Forza Horizon 3 [XO, XPA]

[Cyan]

You don't need to scan foliage for it to look realistic. It just needs lots of resources. FH3 looks like Speedtree to me - static 2D sprites for clusters of leaves painted with highlights towards the top. And that's not a criticism of its look. It's an open-world racer and of course compromises are made, just as they are in every racer. I'm simply responding to Cyan's images and examples with my own personal response. The Uncanny Valley should probably be expected TBH.

And I'll add that if flitting through the images and letting the eye gravitate naturally to the car without looking at the scenery, it does look very like a photo.

at least you give it the benefit of the doubt, because the game doesn't always look as realistic:

Forza Horizon 3 has such realism...

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=es&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=gl&ie=UTF-8&u=http://www.motorpasion.com/clasicos/ellos-nunca-lo-harian-como-acaban-tres-lamborghini-countach-y-un-porsche-911-speedster-abandonados-en-un-granero&edit-text=

 

[Clukos]

I managed to get the game running at -somewhat- 60 fps on my PC, seems like the xmp profile was turned off for some reason (mobo bios reset maybe) so my ram was running at 1333MHz instead of 2133. After i switched it on performance in game is night and day difference. I still can't get it to a locked 60 because of the multithreading issues, core0 is always maxed over the rest, but it's perfectly playable. I'm thinking the game needs a combination of mem bandwidth and cpu single core perf to hold 60 fps, which is why a lot of people end up having problems, even with ddr4 most people cheap out on ram because they think it doesn't make any difference

 

[Cyan]

FH3 has reached more than 1 million unique players.

https://twitter.com/shinobi602/status/787337886702133249

Forza Horizon 3 was the #1 first-party game at USA Physical Retail in September 2016. ~150K range, great for a USA racing game in 2016. #NPD

Also note that Forza Horizon 3 went on sale at the very end of September with only 5 days of tracking, so we should see similar sales in Oct

As of right now, Forza Horizon 3 has had 1,134,155 lifetime WW players (1,021,085 Xbox One, 113,070 PC). Note: not every player is an owner.

Given crossplay and multiple players, it's likely FH3 has been bought by at least 600K worldwide. So we should see good NPD legs in October.

 

[Clukos]

PC doesn't count as a different player. It's crossplay and cross save so whatever you do on Xbox carries over to PC and vice versa. Happy to see the game doing well, it deserves everything and more. Only blemish is the state of the PC version at launch (it still needs improvement but it's better) and those damn drivatars in drift zones. I keep playing and playing and playing and not getting bored, reminds me of when i was burning out Driveclub

 

[Silent_Buddha]

PC doesn't count as a different player. It's crossplay and cross save so whatever you do on Xbox carries over to PC and vice versa. Happy to see the game doing well, it deserves everything and more. Only blemish is the state of the PC version at launch (it still needs improvement but it's better) and those damn drivatars in drift zones. I keep playing and playing and playing and not getting bored, reminds me of when i was burning out Driveclub

Additionally since the 113,070 are Play Anywhere players, that's a guaranteed 113,070 sales as digital sales are tied to the users account.

Right now with the data available, only ~150K copies can be potentially shared with other users. Sales are usually front loaded, so let's assume ~150K more physical sales in October so far. Reasonable as usually sales dip significantly after the 1st week. However, October is also when people start their Christmas shopping.

So perhaps ~300k (+/- some unknown amount) sales could be shared. Who knows how many people are sharing their disks. But it'd be safe to say that digital sales are likely somewhere between 500-700k in the timeframe that the data was for that twitter post was collected.

It's also possible that it'll have decent legs as it's starting off the holiday shopping season, and there aren't many new racing games to choose from on XBO/PC.

Regards,
SB

 

[Clukos]

It's also possible that it'll have decent legs as it's starting off the holiday shopping season, and there aren't many new racing games to choose from on XBO/PC

And none of that caliber anyway, the one thing that'd boost PC sales significantly would be a steam release but we all know that ain't happening any time soon

 

[Malo]

Really want to stream this to my living room HTPC but not going to happen so maybe pick it up if it ever goes to steam or I do my upgrade on the HTPC.

 

[Cyan]

PC doesn't count as a different player. It's crossplay and cross save so whatever you do on Xbox carries over to PC and vice versa. Happy to see the game doing well, it deserves everything and more. Only blemish is the state of the PC version at launch (it still needs improvement but it's better) and those damn drivatars in drift zones. I keep playing and playing and playing and not getting bored, reminds me of when i was burning out Driveclub

talking of other addicting games. I had to write directly to Phil Spencer about one of the loves of my gaming life, Project Gotham Racing series -how can anyone forget playing Edinburgh tracks while listening to your own music on the original Xbox?- and I did that today.

Hopefully he is going to reply, because no game ever came close to that kind of perfection and pinpoint accuracy when it came to track design and the lap times you needed to achieve bronze, silver, gold and platinum medals.

It is a longing never fulfilled by any game I played since the last Project Gotham Racing game (though the 2nd was about perfect).

 

[Clukos]

PGR 2 and 4 I've spent countless hours playing, sadly i think PGR is pretty much dead because MS have two solid racing games with Forza M/H.

 

[AlNom]

PGR4 still looks great. Shame they sent it to die. Game deserves a PC port for preservation.

 

[Newguy]

"Forza Horizon 3 uses a voxel-based global illumination system to calculate light bounces in real-time,” says Fulton

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...izon-3-game-perfect-skies-photorealism-detail

One of the first AAA games this gen using real time SVOGI/something similar? I think Gears 4 uses some form of real time GI, not sure about other games.

 

[AlNom]

One of the first AAA games this gen using real time SVOGI/something similar?

Not likely to be octrees.

The rest:

In Forza Horizon 3, we calculate how light – and hence colour – bounces into partially occluded areas so shadows have a much higher variation in darkness and colour. The depths of a tunnel, with no direct and minimal indirect light, will be almost black; whereas the edges of shadow will bleed naturally from dark to light based on indirect bounced light.”

 

[Malo]

Holy moly that is beautiful

 

[higherARC]

"Forza Horizon 3 uses a voxel-based global illumination system to calculate light bounces in real-time,” says Fulton

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...izon-3-game-perfect-skies-photorealism-detail

One of the first AAA games this gen using real time SVOGI/something similar? I think Gears 4 uses some form of real time GI, not sure about other games.

Amazing I've taken too many screenshots while playing it's breathtaking what they created

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Holy moly that is beautiful

Everything except the vegetation! It's interesting to watch the state of the art in rendering shift focus. SpeedTree brought us much better trees with PS3630 than PS2/XB, while lighting remained limited in improvement. Then lighting was progressed until now we've various secondary illumination solutions, while the trees are still using the old, outdated, and visually incompatible methods. Better foliage middleware is required! UC4 did a pretty good job, but I don't know how engine specific that would be.

Thinking aloud, surely the trees could be considered volumes with SSS. Maybe a shortcut could be applied treating them as such, applying volumetric lighting calculations to the leaf sprites?

 

[Malo]

Everything except the vegetation!

Yes definitely agree, they really stand out in the picture compared to everything else.

 

[Cyan]

PGR 2 and 4 I've spent countless hours playing, sadly i think PGR is pretty much dead because MS have two solid racing games with Forza M/H.

Solid yes, but there has never been a game that came close to it, Forza games are not a substitute for PGR, that was quite the unique game.

 

[higherARC]

Snow is coming in 1 of 2 expansions!!

http://www.forzamotorsport.net/en-us/news/FH3_Alpinestars_Car_Pack

 

[BRiT]

Winter is coming to Australia?

 

[AlNom]

Now is the winter of our downloadable content.