A lot of the upgrades (eg lightmass, godrays) were visible in Bulletstorm, and from Gears 2 almost all tech improvements (eg SSAO, better texture streaming) ended up in UE3. There are probably still 360 specific optimisztions, like Gears 2 had interactive water that never AFAIK made it into other UE3 titles.
Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2011]
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A lot of the upgrades (eg lightmass, godrays) were visible in Bulletstorm, and from Gears 2 almost all tech improvements (eg SSAO, better texture streaming) ended up in UE3. There are probably still 360 specific optimisztions, like Gears 2 had interactive water that never AFAIK made it into other UE3 titles.
(((interference)))
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Yeah, recent UE3 titles look pretty spectacular - there's also Bioshock Infinite which looks to be another stunner. But I don't think Mass Effect 3 will look as good as some of the other UE titles, at least going by how ME2 looked compared to other UE3 games like Gears 2.
I'm also wondering why more games don't have Lightmass style baked GI?
I'm also wondering why more games don't have Lightmass style baked GI?
ME3 has some huge environments, increased texture detail and more complex shaders on the characters, all of which is evident in screenshots. Lightmass prebaked GI seems to be missing but then again the softer look and color bleeding wouldn't really fit ME's unique mix of retro and current SF visuals. I'd also rather have the game next March instead of, say, next September 
Bioshock has a heavily modified engine, I'm not sure how much of UE3 is left in there. To be honest I think we're still not seeing much of the tech advancements in the current games, Epic had at least an entire year's worth of advantage in content creation because they were able to start asset production before the upgrades were completed. Other studios only had a chance to play with them well after Gears 3 was in full scale production.
And what other big franchises are on UE3 anyway? The best selling multiplat games are COD, GTA, Assassin's Creed, Final Fantasy, Fifa, Battlefield, Elder Scrolls, and they all use custom tech.
So apart from the (exclusive) Gears games, Epic doesn't really have any big sellers running on their engine in the end, excluding Mass Effect and Bioshock. Okay I'll give you Batman too, assuming that Arkham City becomes another hit.
So I think that's why we actuall don't see many games using Lightmass. As for other engines, a lot of them opted for fully dynamic lighting (COD, GTA, BF, Elder Scrolls) or they wouldn't profit from that because of their style or setting (FF, sports games, most of the other platform exclusives). Actually almost any game using deferred rendering and a lot of lights has probably decided to do so because they don't want soft lighting and lots of color bleed which Lightmass seems to produce.
And I believe it's more about the GI settings anyway, number of extra light bounces, amount of color bleed and shader settings, and so on... It's more of an artistic choice, which took a brave leap from Cliff's team on Gears with its harsher looks in previous games (hence some people believing that Gears 1 looked better, muhaha).
Bioshock has a heavily modified engine, I'm not sure how much of UE3 is left in there. To be honest I think we're still not seeing much of the tech advancements in the current games, Epic had at least an entire year's worth of advantage in content creation because they were able to start asset production before the upgrades were completed. Other studios only had a chance to play with them well after Gears 3 was in full scale production.
And what other big franchises are on UE3 anyway? The best selling multiplat games are COD, GTA, Assassin's Creed, Final Fantasy, Fifa, Battlefield, Elder Scrolls, and they all use custom tech.
So apart from the (exclusive) Gears games, Epic doesn't really have any big sellers running on their engine in the end, excluding Mass Effect and Bioshock. Okay I'll give you Batman too, assuming that Arkham City becomes another hit.
So I think that's why we actuall don't see many games using Lightmass. As for other engines, a lot of them opted for fully dynamic lighting (COD, GTA, BF, Elder Scrolls) or they wouldn't profit from that because of their style or setting (FF, sports games, most of the other platform exclusives). Actually almost any game using deferred rendering and a lot of lights has probably decided to do so because they don't want soft lighting and lots of color bleed which Lightmass seems to produce.
And I believe it's more about the GI settings anyway, number of extra light bounces, amount of color bleed and shader settings, and so on... It's more of an artistic choice, which took a brave leap from Cliff's team on Gears with its harsher looks in previous games (hence some people believing that Gears 1 looked better, muhaha).
Ike Turner
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ME3 has some huge environments, increased texture detail and more complex shaders on the characters, all of which is evident in screenshots. Lightmass prebaked GI seems to be missing but then again the softer look and color bleeding wouldn't really fit ME's unique mix of retro and current SF visuals. I'd also rather have the game next March instead of, say, next September
Bioshock has a heavily modified engine, I'm not sure how much of UE3 is left in there. To be honest I think we're still not seeing much of the tech advancements in the current games, Epic had at least an entire year's worth of advantage in content creation because they were able to start asset production before the upgrades were completed. Other studios only had a chance to play with them well after Gears 3 was in full scale production.
And what other big franchises are on UE3 anyway? The best selling multiplat games are COD, GTA, Assassin's Creed, Final Fantasy, Fifa, Battlefield, Elder Scrolls, and they all use custom tech.
So apart from the (exclusive) Gears games, Epic doesn't really have any big sellers running on their engine in the end, excluding Mass Effect and Bioshock. Okay I'll give you Batman too, assuming that Arkham City becomes another hit.
So I think that's why we actuall don't see many games using Lightmass. As for other engines, a lot of them opted for fully dynamic lighting (COD, GTA, BF, Elder Scrolls) or they wouldn't profit from that because of their style or setting (FF, sports games, most of the other platform exclusives). Actually almost any game using deferred rendering and a lot of lights has probably decided to do so because they don't want soft lighting and lots of color bleed which Lightmass seems to produce.
And I believe it's more about the GI settings anyway, number of extra light bounces, amount of color bleed and shader settings, and so on... It's more of an artistic choice, which took a brave leap from Cliff's team on Gears with its harsher looks in previous games (hence some people believing that Gears 1 looked better, muhaha).
It will be intersting to see the PC version of Batman: Akham City which will apaprently be the first UE3 game with DX11 support. RockSteady is apprently adding Tesselation support to it among other additions (then again it's a NVIDIA TWIMTBP game so it may very well be a shity implemetation ala Crysis 2 DX11 patch)..
Tessellation doesn't help much without displacement mapping. Game models rely far too much on normal mapping so there's very little mesh detail to work with, and smoothing out curves isn't really enough to make for a big difference. Silhouettes and self-shadows will remain simple and give all the trickery of normal mapping away.
Displacement mapping would require a more complex asset creation workflow and more data stored for the game. Unlikely to happen until the consoles introduce serious support for it.
Displacement mapping would require a more complex asset creation workflow and more data stored for the game. Unlikely to happen until the consoles introduce serious support for it.
Getting a good GI baker working is a serious engineering task. Just getting your basic GI solver right is hard enough, and on top of that you need tools (or you need to integrate it into an existing tool package), you need to handle different material varieties (pulling albedo from one or more textures, handling translucent surfaces, handling alpha-tested surfaces, etc.), you need to handle all kinds of different lighting sources, etc. And most importantly, you need to make it fast enough and stable enough for use in production without your artists thinking that the only reason you made the tool was to punish them.
Of course there are still games that have done it. Source engine has been using radiosity for baking GI since HL2. Beast is a GI baker, and has been used in a few notable titles (Mirror's Edge, GOW III, Medal of Honor, and a few others). Bungie has an in-house GI baker that they've been using since Halo 3, as does Treyarch.
steveOrino
Regular
I was looking at the Gears3 screenshots and videos, lighting looks good but those texture assets are really really getting stretched.
http://images.eurogamer.net/2011/articles//a/1/4/0/1/4/3/2/Effects2.bmp.jpg The exo-skeleton around his chest and especially his arm.
I am not picking on Gears, just using it as an example because many games do the same thing. It just makes me wonder why devs keep pushing normal maps + color maps when they cannot keep the quality up. Just focus on better color maps and be done with it. Or just create the assets from the ground up instead of high-res then down-sample and normal baking.
http://images.eurogamer.net/2011/articles//a/1/4/0/1/4/3/2/Effects2.bmp.jpg The exo-skeleton around his chest and especially his arm.
I am not picking on Gears, just using it as an example because many games do the same thing. It just makes me wonder why devs keep pushing normal maps + color maps when they cannot keep the quality up. Just focus on better color maps and be done with it. Or just create the assets from the ground up instead of high-res then down-sample and normal baking.
I'd just like to leave a little request here for the DF peeps.
BF3 is meant to have an optional hard drive install of HiDef content on the 360.
Is the no-install option better for competitive gamers, due to the extra overhead of rendering the HiDef stuff? I'd think that input lag, min and avg framerate could be affected. It would be interesting to see by how much.
Is the no-install option better for competitive gamers, due to the extra overhead of rendering the HiDef stuff? I'd think that input lag, min and avg framerate could be affected. It would be interesting to see by how much.
I also don't see the logic in "create the assets from the ground up instead of high-res then down-sample and normal baking". I mean how the hell could you get a better looking asset in any other way? Huge polygon counts are impossible because of a gazillion reasons, and without normals the shading will suck ballz...
true I was forgeting specular, sorry
steveOrino
Regular
I never said anything about eliminating normals I was implying they need to scale back the game design so where they aren't stretching memory requirements and getting results like the image I included.
And yes I know that starting with a high resolution mesh + assets and baking is the norm these days to get very quick workflow. However, it can make for very ugly results because the mesh and textures are sometimes reduced to a point where it doesn't even look good.
The original mesh resolution for that enemy in that image was probably way to high resulting in the normal being way too detailed for the in-game mesh + being very low resolution making it look horrible up close.
To be more clear on my last statement I meant creating a normal for a ultra high resolution mesh that wont even come close to the in-game mesh wont give you good results so making the original mesh closer to what you will get in game will yield better results.
And yes I know that starting with a high resolution mesh + assets and baking is the norm these days to get very quick workflow. However, it can make for very ugly results because the mesh and textures are sometimes reduced to a point where it doesn't even look good.
The original mesh resolution for that enemy in that image was probably way to high resulting in the normal being way too detailed for the in-game mesh + being very low resolution making it look horrible up close.
To be more clear on my last statement I meant creating a normal for a ultra high resolution mesh that wont even come close to the in-game mesh wont give you good results so making the original mesh closer to what you will get in game will yield better results.
That may be true for the Doom 3 days, but I think it's gotten much better over the years, be it from much higher in-game polycounts and/or experience/iterations. Just look at the progression from each of the Gears titles for the main characters and main weapons. Of course, it'll depend on what the game situation can allow for particular characters. Not everyone will be receiving high enough counts or attention to detail just for time/budget concerns.
Next gen ought to give plenty of breathing room for pushing in-game polycounts.
Next gen ought to give plenty of breathing room for pushing in-game polycounts.
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