Game development presentations - a useful reference

Laa-Yosh said:
Okay, this one from Lionhead looks very interesting.

Edit: it also sounds like what ILM developed for Davy Jones in Pirates 2, in order to overcome the poly limits of the previous versions on Zbrush (they managed about 1.5-2 million quads at that time)

Edit2: super amazing, forwarding it to our own tool programmers, probably gonna add some questions tomorrow ;)
Click to expand...

So their tech is that good huh?
 
They've overcome a major problem in content creation related to environments, and also managed to deal with the mountains of data that it created.

We're dealing with different detail levels (games can get away with more issues than us) but we still face very similar problems, content creation tools and 2D/3D representations are usually just not enough for our needs. Our director wants a close up of a truck with large portions of the ground visible where we need literally millimeter levels of detail, but we also need to see the same asset extend to dozens of meters - it is impossible to texture map and model something like that with the current tools. Cheating is our only option so far, but what's outlined in the presentation looks like a good approach to overcome the limitations in off-the-shelf tools.


So... they did not actually implement the "unlimited geometry" concept that Carmack's been talking about, but they've obviously been inspired by the idea and managed to build a content creation pipeline that could already handle datasets of previously unheard sizes. They've also implemented tools to create the ingame versions with very little artist involvement. They're dealing with relatively small environments, but at a huge level of detail (2 texels / cm) and with relatively fast turnarounds.

So it's nearly unlimited geometry for the source art, but still represented as low-res geometry, and also using virtual texturing, all running on the X360 from a DVD. They also have real time global illumination with dynamic time of day but static world geometry.


If their game system guys are as clever as the graphics programmers, Milo can easily become a system seller for Kinect. Considering how well it's already selling, the implications are interesting, to say the least.
Of course they also have to get realtime characters to a completely new level, to make Milo easy to accept, but obviously they're keeping that under wraps for now. But it must involve some very interesting tech indeed, especially regarding facial animation and skin shading / eye rendering.
 
That is some pretty amazing looking stuff. The beach scene is a bit lacking, far to repetitive, but the rest is far ahead anything else, the lake is mesmerizing for example.
 
If you mean the framerate is bad in the vid, he does mention there is an issue on youtube. :p
 
AlStrong said:
If you mean the framerate is bad in the vid, he does mention there is an issue on youtube. :p
Click to expand...
No problems with framerate since he said its because youtube.What I have "problems" with is the fact that it looks so damn nice.Like good looking cartoon :smile:
 
Oh yeah. And I thought I can go to sleep about now... ;)

Hm, there actually isn't that much to download yet...
 
There are three presentations on Alan Wake as well. :devilish: XD


Looks like I was completely off on the Impostor tech. :LOL: Voxels eh... Definitely go through the Reach LOD presentation on full screen so you don't miss the transition frames.
 
hm... Don't have MS Office? There are some that are .key files, which are mac-only AFAIK. :(

The SPU culling in KZ3 is a neat one to watch. Big download, but they include videos within the presentation (gotta full-screen them).

Chris Tchou's presentation on Reach was neat too (also huge download).
 
I'm a more busy at my new job, I added two links some days ago on the front pages, I hope to find sometime in the next weeks to finish the update possibly improve the presentation through the use of "spoiler" tags.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
AlStrong said:
hm... Don't have MS Office?
Click to expand...

Only OpenOffice at work, and it can't read any new stuff; nor is the ppt viewer from Microsoft itself able to deal with this format. Meh, I don't want to buy Office... let's hope we're gonna get some more friendly downloadable slides.

At least I was able to unpack the Reach videos and images, still kinda interesting. Will look at the rest sometime during the weekend, is there anything else you can recommend? I've checked the Heavy Rain one, somewhat of a letdown; and Bioware's SWMMO on their automatic lighting, which was interesting and looked kinda nice.

There are some that are .key files, which are mac-only AFAIK. :(
Click to expand...

Bollocks. This is lame.
 
Oh, and I've watched half of the Doom post mortem (yeah, Doom 1) and it was quite funny, Tom Hall and Romero together again ;)
There's a lot of these classic game post mortems, Populous, Elite, so I'll probably have to spend a day to watch them all.
 
The presentation on sound synthesis (Crackdown 2) was pretty neat if you're into audio. It's pptx, but there are a number of movie files with audio examples and even some Half-Life 2 in there. Pretty refreshing to see some audio processing being focused on.

Kinda neat to see how Bioware Austin is handling Old Republic character lighting. It's so... roundabout, but at least it's in PPT.

There's also the presentation on DLAA used in SW: TFU2, also ppt.
 
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