While I do agree (I would even extend that out 6 months) it was these very boards that were crucifying the very concept 10 months ago! Anyhow, HS is looking like a great game. It could come Q4 2007 and it would be well worth the wait.
Heavenly Sword update (E3 cometh..)
- Thread starter Titanio
- Start date
While I do agree (I would even extend that out 6 months) it was these very boards that were crucifying the very concept 10 months ago! Anyhow, HS is looking like a great game. It could come Q4 2007 and it would be well worth the wait.scooby_dooby
Legend
I thought MS basically coined the phrase?? Were there launch 'windows' before Nov 2005??
The whole launch window thing is pretty cheesy (always has been imo, 360 included) just say "a few months after launch" is that so hard??
mckmas8808
Legend
Does anyone know if there's any procedural synthesis on this game? I was just wondering about whether any games are doing procedural textures at all yet, and thought with HS at least the devs are around to ask! Apart from SpeedTree there doesn't appear to be any making noises in this field.
speedtree doesnt really use procedural methods (and certainly not ingame), trees are created mainly with artist input
I dont know much about the application, but I was thinking MGS4's new Octo-Camo system might be a candidate for some kind of texture synthesis. In the game the suit has to randomly match a pattern to whatever background texture the character is up against, and on the fly. Would procedural textures make sense there?
I don't know about about HS but there is an XBLA game called Roboblitz http://www.roboblitz.com/site.html that is using procedural textures using a tool called ProFX from Allegorithmic http://allegorithmic.com/v2/ProFX_roboblitz.htm. As said they are making an XBLA games and they need to be under 50MB and on top of that they are using UE3, to which they have incorporated this tech, to make the game so they really don't have that much space to play with so procedural synthesis I guess is the only way to go. Quite impressive I have to say looking at the screens and knowing that it will be under 50MB and finally someone that is actually using this tech in a commercial product...
A good way to save space but once you have blue ray..who cares? lol
But it does bring up an interesting subject. Even though there seems to be advantages like much smaller file sizes and even more importantly much faster loading, I wonder how many will even bother to look into it just because the space is there after all and I guess there are more acute matters to attend to...
I was thinking more realtime content. AFAIK that mentioned method is pre-creating textures algorithmically on startup and then using them exactly as normal. I thought SpeedTree did this by varying the trees as they are created when they come into view.platon said:
My inspiration for considering this was outside in the evening seeing the tiny shadows cast by the detail on a brick wall. I got thinking how you could create procedural texturing for a surface as you get closer. You'd have your large brick textures from afar, and as you approach the wall, detail is added algorithmically to add realism. To keep it consistent you'd need a 'seed' texture or value, perhaps per vertex, so the procedural material doesn't vary either between frames or when you zoom out and zoom back in again. For things like random noise, procedural texturing should add considerably to realism, elliminating repeating textures, without costing much to implement, but it depends how you get the texture info to the GPU. It may be better to have the maths done in pixel shaders rather than CPU. It'd be great on things like walls, trees, dirt and the such.
Ok, so you ment on the fly procedural creation. As far as I know there are not any titles that use it, or even if it has been seriously looked into, and if I remeber correctly there was in an interview with some MS guy that said that they have not started looking into real time procedural generation yet, but it is really interesting, especially for the kind of example you describe...
Here's a 720p direct-feed variant of the E3 trailer - it's not the exact same as the E3 trailer as far as I can tell. It has footage from that, spliced with Andy Serkis's main character:
http://www.playsyde.com/leech_2906_en.html
It came off of a promotional DVD you get with preorders in parts of Europe.
http://www.playsyde.com/leech_2906_en.html
It came off of a promotional DVD you get with preorders in parts of Europe.
You forget that good procedurals are a result of compositing together up to dozens of different fractals to hide their artificial look. Calculating them on the fly may not even be possible on a GPU, and storing them in RAM will once again introduce memory issues...
What do you mean by 'good procedurals'? Take a random roughnessas that could be used for a brick or ground texture. That can be calculated very straightforwardly per pixel with a cellular or other noise algorithm. Creating such a texture wouldn't need the data to be written to a texture file; it wouldn't need adjacent pixels to be calculated to work out what any given pixel is. If the algorithm fits onto pixel shaders it can be calculated per pixel with no need for creating a texture at all.
Looks very, very good. Great detail, fluid, awesome style, gameplay looks absolutely fantastic. Only small complaint is the haziness, almost like bloom--the hero almost glows. Anyhow this game looks awesome.
The problem is that a simple procedural in itself, be it some Perlin noise, marble, cellular, wood or whatever, does not look neither realistic nor good at all. It usually only combines 2-3 colors in a very recognizable pattern, so it will have a very obvious CG look.
Remember Babylon 5? Vorlon ships and most of the hyperspace stuff has used simple fractal noise procedurals and that looks pretty bad compared to the high res hand painted textures seen in today's games.
The preferred method is to build an entire tree of procedural maps where you'd use one kind of map as a mask to mix 2 different maps... and combine this until you have 10-30 different maps with varied world scale, colors etc. etc. Also, most procedurals require several iterations of the fractals to get a detailed look, otherwise it'll look very soft in closeups. This is so slow to calculate, however, that it can be felt with offline rendering as well, so it'll almost certainly be impossible to use in a realtime application. Today's hardware can render maybe 4 or so many procedurals per pixel with a medium iteration level which just isn't enough.
And even if you combine all those procedurals, it will never look as good as a hand painted texture. And it'll be a problem for the artists, too...
