Grandmaster- Can we look forward to a Mass Effect 2 face-off?
I would.
Grandmaster- Can we look forward to a Mass Effect 2 face-off?
Undoubtedly the biggest strength of RAGE engine.Plus there are some awesome physics and animations in R* games...lots of a.i,lots of cars,hundreds of light sources and that was their first next gen title,3 years old,made by 3rd party.Good job if you ask me
You could climb the tallest tower in the city and get a good view in Infamous. Also the city is build using hexes which allows them to easily duplicate the stuff and every street intersection was "Y" Shaped.I was wondering...looking at Infamous(and Infamous 2),it seems like the game was designed so there was not much draw as in GTA for example.View distance was quite small.Building blocks were placed so that you cant really get to see whole city,they always blocked your view,than less geometry has to be rendered.It is probably their design choice,but R* made different one.
Looking back on GTA IV it was never the case...You could get in to heli at night and you could practically get a view on whole city,sure buildings had lower LOD but there was still a lot of polygons and light sources to draw,eh?
The entire city in Infamous is made up of hexes where Sucker Punch's artists would place roads, buildings and other environmental pieces. Roads meet perpendicularly at the center of a hex's side, which allows artists to rotate hexes to create different configurations, as roads would line up from piece to piece. This meant less work for artists, but there is still good variation in the environment thanks to different hex configurations.
I was wondering...looking at Infamous(and Infamous 2),it seems like the game was designed so there was not much draw as in GTA for example.View distance was quite small.Building blocks were placed so that you cant really get to see whole city,they always blocked your view,than less geometry has to be rendered.It is probably their design choice,but R* made different one.
Looking back on GTA IV it was never the case...You could get in to heli at night and you could practically get a view on whole city,sure buildings had lower LOD but there was still a lot of polygons and light sources to draw,eh?Plus there are some awesome physics and animations in R* games...lots of a.i,lots of cars,hundreds of light sources and that was their first next gen title,3 years old,made by 3rd party.Good job if you ask me
You could climb the tallest tower int eh city and get the whole view in Infamous.
Well truth be told GTA4 had it as well, infact they blurred the whole screen with a blur filter along with a DOF filter for the scenery. Though the last episode (BOGT) removed that blur filter from consoles but I can't recall whether they removed the DOF filter or not.But didn't the heavy use of DOF at quite close distance make it hard to notice that beyond DOF blur barrier it was very low detail?
Whatever effects they put in place does not prevent me from seeing far away flying objects too (since I have to notice them from a distance and then platform near them to shoot). The far far away buildings are indeed blurred probably to hide aggressive LOD. The effects are done rather well. Only hear people complain about jaggies.
Well truth be told GTA4 had it as well, infact they blurred the whole screen with a blur filter along with a DOF filter for the scenery. Though the last episode (BOGT) removed that blur filter from consoles but I can't recall whether they removed the DOF filter or not.
Whether they blur the distant objects or not doesn't really matter. The LOD has them reduced to very simple objects. Unless one engine is maintaining details tat the other isn't rendering, or even is using 2D cutouts, DOF is an artistic choice rather than a technical one. ie. You can't not render the distant objects and then apply blur to conceal the fact!
But it still has compromises as pointed out. The LOD switching is also very aggressive.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/infamous-how-high-can-you-try
Yes, it is a good choice. But that doesn't mean DOF in one game means it is doing less distance work than another game without DOF. If GTA4 renders low-res, simply textured boxes up to 3 miles away and doesn't blur them, and Infamous also renders low-res, simply textured boxes up to 3 miles away but does blur them, that doesn't make Infamous a weaker engine. By that same token, the presence of DOF doesn't denote lesser distance work, and the game without DOF is working harder at distance rendering. We just don't know, unless the differences are apparent even under the blur, such as lighting and stuff (I haven't played either title!).DOF is excellent to hide uglies and very noticable compromisses at distance. I mean try to focus on the blurred out scenery and make out texture resolution, shadowmap res (if applied at such distances), detail.. would it have been easier without the blur?
We created a low-resolution transparent rendering solution to get around the fill-rate/overdraw bottleneck and render a lot more transparent layers.It doesn't use the 360's MSAA fill rate trick, so it costs a little more, but you don't get the crunchy edges or up-sampling artifacts.
What do you consider pushing? PGR4
What some of these guys may be saying, unless I'm mistaken, is you have to wonder whether or not Bizarre would have made such advancements or optimizations if their games/engine were still 360 exclusive?But even though we had a competent rendering engine from PGR4, we couldn't have used it for Blur. This was because it was single-threaded renderer which was written for 360, porting it to PS3 would have been very difficult, and anyway it was pretty much at its limits with eight cars and no other dynamic objects on track.
And Microsoft first parties like Rare
Almost every game "pushes" the console. Do you really think the developers just sit there leaving a core idle or something?
IIRC DF thought Bungie used a full res alpha buffer for transparencies, does this quote say otherwise? If true, I know stupid question since the quote indicates a low res buffer, I just know DF are right 99% of the time which is where the confusion is from.
All I remember is Alstrong saying I think Reach uses a full res "particle buffer". I'm guessing the fog is exempt from that statement and is lower res.
GPU simulation and it's using the information that they already render. Pretty elegant.We built a particle system to handle the specific case of numerous small transient particles - basically rock chips, dirt puffs, rain drops, splashes, sparks and that kind of thing. I am presenting it in more detail at the next GDC, but the neat part is that it can handle tens of thousands of collisions/bounces each frame by reading the depth and normal buffers, and the whole thing takes less than 0.3 ms (about 1/100th of a frame); which looks pretty good compared to the seven (7) standard particle collisions per frame allowed by the effects budget.
This is why I used PGR4 as an example above. Of course there is no way to know for sure, but I think it's still a valid question to ask if Bizarre would have developed a multi-threaded renderer for PGR5 if they were still developing exclusively for the 360 and instead further pushed and optimized for what gains they could achieve with the single threaded renderer they already had written. Outside of hitting the limit with cars and dynamic objects, to me it looks like developing on the ps3 has pushed them into recoding their rendering engine. Of course one also has to consider the allowed time and budget a team has as well.
Honestly I would think most members here should know at least about the basics of how advancements are made with game development.:smile:
Didn't some other team recently state they went back to a single threaded renderer in order to decrease latency or something?
I'm sorry but there is no way anyone can claim Banjo N&B does not push the 360. That game is gorgeous and looks as good as just about any platformer on the market IMO.
And Microsoft first parties like Rare, Lionhead, Turn 10 are more interested in gameplay rather than technology
It's also pointless, because getting an extra light source doesn't magically make your game more fun. Some of the most fun games on the 360 could probably have been run on the original xbox, and would still be just as fun, like, say Geometry Wars.
http://www.bizarrecreations.com/games/geometry_wars_retro_evolved/interview.phpQ: One of the most striking new graphical features in the game is the "gravity grid" play area. How did you make this look so cool; does every object in the game really have its own gravity?
The grid itself is made up of 60,000 points, each one exerting a small amount of force on its neighbour. The simulation itself sits on the edge of stability which is what causes it to swing about so much when one of the game objects gives it a small push!
Only a few types of object affect the grid. As the grid system is rather expensive to calculate, it actually runs on the second core along with the audio system, (the first core being dedicated to gameplay and particles, the third is used to render the audio).