline. If you designed carefully you could avoid that. Slowdown was due to too much load on the CPU (one reason why the SNES despite it's awesome palette choked when the MD persevered).

There's something magical about shitty scanline sprite engines. Latency of effectively 0 ms is one part; performing effects in a fraction of a ms is another. I like to pull out my old consoles from time to time. Feels like I'm closer to some kind of universal truth.

But maybe that's just because I'm an asshole.

 

Best signature ever.

 

that's how you could tell the game was serious business





but really though, lots of flicker is mostly an issue on 8-bit systems.

 

“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.”

Something you could do on those systems was, especially if running at 60 fps, alternate selected sprites between showing and not showing. E.g. explosion / flame effects. This meant you could swap sprites in and out to effectively double the number of sprites the player (thought they) could see at once, with the caveat that they flickered on and off at every other field (50 or 60 hz depending on region). Not to be confused with overloading a scanline so sprites simply didn't appear at all - the phantom killer in some shoot em ups (as you seem to demonstrate in your first video)!

 

recca does that... but zanki mode is too much lol

 

A Plague Tale: Innocence - a fascinating game powered by stunning tech
A bespoke engine from a smaller developer delivers triple-A level visuals.

Asobo Studio deserves kudos for the scale of the achievement delivered in the recently released A Plague Tale: Innocence. Where many smaller studios tap into established engines like Unreal Engine 4 or Unity for their technological needs, this outfit did things the old-fashioned way, developing its own proprietary engine technology. The end result is an absolutely beautiful game and one that scales remarkably well as we climb the console ladder and beyond to the heights of PC's most powerful graphics hardware.

I think what makes A Plague Tale really work from a visual perspective is more than just the core engine technology - though its accomplishments are significant. Combining a linear, story-driven experience with a striking art style and design running on this tech sees all components deliver something greater than the sum of their parts.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is a wonderful-looking game from its environments, to its characters, and its effects work. Just the first scene is an absolute treat, revealing a rich post-process pipeline that's reminiscent of Unreal Engine 4 at its most resplendent. There's an embarrassment of riches here, with a beautifully soft volumetric lighting solution, which looks good on all platforms but absolutely shines on PC at its highest settings. Volumetrics don't just come from the sun: lighting piercing fog, suggesting that colour and shadow are drawn from smaller point lights, such as lanterns or torches. It's also impressive to see volumetrics beam through stained glass windows, with the varying colours of the glass illuminating light shards and - impressively - the ground too. It's just one example of an attention to detail that is much appreciated and sometimes overlooked.



Read the full Digital Foundry Article here: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-a-plague-tale-innocence-tech-analysis

 

"Set for release on November 4th this year, Death Stranding returned with a brand new extended trailer last week. Based on Guerrilla Games' Decima Engine, Alex takes a very early look at the technology, noting how the engine has adapted compared to Guerrilla's prior titles"

 

I want to know if the game goes beyond Horizon's GPGPU use for world composition. The huge amounts of ground level detail would be a good fit since the landscape is so devoid of megaflora.

Also, seeing the Death Stranding baby is kind of eerie when I have a two week old baby at home. I hope he's customizable to have the same dark blue eyes as my son