Halo: Reach

[LightHeaven]

imposters and LOD are not something to boast about, NOT using them now that is something to boast about
In fact with todays tech theres less much need to use them than there has in the past, A future cryengine will not use imposters as GPU power is increasing faster than vertex etc rates

LOD/imposters
pros
- better FPS
cons
- more memory used
- graphically worse

halo is a game thats impossible to have a talk about the quality of the gfx tech, remember here on these forums when halo3 came out, some ppl were saying 'its near the top graphically' which was completely illogical.
btw - Laa-Yosh halo:reach will not use natal (like I said it wouldnt)

But bungie said that using the imposter system helped them reduce ram usage, not increase it.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

imposters and LOD are not something to boast about, NOT using them now that is something to boast about

I'm sorry but that's silly. We have an entire render farm and still we build 300 polygon characters for the crowd scenes, and prefer to use sprites instead of them whenever we can.

High res geometry in the distance also ruins GPU efficiency as you start go get subpixel triangles.

 

[dragonelite]

I'm sorry but that's silly. We have an entire render farm and still we build 300 polygon characters for the crowd scenes, and prefer to use sprites instead of them whenever we can.

High res geometry in the distance also ruins GPU efficiency as you start go get subpixel triangles.

Hey time is money and if people cant see it why spend more resources making high detail models when people don't get to see the details on them.Hope i got that right,but i want more opinions on the assassination move.

 

[ShadowWolf64]

imposters and LOD are not something to boast about, NOT using them now that is something to boast about
In fact with todays tech theres less much need to use them than there has in the past, A future cryengine will not use imposters as GPU power is increasing faster than vertex etc rates

LOD/imposters
pros
- better FPS
cons
- more memory used
- graphically worse

halo is a game thats impossible to have a talk about the quality of the gfx tech, remember here on these forums when halo3 came out, some ppl were saying 'its near the top graphically' which was completely illogical.
btw - Laa-Yosh halo:reach will not use natal (like I said it wouldnt)

Bungie's imposter tech gives them more memory usage instead of decreasing it..It also allows them to have high detail up close as well....

 

[ShadowRunner]

We shouldnt be calling people "bungie haters" for little reason, this forum is better than that. Or it should be.

I believe what zed meant was that in an ideal world you would want to do away with LOD and use highest detail for everything. Wether true or not its a fair comment and its understandable how someone would come to that conclusion in a situation where you have limitless rescources. LOD is commonly seen as a system of removing detail to gain performance. It was obviously a toung in cheek remark.

 

[Acert93]

I believe what zed meant was that in an ideal world you would want to do away with LOD and use highest detail for everything.

If he is trying to say no game should use LOD then that is just a dumb comment not worthy of consideration in a realtime context for games on consoles or the PC. Period. But then again maybe he doesn't agree with your translation of what he is saying

LOD is a smart way to maximize resources--instead of having the same quality, even for distance objects where that detail cannot be seen, a good LOD system allows you to have higher quality models when they are close to the camera and consume significant screen space compared to a game that had HQ assets far off in the distance choking the GPU with mamoth poly budgets for such small objects.

Further the "ideal world" of theory isn't translating to Bungie's engine architecture as they have deposited their impostors is saving them memory. Now we can theorize why this shouldn't be the case (what were Bungie doing with Halo 3 that would result in an extra layer of LOD is actually reducing footprint?) but zed's comments pretty much fly in face of how their game works.

I have a feeling this thread is going to end up in the, "Why doesn't every game have FNR4 model quality?" and "Uncharted would look exactly the same if ND made it into a GTA4 style world." There seems to be little appreciation for the implications for a game engine that records hours of gameplay with 4 player coop in large areas with 20+ combatants to keep coordinated across the 4 live players.

And I am the first (see above) to lay out criticism of some of Bungie's choices (oh well, I best not show up for the interview), so it isn't blind love.

 

[(((interference)))]

IIRC, somebody talked about an engine (CryEngine 3?) using something they also called imposters, where a character would be rendered into a texture. The texture would then be used for a few frames, before being updated. This only occurs in the distance.

Seems far more likely that Bungie has implemented the above than renaming LOD. Considering how little bungie has talked about much of their tech to the public, they don't sound nearly that shamelessly boastful.

Ah, I always thought that devs should be looking to advanced image based rendering techniques to solve the LOD problem.

Perhaps its somewhat like the KZ2 loading screens which use 2D images but look like a 3D scene.

 

[NRP]

but i want more opinions on the assassination move.

Honestly, when I heard they removed one-hit-kill assassinations in favor of some elaborately animated kill sequence by holding the melée button for two seconds, I wasn't a happy camper. Halo's gameplay is pretty fast, so you will hardly ever have time to pull off one of those fancy assassinations. But in the latest podcast, they said the game will have both the standard one hit assassinations as well as the fancy new ones. So I'm happy again.

We really won't know until the beta, but so far it sounds pretty cool. I predict a lot of movie clips and screenshots of degrading kills. LOL!

 

[ShadowWolf64]

Honestly, when I heard they removed one-hit-kill assassinations in favor of some elaborately animated kill sequence by holding the melée button for two seconds, I wasn't a happy camper. Halo's gameplay is pretty fast, so you will hardly ever have time to pull off one of those fancy assassinations. But in the latest podcast, they said the game will have both the standard one hit assassinations as well as the fancy new ones. So I'm happy again.

We really won't know until the beta, but so far it sounds pretty cool. I predict a lot of movie clips and screenshots of degrading kills. LOL!

Im glad both the basic and elaborate melee kills are in the game.Honestly, the way Bungie is implementing the fancy melee kills is exactly how I thought it should be.So, im pretty excited to use it.

lol yeah, in the beta we are going to see people perform those fancy melee kills and then t-bag you afterwards..

 

[assen]

The "you don't need LOD because hardware is powerful now" and "the ideal scene would have no LOD" things are a common fallacy.

You never have to choose between rendering the same scene with or without LOD/impostors.
The choice is between scene A, which has e.g. 2000 trees rendered as full-res meshes without LOD, or scene B, which has e.g. 1500 trees rendered as full-res meshes, and an additional 50 000 rendered as impostors/sprites. In almost all situation you can get the second, more complex scene, to look considerably better.

 

[ShadowRunner]

Indeed. I do not agree with zeds comments about LOD in the context of realtime graphics rendering, though i dont think he was serious. I took it as more along the lines of if bungie came out and said they created a technique of always using highest detail models without any sacrifice to performance over a traditional LOD system we would all be excited about it, a world of miracles if you like, it was a joke.

Anyway ill let Zed explain his comments now just seemed like a bit of an extreme reaction to me.

 

[zed]

Hey time is money and if people cant see it why spend more resources making high detail models when people don't get to see the details on them.

the opposite is true, with LOD u need to invest more time not less

eg check Laa_yosh's quote

I'm sorry but that's silly. We have an entire render farm and still we build 300 polygon characters for the crowd scenes, and prefer to use sprites instead of them whenever we can.

thus instead of creating a single model they create a model and a sprite, ergo more time/resources

yes LOD is used to improve performance, hmm I mentioned this in in my pro's/cons list.

hoking the GPU with mammoth poly budgets for such small objects

todays GPU's can handle huge(*) numbers of vertices per frame, this is rarely the bottleneck unlike it was 10+ years ago. now for LOD theres a couple of ways of doing it
A/ creating various LOD models and switching between them (requires more memory) popping effects can occur
B/ dynamic polygon collapse, requires more CPU power and often doesnt work well visually as the wrong edges are collapsed

(*)>1 billion a second

So are GT5's 2d polygon tree's are good?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

It's always a tradeoff. If using any kind of LOD gives you better performance, that you need, then it's worth the investment.

Also, a GPU's ability to handle a billion vertices is irrelevant if your pipeline is stalled because you spend a lot of cycles on rendering 20-pixel tall enemies.

 

[Neb]

But the bigger play area the game has the worse perfomance penalty will be with no use of LODs. And how will applying MSAA affect perfomance on all those polys and how about the highres textures and perhaps shading for those tiny objects. Imagine GTAIV with no LOD and 40m polygons per frame and awfull framerate or good perfomance with fog line 100m ahead and the rest being culled away to fit perfomance budget...

 

[(((interference)))]

New Bungie Weekly Update


They talk about how the elites are interesting to fight again
and about the new shield effects

“If you remember the shield effects in Halo: CE, when you took damage, it would swell and eventually burst. We lost that functionality in Halo 3. In Reach, we’re bringing it back. You can see perturbation around the vertices now. It’s an extrusion of the render mesh.”

 

[AlNom]

Shouldn't be too hard. Elites tend not to drop their weapons in anger and resort to suicidal charges.

 

[(((interference)))]

Shouldn't be too hard. Elites tend not to drop their weapons in anger and resort to suicidal charges.

Lol, yeah, actually the Brutes were much scarier to fight in Halo 2 (apart from the Chieftains of course) because when they would go beserk they were actually dangerous and could one hit kill you with their very fast charging.
In Halo 3 they just sort of growled at you allowing you to headshot them and finish them off before they do anything.

I really hope they can make the Elites as fun to fight as in Halo 1, anyone remember the time you first encountered the p sword wielding gold elite on one of the bridges in Assault on the Control Room. :smile: was scary as hell when he would roar and charge at you, I always remember running like hell back to the other side of the bridge, you couldn't risk a look back either cos he'd always be right behind you.

I really like the Halo Wars elite designs though, Bungie should have built on Ensemble's/Blur's designs

 

[NRP]

I really hope they can make the Elites as fun to fight as in Halo 1, anyone remember the time you first encountered the p sword wielding gold elite on one of the bridges in Assault on the Control Room. :smile: was scary as hell when he would roar and charge at you, I always remember running like hell back to the other side of the bridge, you couldn't risk a look back either cos he'd always be right behind you.

Hell yeah I remember that. After killing what seemed like every enemy in the game, that damned door at the end of the bridge opened and here comes the meanest bastard so far! It was then I learned how useful a needler could be.

Assault on the Control Room is my absolute favorite video game level of all time.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Er, depending on the level of difficulty I guess, but you should have met some of those bastards.
Like there was one on the Truth and Reconciliation, and one on the Silent Cartographer; although they might not had swords. But the invisible Elites on top of the grav lift on the Covenant cruiser definitely had swords and they were terrifying as well...

 

[NRP]

Yeah, now that you mention it, I had a tough time with the invisible bastards on the grav lift (Truth and Reconciliation?) too. The secret to defeating them was plasma grenades, timing the active camo, and . . . more plasma grenades.

What made the elite on the bridge tough was that I was typically low on ammo and grenades by the time he showed up, which made things tense.