Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2011]

Oh well, why stop there, narrow it down to 2d static screen adventure games.... my point was, that fully dynamic lighting is alive and doing well. I didnt say it was the best solution to everything, but its gaining more and more ground due to increasing computing resources and a demand for it - it's simply easier to edit levels without waiting for precalc to finish. It's a happy coincidence that it also allows designers to play around a bit with the environment and such - not neccessary, but a nice bonus, and trust me there ARE people who value more interactivity over more polygons/texels per frame.

 

I agree with all of that, on my better days I hope I come across as a reasonable person after all.

But I fail to see why it is relevant to either Rage or tech 5. The engine should be able to support a dynamic lighting system (although you probably can't escape level compilation) and the game itself would not have been any better with dynamic lights IMHO. But it made all kinds of sense to utilize the 1:1 lightmapping ability because of the unique texturing and the 60fps target.

 

One of the id software artists has basically confirmed on the Polycount forums that a lot of the enviroments in Rage are completely static and even specular highlights have been baked into the megatexture - so that it only uses a color channel and no normal or specular/spec power channels. That must cut down the texture data sizes significantly (and reduce the stress on the streaming system too).

This is also an answer to why there is no dynamic lighting - it would require those extra channels and thus slow the streaming down far too much even on an X360 full HDD install. Good news is that there's a lot of room to scale up the engine on faster next gen consoles, but 50+ GB of SSD sounds like a must have feature for this.

 

Mind if we got a link to that place?

 

Well I thought you can use Google
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=89756&page=3

 

He clearly said that the actual specular is a cubemap, not that they do not store normal or specular maps.
They still use normalmap to get proper reflection vector and specularmap as mask for the cubemap, It's very evident from pictures on a previous page.

Baking actual specular is possible, but not with the memory usage and texel they want to archieve. (Precomputed Radiance Transfer)
It would look great and might be feasible if it wouldn't be in same resolution as base megatexture. (Perhaps one mipmap down and group the PRT data into 4x4 blocks of original texture, it even might compress nicely)

 

I think a Scorpio black would be less expensive & a wiser choice. Sure SSD will make the game run perfectly, but I think the jump to the 5400RPM HDD to a 7200RPM HDD will likely fix to a very acceptable level.

 

I will check this out next week - some random 5400/160GB (8MB cache) vs. Samsung HM500JJ 7200/500GB (16MB cache)

 

This is true for some of the environment surfaces, particularly in the settlements.

I think you misunderstood, what we mean is that all the shading is baked into a single diffuse color texture. The highlights themselves are static, for example on the mutant stuff in the dead city interiors.
This logically means that they are not using normal and specular components in the shading of these surfaces so there's no need to store them in the virtual texture either.

 

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/laptops/laptop-hdd/

 

That kinda assumes Retail will still be the dominant money maker by the time next-generation of consoles rolls around, which at current pace - will no longer be the case before 2014 (admittedly, retail will still be a big market, but digital will be comfortably bigger by then).

 

I raised this in the Vita thread, but currently retail prices of DD games are 25+% more expensive than their boxed disc alternatives, and as much as 50% more expensive. As long as the console companies have to appease the BnM stores to get a presence on the high street and shift their consoles, they won't be able to competitively price the DD offering as BnM needs the margins. Coupled with crappy broadband in various important markets and DD will still most definitely be playing second fiddle to solid media next-gen. Maybe by the end of next-gen we'll have transitioned to DD, or even streamed gaming a la OnLive, but 2014 is too early for download centric console designs and devs can rely on BRD or greater for distribution.

 

I wasn't suggesting that - simply estimating at what point digital-revenues will exceed those of retail market worldwide (possibly without counting phones in all this - could happen sooner otherwise).
I don't actually expect traditional game-purchase model to be the dominant part of digital revenue though (it's never been the case anyway), so if you only compare on that level, retail should stay ahead longer.

 

I'd like to add that speeds aren't the only barrier to digital dist.

Caps are. I have pretty dang good download speeds here near Seattle (~20Mb/s max, ~16 sustained). But I yhave Comcast and I'm pretty sure I torque them off using 150-200 GB/mo. They're stated policy is 250+ gets you a warning.

I have noticed certain times I appear to be throttled, as well.

If I download 1 game @ 200GB, that's basically my allowance for a month. And with monopolies being what they are, I have no alternative.

 

Live and PSN don't appear to making massive sales. I don't think DD is a path for major developers. Unless the developers Joker was talking about decide to become iOS/Android devs, I think they can rely on 100+ GB storage media.

 

I checked the environments with couple of our artists, and we all agreed that the static environment doesn't have any dynamic lighting. They have baked some fake static highlights on shiny objects, but the highlights do not move when you look at the surface from a different angles. So no normalmaps or PRT in the baked surfaces. The rageConfig.cfg file lists virtual texture cache sizes separately for normal mapped surfaces and diffuse only surfaces ("vt_pageimagesizeuniquediffuseonly"), this pretty much confirms that they have baked lighting to the static geometry.

Dynamic objects on the other hand have normalmaps and seem to have some kind of cubemap specular lighting (most likely offline generated static light probes based on the area surroundings). This sometimes makes the dynamic objects stand out of the surroundings, because the lighting model is so different.

I am pretty confident they have normalmaps and per pixel material properties available during content production, but the system bakes the high quality global illumination lighting and shadows based on requested lighting properties when the game image is generated.

 

I am also sure that these moves have allowed them to cut out 10+ GB of texture data from the final release, maybe even more. Including normal and specular channels in addition to diffuse only could potentially mean a +200% increase in world texture data.

If they could do a 50 GB release of the game, it could look a little bit better with dynamic speculars. They seem to be able to pay the fragment shading cost in the town areas, which is why I believe the background storage size was the bottleneck here.

 

You'd still have the streaming overhead to worry about though. What would normal be? 16 bits? 8 bits for specular? That'd be twice the data requirement as a simple 24 bit colour map, and virtual texturing is already struggling. This is an interesting limit of VT - there's a BW cap from the streaming sources that limits the quality of the assets in terms of variety. Unless 10000 RPM HDDs, or significant RAM caches, can be used, games using VT for environments will be less dynamic, limiting the scope for their use.

 

Well, normals are RGB 24 bits at least; specular needs an intensity/color and a power/gloss/roughness element too. If you do colored spec, that's 4 bytes; if you do monochrome, it's 2 bytes.

And again, they can load the data fine in the towns, at least I don't really get much trouble there, although they're relatively smaller and enclosed areas. Still, I think it'd work on PCs, the problem is that they'd have to ship an 50+ GB sized game and that doesn't work yet.
Must have been a very painful decision for all the artists working on those huge, beautiful levels...

 

Need to play that far, it's incredible if they actually baked it all.
I did not expect full PRT, but I was hoping for a single 8bit specular mask and a normal map.

I really hope do for some more 'magic' for Doom4.
I have been wondering about possibility of just in time rendering of GI or 'PRT' with virtual texturing, is such approach possible?
Or in general creating some of the lighting in texture space to get resolution and/or frame independent lighting in a complex scene.