Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2011]

[Laa-Yosh]

Well, console is where the money is, so whatever they say about focusing development on the PC is probably more related to the engine and less related to content or gameplay. It's yet another reason to be totally interested about the sales of Rage - I'd like to see them move at least 3 million units and outsell Doom 3. The ATI fiasco certainly won't help PC sales, and the PS3 has far too much delayed texture loading for my tastes, but who knows what the public thinks. The wonderful painterly look could certainly appeal to a lot of more casual console gamers... Just as the Doom/Quake past of id Software.
Sales of this game are definitely going to be a very important factor in the success of virtual + unique texturing. I'm sure Doom 4 is already paid for as well, in order to capitalize on the existing engine, but whatever comes next from id will depend on Rage's fate. Industry adoption of the tech will depend on it too.


Also, if Carmack really wants to virtualize geometry in the next gen, then that will need a LOT of storage too. Whether they go with voxels or with displacements or anything else, it'll still increase storage requirements somewhat further, maybe like double them. So either everyone gets 4 times the bandwidth in the next 3-4 years, or we won't see massive changes on the PC...

 

[tabs]

Well, I'm rural so that's unlikely, but I'm very happy to grab myself a Bluray player when the time comes... I suspect other 'less connected' PC gamers will feel the same way.

 

[Rangers]

Well, console is where the money is, so whatever they say about focusing development on the PC is probably more related to the engine and less related to content or gameplay. It's yet another reason to be totally interested about the sales of Rage - I'd like to see them move at least 3 million units and outsell Doom 3. The ATI fiasco certainly won't help PC sales, and the PS3 has far too much delayed texture loading for my tastes, but who knows what the public thinks. The wonderful painterly look could certainly appeal to a lot of more casual console gamers... Just as the Doom/Quake past of id Software.
Sales of this game are definitely going to be a very important factor in the success of virtual + unique texturing. I'm sure Doom 4 is already paid for as well, in order to capitalize on the existing engine, but whatever comes next from id will depend on Rage's fate. Industry adoption of the tech will depend on it too.


Also, if Carmack really wants to virtualize geometry in the next gen, then that will need a LOT of storage too. Whether they go with voxels or with displacements or anything else, it'll still increase storage requirements somewhat further, maybe like double them. So either everyone gets 4 times the bandwidth in the next 3-4 years, or we won't see massive changes on the PC...

Laa Yosh Rage looks good but does it really look better or even quite as good as other top notch console games (Uncharted 3, Gears 3, Crysis 2)? I dont think so. Now maybe if it was 30 FPS it would but since it's not that's a moot argument (we'll see what Doom 4 does). And it also weighs 3 times what most other games do (22 GB) which could actually hurt it in the digital download market.

As far as sales, Cliffy B thinks that nowdays you must either have a hefty multiplayer component, or a deep 40+ hour campaign (like Dragons Age, Assassins Creed) to sell. Otherwise people will just redbox (and maybe pirate) and blast through it. Rage doesn't really have either, so I already suspect it's going to be a middling hit as it's ceiling.

 

[reptile]

Couple of things to consider, which should be kinda self-explanatory IMHO

- The often criticized "low" texture resolution (2 to 5 texels per inch according to the presentation linked in one of the Rage threads, btw) is the result of a compromise; a smaller game world would be able to increase the density while staying at the 22 GB size. An everyday corridor shooter could get far more detailed textures, but id choose to display rich landscapes and include driving, too. It is not a tech related issue, and also, once we can buy 100GB sized games, even a similar game world could get another increase in texture detail (which should be about enough for 1920x1080)

- Dynamic lighting and scenery are perfectly possible with virtual textures as well, Rage is once again only one possible compromise where id felt that the superior quality of the baked lighting outweighs the loss of superficial scenery interactivity. But there's no reason why it wouldn't be possible to add complete destructability and dynamic lights to the engine. Don't forget that they went all dynamic with Doom3 and learned some pretty important lessons with that (like, customers don't actually give a damn about full dynamic lighting).

- Virtualizing textures is a revolutionary step for two reasons: the entire memory and background storage management system can be completely reworked, with many former constrains removed (especially as we get faster media, HDD or SSD). And also, just as importantly, art content creation is drastically changed once again (after the introduction of normal mapping), assuming that other studios will implement it as well - which Lionhead already did.

- an everyday corridor shooter would probably have more levels, hence requiring more textures - i dont see your point. big outdoor vistas dont need any more textures if you cant get close to those mountains, and in rage you certainly cant. the whole point of virtual texturing is that the average texel/screen should be constant.

- again, i dont see your point with doom3. as far as i know it was quite successful, and while one could argue about the gameplay, the lighting was consistently praised by both critics and players.

- this is just a personal opinion, but after playing rage on all platforms, i have to say that i find megatexturing to be very distracting. i always liked ID games for their "robustness" in image quality. wolfenstein and doom were pretty accurate, quake had perspective/subpixel correct software rendering, doom3 unified lighting... they all helped to create a solid feel to the game world, something the competitors were struggling to get right. rage doesnt have that - the whole world seems to be in a constant flux of texture popin, i personally find it really annoying. i think this is exactly the case of a technology wanting too much too soon.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

- an everyday corridor shooter would probably have more levels, hence requiring more textures - i dont see your point.

I don't think so, Rage is quite long even without races and driving sections, especially compared to the average 3-5 hour long FPS games like COD.

big outdoor vistas dont need any more textures if you cant get close to those mountains, and in rage you certainly cant.

There are some very large surfaces areas in all the driving sessions, several square km in size IMHO, that wouldn't be there in any games without vehicles. These eat up huge amounts of texture data, the wastelands alone are about 2GBs from the 12GB of the single player campaign. If the entire game was set in closed areas with no driving they could increase texel density at least 2 times.

the whole point of virtual texturing is that the average texel/screen should be constant.

Not really IMHO, it's more about
- fixed memory requirements irregardless of the detail
- ability to uniquely texture the game world
The two aren't really working well together though if the background storage is too slow - what you'd win on loading only the necessary tiles, you'll mostly lose on caching.

- again, i dont see your point with doom3. as far as i know it was quite successful, and while one could argue about the gameplay, the lighting was consistently praised by both critics and players.

Still doesn't make the choice of fully dynamic lighting with no pre-baked info a wise one. Practically every game uses baked lighting info, even BF3 with all its destruction; thus Carmack's choice in Doom 3 turned out to be a dead end. Granted, they went in the other opposite with Rage, but it still doesn't make their choice a bad one - the game does not miss dynamic environment lighting IMHO.
(not sure about Assassin's Creed though, with the day-night cycle)

they all helped to create a solid feel to the game world, something the competitors were struggling to get right. rage doesnt have that - the whole world seems to be in a constant flux of texture popin, i personally find it really annoying. i think this is exactly the case of a technology wanting too much too soon.

I'll give you most of that, the delayed texture loading on X360 and particularly on PS3 seems to be far too distracting, id has clearly went a bit too far with the content for the consoles. This is a price they were willing to pay, probably hoping that if it didn't kill sales of games like GOW 1 or ME 1 then they will be forgiven as well.
Also, wasn't Brink for example a lot more problematic?

However on my totally average PC (i5-2.8GHz, 4GB RAM, GTX460 1GB and using 8k physical texture page) there's almost no problem at all, it only appears a few times when I enter a new area. I did not even defragment my hard drive in a year, it might help even more. I might be just lucky but the experience has been pretty smooth and problem free for me.
(thinking about it though, I did set AA to 8x yesterday and the loads on entering new levels felt a tiny bit more frequent so I'm gonna turn it back to 4x to see if maybe that caused some trouble)


All in all it seems to me that a lot of people got something different from what they've expected in Rage and this personal opinion of the game affects their opinion about the tech and id's art direction related choices significantly...

 

[nightshade]

- an everyday corridor shooter would probably have more levels, hence requiring more textures - i dont see your point. big outdoor vistas dont need any more textures if you cant get close to those mountains, and in rage you certainly cant. the whole point of virtual texturing is that the average texel/screen should be constant.

This point makes little sense when talking about megatextures. My questin to you would be what exactly you mean by 'more' textures? In terms of virtual texturing it probably means one thing, more disc space.

The world in Rage is quite big compared to corridor shooter so the 12GB or such of texturing data they have is used to cover everything in it. If the world was smaller they could've used the same amount of texture data and have gotten better looking results cause of higher texel density. Do not forget that the textures in the game right now are unique as well, so your point of corridor shooters requiring 'more' textures is kind of moot. The wasteland is only a part of the gameworld, majority of the game takes place in other environments.

 

[reptile]

Talking about the world "size" is meaningless, what matters is, how much access you have to certain areas. Having a huge-looking open area with beautiful vistas doesn't mean anything if you cant walk up the mountains and wander off to the distance... the whole point of virtual and unique texturing is that you'll never ever going to need to store and display more than needed. Im definitely not saying that rage is short or anything, but if it had more levels as a corridor shooter (which it probably would, had they decided to go that way), it would have still required the same amount of textures.

Layosh: fully dynamic lighting has definitely not turned out to be a dead end, a lot more games do it that you'd think. (you mention assassins creed) i agree that rage didnt really need it and given the choices they had with this gens 60fps capabilities, they made the right one.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Talking about the world "size" is meaningless, what matters is, how much access you have to certain areas.

Have you completed the game? There's miles of terrain to drive through, at high speeds, with high canyon walls, and that is a LOT of surface area.

Im definitely not saying that rage is short or anything, but if it had more levels as a corridor shooter (which it probably would, had they decided to go that way), it would have still required the same amount of textures.

I strongly disagree. You probably have no idea how incredibly large the open areas actually are. Terrain is the single worst case of texturing even without unique texels...
Even with the tiling I'd say that you can fit the texel amounts of a few complete FPS games into just the wasteland's texture area.

Layosh: fully dynamic lighting has definitely not turned out to be a dead end, a lot more games do it that you'd think. (you mention assassins creed)

Let's narrow it down to FPS (and maybe TPS) action games that aren't open world sandbox type environment. How many games are left to use fully dynamic lighting? KZ, UC, Halo, COD, Gears, BG, Crysis all use some level of precalculated lighting.

With these games there's always a tight narrative, a more or less linear path, the action is directed, so there's no need to change time of day. The only other case where dynamic lighting is required is when you want to turn it off, which Doom 3 did (all the time). So unless you want to make that kind of game, you can and thus you should bake some of your lighting because it'll always look better than the fully dynamic one.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Laa Yosh Rage looks good but does it really look better or even quite as good as other top notch console games (Uncharted 3, Gears 3, Crysis 2)? I dont think so.

Then we disagree on that one. In my opinion it's better even than UC3, but let's not get too far into game comparisons, as they're not preferred here.

And it also weighs 3 times what most other games do (22 GB) which could actually hurt it in the digital download market.

Does it? Most connections are fast enough so that the download time is at least comparable to the DVD install time. It takes like 45-50 minutes to copy everything from the optical drive!

As far as sales, Cliffy B thinks that nowdays you must either have a hefty multiplayer component, or a deep 40+ hour campaign (like Dragons Age, Assassins Creed) to sell. Otherwise people will just redbox (and maybe pirate) and blast through it. Rage doesn't really have either, so I already suspect it's going to be a middling hit as it's ceiling.

There's multiplayer, supposedly good, totally unique - only thing is that the driving really needs a controller IMHO. It can take off on the consoles, but the PC I'm not sure about.
And Cliffy's opinion isn't the final truth here either

 

[AbbA]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsunRUJQpdc&feature=related

 

[NotTarts]

Let's narrow it down to FPS (and maybe TPS) action games that aren't open world sandbox type environment. How many games are left to use fully dynamic lighting? KZ, UC, Halo, COD, Gears, BG, Crysis all use some level of precalculated lighting.

Crysis only uses precalculated sky ambient occlusion (though Crysis 2 also has environment probes), which is a shame, because there are many areas where pre-baked/calculated lighting makes sense (eg, terrain shadows/AO, static indoor/outdoor objects such as buildings, rocks, etc). It's remarkable that they can actually achieve fully dynamic lighting for every object, but it often isn't needed and it just seems like a waste of resources IMO.

 

[Rangers]

About comparisons, I think Rage is one of the best looking games, but I dont think it's the best looking one. It's sort of 2nd tier great imo.

But again a lot depends on 60 FPS (then again, it had to "cheat" a bit to get there with dynamic resolution).

22GB if you maxed a 15 mbps connection (my speed, seems fairly upper-standard for cable) would take 3 hours 20 minutes...but again that's maxing the connection perfectly, real world results would take longer.

For the Cliffy thing, I cant think of a whole lot of games that defy his rules, although I just thought of Batman being one, maybe Dead Space? Regardless I watch the Amazon best seller charts and I'm pretty positive Rage was not a huge hit. It might do 2-3 million worldwide and I dont know what Id's expectations were. Most review outlets seemed disappointed in the no-FPS multiplayer and it seems obviously forgettable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsunRUJQpdc&feature=related

Just made me wonder, as in the comments the uploader mentions 60 GB OCZ SSD available for $80, why not next gen "Elite special edition" models, maybe like the gears of war 3 bundle, now with SSD, +$100 For those who want the very best...

 

[hoho]

22GB if you maxed a 15 mbps connection (my speed, seems fairly upper-standard for cable) would take 3 hours 20 minutes...but again that's maxing the connection perfectly, real world results would take longer.

Or less. Here in Estonia 100-150Mbit costs you less than 30€/month and is availiable to large proportion of population

 

[Laa-Yosh]

3-4 hours download vs. me going to the shop after work 30+ minutes, installing from DVD ~45 minutes, I'd say it's a reasonable alternative.

Actually if I had got it through Steam I could've started the donwload in the morning, and then I could've began to play like 2 hours earlier It wasn't available in my region though.

 

[kagemaru]

Laa Yosh Rage looks good but does it really look better or even quite as good as other top notch console games (Uncharted 3, Gears 3, Crysis 2)? I dont think so. Now maybe if it was 30 FPS it would but since it's not that's a moot argument (we'll see what Doom 4 does).

Out of curiosity, why isn't frame rate factored into the graphical make up of a game for you?

 

[Scott_Arm]

I find new radical tech always brings complaints/compromises in it's first serious iteration. I remember when Virtua Fighter first came out, there were a huge number of gamers that thought it was visually horrible because you could have more beautiful 2D animated characters. When Quake 1 came out, I knew people who were incredibly disappointed. They could play Duke 3D at relatively high resolutions with what they thought were more visually appealing graphics. To them, the 3D world of Quake was a novelty that wasn't ready for prime-time. Doom 3 had all of the same type of complaints about the lighting and shadows. The solid, sharp and pitch black shadows were incredibly unpopular with many people. Comparisons to Half-Life 2 were common, with many people preferring the baked lighting of Half-Life 2 for having better image quality, less performance impact and more realism. It seems to be the way of John Carmack. He'll take the plunge, work out most of the problems, but maybe too soon for his own good. In the end, the tech will be useful, and will be adopted by most of the industry in some form. They'll just have the benefit of the work he did. Megatexture, or other virtual texture setups, help solve some serious problems. Unique texturing will go a long way to creating more believable environments, and a stable memory profile will be important on both the PC and console. The only question that's still open is whether Carmack/id made the right choice in using an "open-world" game at 60Hz to show off the new tech. A 30Hz graphics-pusher with more checklist features (gamers love checklists) may have been a better way to prove the technology. That said, people didn't want another corridor Doom3 from id, so it might have been a no-win situation for them.

 

[Rangers]

Or less. Here in Estonia 100-150Mbit costs you less than 30€/month and is availiable to large proportion of population

It always strikes me as so funny that in Onlive arguments everybody argues that their connections are terrible, but when time to argue against me another way it's opposite...

Out of curiosity, why isn't frame rate factored into the graphical make up of a game for you?

It is, but 60 FPS means lesser graphics...

There's no way for me to exactly know how much better a 30 FPS megatexture game might look. As I said, wait for Doom 4 hopefully...

 

[hoho]

It always strikes me as so funny that in Onlive arguments everybody argues that their connections are terrible, but when time to argue against me another way it's opposite...

Has it ever occured that this "everybody" is actually two completely different groups of people? Also, for onlive you'll mostly need low latency. Throughput it's not that important as long as you have something like 5-10Mbits though more obviously helps assuming servers can feed stuff to you fast enough.

 

[KKRT]

Grandmaster, AlStrong any chance of new GT 5 analysis after Spec II or it will be part of Forza 4 article? :>

 

[kagemaru]

It is, but 60 FPS means lesser graphics...

There's no way for me to exactly know how much better a 30 FPS megatexture game might look. As I said, wait for Doom 4 hopefully...

Yeah you can do more with 30fps than with 60fps, all I'm saying is I believe the frame rate should be factored in when discussing graphics. Meaning 60fps is a part of the graphics and not necessarily always an indication of lesser graphics.