Last of Us [PS4]

[patsu]

Some games stream dialog from BR while streaming other assets from the HDD.

 

[Grall]

BD has long seek time and combination of BD+HDD is most likely always slower than just using HDD.

BDs huge capacity should let a dev just duplicate assets as required to avoid having to seek at all in most cases, unless you're doing a GTA-style open world game (although Burnout Paradise had no trouble with streaming from BD, not even with the fastest vehicles...)

 

[patsu]

Pretty good impressions on the preview:
http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=558770

Not going to read any of them, but the highlights from Gaffers are:
AI, horror elements, rich crafting options, enable/disable in-game radar, ...

 

[Gradthrawn]

Pretty good impressions on the preview:
http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=558770

Not going to read any of them, but the highlights from Gaffers are:
AI, horror elements, rich crafting options, enable/disable in-game radar, ...

More specifically, you can disable/enable 3 of the games in-game aids that get the most grief from certain very vocal gamers that lack the self control to simply not use them and wish the option didn't exist for anyone because it "pollutes" their "pure" gaming experience.

 

[milk]

More specifically, you can disable/enable 3 of the games in-game aids that get the most grief from certain very vocal gamers that lack the self control to simply not use them and wish the option didn't exist for anyone because it "pollutes" their "pure" gaming experience.

To be fair, they do have a point when many games with those types of features really are designed for them, and there is no fair way of playing them without those aids.

 

[patsu]

It may be ok if they developed the game with no in-game aids, and then throw in those aids later for newbies and demoes.

As long as we see reporters and early players rave about their experiences, we should be able to play with the right options by listening to the crowd recommendations.

KZ2 MP default setup can be terrible. GAF found the right sweetspot config for them, and built a following around the game anyway.

 

[Gradthrawn]

To be fair, they do have a point when many games with those types of features really are designed for them, and there is no fair way of playing them without those aids.

To have a proper discussion about this we would probably have to first decide on an accepted definition of "fair" (fair in context of the discussion). For example, does fair mean no trial and error (or no additional T&E)? Perhaps it means the game is just as easy without the "wall hacks"? Could be an interesting discussion but would really require developer feedback as well. Especially if specific games are going to be used as an example. It's very easy for someone to say "yeah, Hitman Absolution was designed around it and can't be played "fairly" without it". With their only proof being "its harder without it". But any further discussion should probably be moved to a separate post.

 

[Bagel seed]

If the audio cues are detailed enough to discern the location of enemies as long as you've got a quality speaker setup or decent headphones, then I'd be pretty satisfied. Plus with the game being in 3rd person view, how much is wall hacking really needed anyways?

I played all the Hitmans without resorting to the game aids, and I can say that basically it boils down to how much patience you've got in determining how much T&E you'll encounter. Although I have to say in H:A it was mostly unavoidable because the levels were very small and corridor like. If Last of Us sticks to this wide-linear kind of level design they've been advertising I don't think avoiding the hint system should create too many unfair situations.

 

[patsu]

It’s both way. The Clickers will hunt you by emitting audible clicks. The regular mushroom folks will probably use line of sight. We will of course use both our eyes and ears.


Anyway, looks like some people are posting spoilers in the comments section of Youtube videos and previews. Be careful when you’re out there. ;-)

Came here to post this though:

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Short presentation on the character rigging:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myZcUvU8YWc

 

[Deleted member 7537]

The Music of The Last of Us (spoiler free )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ejdjcun2Jo4

 

[RenegadeRocks]

Yeah ! Stop internet browsing guys, there are people posting the ending of LOU on randomn articles on N4G ! Most prbly the same old Xbox fanboys who are pissed at not being able to play it on their money sucking hardware Thnankfully a helpful soul posted a warning as a reply to the first comment to not scroll below !!

Anyways, ND has a habit of showing off all the surprises of their games , so I have been avoinding everything now. I am still not 'convincec' for this game, somehow, there's something missing, that hook that makes you tear away your wallet and throw the money at them. I dunno, ut since they announced it will be avaialalbe on PSN, I have decided to buy it. I am done with physical media, all my games are on my hdd. Actually missed out on GOW:A since it didn't come to psn. So, will be grabbing this one. Hope it turns out good !

And very intrigued about what makes ND so confident about its MP that they have still kept it as a surprise ??? I mean DayZ has already happened, what more unique can they cook up in this story premise ?

 

[RenegadeRocks]

Short presentation on the character rigging:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myZcUvU8YWc

Thanx for the link ! The face meshes are really dense, like meshsmooth =2 or something. Didn't know games had gone so far these days.

 

[Billy Idol]

Short presentation on the character rigging:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myZcUvU8YWc

Thanks for the link. Always amazed to see the crazy amount if work and tec that goes into this. Besides all the crazy stuff, my favorite was pupil dilatation.

 

[RenegadeRocks]

Frankly, its the music and the character faces , the way they always have an expression, however subtle it might be, that is making me buy this game. The eyes never seem dead and the faces are never blank, it feels so special for a game(or even a cg movie).

Some how the environment art isn't doing anything for me, its beautiful but nothing that makes me wanna go there and live the story. What really pulls me towards the game is that one concept art which was revealed long back, a sketch of Joel and Ellie sitting by a fire and peeling potatoes while laughing ....... It felt so magical ! You could feel the joke , the story and the harsh environment(even though it wasn't there) in that one sketch !!! That is why I am driven to chk this game out. If that one sketch can capture a feel so perfectly, I am hoping some of it will seep thru into the game too. Although, we all know games never really reach what Concept arts aim for, but .........we have a talented dev here, great music to set the tone, really good character faces........it could happen !

I dunno what, but something feels off...can't put my finger on it :-/

 

[orangpelupa]

amazung audio!

its nice that ND upped it from uncharted wish other devs give attention to audio too. The positional and reverb also better than BF3!
make me remember bfbc 1 2

 

[upnorthsox]

Short presentation on the character rigging:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myZcUvU8YWc

Awesome, thanks. Could you go into more detail on FACs if you know anything?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

The face meshes are really dense, like meshsmooth =2 or something. Didn't know games had gone so far these days.

Nextgen games like Quantic Dream's stuff is probably going to get even more dense, as the facial expressions can get more convincing and it's also easier to slide the skin over the muscles and bones if you have more geometry.
They're pretty much converging with the level we're doing, when the mesh is dense enough to actually form the little folds and wrinkles, instead of just fading them in from a secondary wrinkle map.

Although, this would make it near impossible to re-use the mesh and thus the bone weighting. Painting the influences for those 98 bones must be quite a chore to do, even once.

Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised to see 15-50k polygon heads in next gen games focusing on characters and acting.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Could you go into more detail on FACs if you know anything?

Yeah, sure.

FACS is for facial action coding system, developed by Dr. Paul Ekman and his team in the `60s to get a way of describing facial expressions of patients in mental institutes, so that the doctors could compare exactly what's going on instead of trying to describe it or draw it.
I think it can also be used to detect subconscious ticks and such that the face does when lying, and there's a TV series with Tim Roth about it as well?

Action units are based on what the brain can tell the facial muscles to do, not on the individual muscles of the face or what we call expressions like anger or sadness. Those larger expressions can almost always get decomposed into a set of AUs with various weights for each.
For example a nice smile usually involves the Lip Corner Puller but also the Cheek Raiser to form the crow's feet around the eyes and perhaps stuff like Inner and Outer Brow Raiser and Upper Lip Raiser and so on. But leave out the Cheek Raiser and it's suddenly a fake smile.

There are detailed descriptions on what muscles each AU fires, I think they even did some research with electrodes and such. Lots of facial expressions use AUs unintentionally although getting into the evolutionary and behavioural aspects would be too much for me
They also included head turns and gaze directions but this is irrelevant to facial rigging, btw.


The big advantage of FACS is that since the system uses small elements, there's an almost limitless number of expressions that can be built, and the face can move into an extreme position and still act from there (like look pretty angry with all muscles compressed and then start to talk or shout). Lip sync is also not about dialing phonemes like E and F and M, but using the various AUs to shape the lips.

The idea to use this approach in CG facial animation is kinda old by now, but the first big example was Gollum. The main reason it took such a character is that there was an inherent problem with combining to many AUs and getting a result that looks unrealistic and disturbing and kinda messed up altogether. Weta solved this by creating 'fix' shapes for practically all the thousands of combined expressions and mixing them on top of the base shapes. This involved a LOT of work but the results were amazing. Also the animators had to learn how AUs work and it was somewhat against traditional 2D animation approaches where realism was secondary, as stylization helped with readability. We all recognize a smiley face, after all (I'm told even babies do).

Today FACS is sort of an industry standard, especially after Avatar, Apes and Hobbit have taken it to a new level. But FACS was also used for Benjamin Button, Dobby in Potter 7, the CG Guy Pearce in Iron Man 3 and so on. So it was inevitable for games to implement it as well.

Last of Us is using pre-set values for bone rotations and translations to create AUs, and adds blendshapes and wrinkle maps on top. Halo 4 is not using a direct implementation of FACS but it's very similar, and it's completely blendshape based but also using wrinkle maps (and not just normal, but color as well).

I think Beyond is still not FACS but a direct transform based approach, as they're capturing from the same actor that was used for the CG model. They'll probably have to switch for PS4 projects though.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Here's Neytiri from Avatar as an example of movie level stuff: