New Tim Sweeny interview

[mckmas8808]

I can see the only thing that some of us here are complaining about is the fact that Sony (and MS too) are using prerendered CGI concepts and passing them off as targets for their graphics, targets that are unreachable (unless you believe in miracles, I don't). Not to say that games won't look better than that

I think too this is what fuels the fire more than anything. I know alot of people that don't like when others say something shown at E3 is unreachable. Its the unreachable part that gets under people's skin. Then people say well look at the PS2 tech demos Sony did live up to it. Again something that only fuels the fire and it doesn't help.

I say this because everybody knows that Namco girl for example has been and pasted. Maybe not from a technical polys for polys stand point, but visually to the average gamer eye. I not going to say I know for a fact that KZ is possible, so it would be nice to not hear people on the other side say it isn't possible. Like everybody else is saying neither side knows any pure facts. So I just going to wait it out.

With all due respect PEACE.
________
Magic Flight Launch Box

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Then people say well look at the PS2 tech demos Sony did live up to it. Again something that only fuels the fire and it doesn't help.

The thing is that Killzone and Motor Storm weren't tech demos...
They were much better in quality than the tech demos we saw (gas Station Explosion and Unreal Engine demo for example). I can easily believe that the tech demos are going to be surpassed this time also, but Motor Storm and Killzone has stuff that aren't possible in realtime, now they might have some tricks to mimic them, but in the end the difference can be seen.

 

[therealskywolf]

Then people say well look at the PS2 tech demos Sony did live up to it. Again something that only fuels the fire and it doesn't help.

The thing is that Killzone and Motor Storm weren't tech demos...
They were much better in quality than the tech demos we saw (gas Station Explosion and Unreal Engine demo for example). I can easily believe that the tech demos are going to be surpassed this time also, but Motor Storm and Killzone has stuff that aren't possible in realtime, now they might have some tricks to mimic them, but in the end the difference can be seen.

Thats the problem isnt it? Tech demos for a system being surprassed 30 Min later in the Same Conference

So what are we saying? Nvidia doesnt know its own hardware?

This makes the KZ2 and the MotorSport movies sooo hard to believe....is Guerrilla all that more gifted than Epic? Killzone and Shellshock certainlly dont nod well for them :?

 

[MrWibble]

Then people say well look at the PS2 tech demos Sony did live up to it. Again something that only fuels the fire and it doesn't help.

The thing is that Killzone and Motor Storm weren't tech demos...
They were much better in quality than the tech demos we saw (gas Station Explosion and Unreal Engine demo for example). I can easily believe that the tech demos are going to be surpassed this time also, but Motor Storm and Killzone has stuff that aren't possible in realtime, now they might have some tricks to mimic them, but in the end the difference can be seen.

Once again you're failing to understand what the tech-demos were illustrating - and also failing to see the difference between a tech-demo and a game-demo.

The gas-station explosion thing was meant to illustrate computational power being used to correctly simulate an explosion in a 3D environment. Some of the other concepts may have had "prettier" explosions, or more "stuff flying about" but were probably not being simulated to anything like the same degree.

Meanwhile the Unreal demo wasn't a tech-demo so much as a demonstation of how easy it was to port over an existing engine to the new platform and get it running at a good speed even on prototype hardware. It was not a tech-demo of how well a PS3 could render two characters in an enclosed scene.

So the conclusion people are presumably meant to draw, is that the PS3 is powerful, that it is not too hard to program for after all, and that hopefully these two elements will combine to give impressive looking results. It seems people not only are unwilling to accept the conclusion, but can't even understand the basis of the argument.

Obviously there will be differences between what we finally see and how the prerendered stuff was done. If you want to have a meaningful discussion on how that will affect things, feel free to highlight specific effects which present in the movies but you feel are hard to do in realtime, and perhaps the coders here can discuss how they might (or cannot) be acheived in real-time.

 

[PC-Engine]

Real GI vs fake GI light maps.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Then people say well look at the PS2 tech demos Sony did live up to it. Again something that only fuels the fire and it doesn't help.

The thing is that Killzone and Motor Storm weren't tech demos...
They were much better in quality than the tech demos we saw (gas Station Explosion and Unreal Engine demo for example). I can easily believe that the tech demos are going to be surpassed this time also, but Motor Storm and Killzone has stuff that aren't possible in realtime, now they might have some tricks to mimic them, but in the end the difference can be seen.

Once again you're failing to understand what the tech-demos were illustrating - and also failing to see the difference between a tech-demo and a game-demo.

The gas-station explosion thing was meant to illustrate computational power being used to correctly simulate an explosion in a 3D environment. Some of the other concepts may have had "prettier" explosions, or more "stuff flying about" but were probably not being simulated to anything like the same degree.

That's a big assumption. In the end of the Motor Storm video when the yellow car starts to roll, there are lot more stuff going on and all the parts seem to be flying where they are supposed to fly, so to me that is much more complex physics than the gas station demo.

feel free to highlight specific effects which present in the movies but you feel are hard to do in realtime, and perhaps the coders here can discuss how they might (or cannot) be acheived in real-time.

I'm sorry, but I'm no expert on this area, and there are other people who have already said things about those videos, like Laa-Yosh, but I still the overall detail on these two videos (Killzone and Motor Storm)are way too high.

 

[MrWibble]

Real GI vs fake GI light maps.

GI is a very active area of research right now in real-time graphics.

I don't think we're going to see "real" GI in a complex real-time scene anytime in the next generation. But I certainly think we're going to do a lot better than precalculated light-maps which have been prevalent for the last few generations.

I think that hybrid precalc/realtime technologies such as PRT techniques are going to get us pretty close to the results that a full-on GI pass will give.

The hardest effects to simulate are high-frequency or discontinuous things such as caustics and hard-shadows. I think shadows are best approached using a parallel but unified technique, such as applying shadow-maps as well as the PRT lighting. Caustics are much trickier, and even traditional off-line rendering approaches have trouble. The best efforts I've seen have involved photon-mapping with hacks to up the emissions in the important areas, and photo-mapping is almost always noisy even with a vast number of photons.

However I've not actually seen a lot of this kind of lighting in the movies presented so far, and any specific effects could probably be "cheated" without it making a significant quality deficit in the final result. Caustics are fairly unpredictable on the whole (I'm not sure that the brain would really be able to tell if one was "correct" or not, and any attempt at all to render them will probably provide a minor improvement but otherwise not be all that important).

So while you certainly are correct in assuming that GI will not be "real" in the upcoming generation of graphics, I think that the techniques used to apply lighting to a scene will introduce a lot of effects which approach the GI result in accuracy and quality, and on the whole you might not notice a difference.

So I'm going to ask you to be even more specific... point me at a particular bit of a particular demo and highlight a GI effect that can't be effectively simulated in realtime using an alternative algorithm, or at least one where the alternative is (in your opinion at least) not going to come close to the same quality of result?

 

[MrWibble]

That's a big assumption. In the end of the Motor Storm video when the yellow car starts to roll, there are lot more stuff going on and all the parts seem to be flying where they are supposed to fly, so to me that is much more complex physics than the gas station demo.

The gas-station wasn't a physics demo, it was a fluid-dynamics demo with some debris. Fluid-dynamics is a signicantly harder problem, especially in 3D, than rigid-body physics. Even an average PC can throw around a hell of a lot of car body-parts in realtime, so I can't see any amount of that being particularly impressive right now. Seeing fluid dynamics working properly is much more impressive (and more importantly for a tech-demo, harder to calculate).

I'm sorry, but I'm no expert on this area, and there are other people who have already said things about those videos, like Laa-Yosh, but I still the overall detail on these two videos (Killzone and Motor Storm)are way too high.

Detail (if I understand exactly what you mean by this) is mostly a matter of effort on the part of the art-team, and clever use of compression, instancing (and so on) on the part of the programmers. I would say it's mostly acheiveable, but a lot of effort. Whether this effort is expended on a whole game is questionable, but this is why everyone is talking about vastly expanded team-sizes and out-sourcing for next-gen.

If Guerilla out-sources the creation of art for this demo, who is to say they will not continue this into the game production?

I think it's hard to say something is "impossible" at this stage, purely by looking at a rendered movie and saying that there's too much stuff in there to be done realtime. Certainly not from the movies so far seen, anyway. If Getaway (for example) had claimed to have modeled every brick and paving slab in London, completely seperately, then I'd suggest that's too much to expect. But when all we have to go on is an image, I think the issue is fairly open until we see the end result.

 

[jonnyp]

I'm just going to buy consoles and play on them. Gears of War for instance looks more than good enough to me to make Major Nelson's and Phil Harrison's comments meaningless, at least to me anyway. But that's just me. If we're not going to see the kind of graphics seen in a pre-rendered KZ demo then I'm not going to sit down and pout about it. I'm sure it'll look more than good enough anyway, I just hope they've upped the gameplay experience this time around. That's what's important to me.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

There's absolutely no reason to continue this debate over KZ and the rest. You can make any assumption you want, and then go and prove it to yourself, while you ignore and dismiss anything presented against your assumptions. Belive in this then, and we can meet again here, once KZ3 has been released, to see who was right.

 

[MrWibble]

There's absolutely no reason to continue this debate over KZ and the rest. You can make any assumption you want, and then go and prove it to yourself, while you ignore and dismiss anything presented against your assumptions. Belive in this then, and we can meet again here, once KZ3 has been released, to see who was right.

Actually how about if you want to just gloat over some point that you can't be bothered arguing intelligently about, you take it somewhere else?

What happened to this forum?

Are you seriously just interested in having a slanging match, then waiting for the release of the thing you're arguing over so you can have another one about who was right and who was wrong? Because I can guarantee that it'll be just as unproductive...

It's perfectly possible for people to take Sony's press stuff at face value without either calling them liars, nor assuming they can acheive the impossible.

What we should be doing, entirely in line with the purpose of the forum as I understand it, is taking apart the claims to see what kinds of things they're actually promising, discussing how those things might technically be acheived, and maybe *then* expressing opinions on the likelyhood of success.

Apparently instead people now prefer shouting matches, crowing, gloating, wild generalisations, and generally just making s**t up.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I disagree...
I've brought up various features of the video that I believe to be too much for this generation of console hardware based on my experience in offline rendering. Only one of these were questioned properly, by Faf (polygon counts), the rest of the discussion is basically like this - "you say it's not possible, I say it is".

 

[archie4oz]

Okay

(walks down to his sisters room , tells her to give him the cd with the demos on them. Puts them in the pc and watches them... comes back )

Nope still haven't seen a game on the ps2 that looks that good . Same with the face demo.

I can tell you for sure that the ballroom demo was:

a.) Not only real-time, but...

b.) Also surpassed by not only other PS2 games, but other Square PS2 games.

Well to be fair pachman Sony really did screw up with making the PS2 hard to program for. Everybody knows that out of the three consoles the PS2 is the worst. It seems to me that they have learned from their mistakes.

Well as far as system "difficulty" or SDK goes, I'd say they're batting .666 right now...

 

[Acert93]

Actually how about if you want to just gloat over some point that you can't be bothered arguing intelligently about, you take it somewhere else?

. . . . .

Apparently instead people now prefer shouting matches, crowing, gloating, wild generalisations, and generally just making s**t up.

I suggest going back to the past threads on this where Laa-Yosh specifically discussed the technical issues he saw with the videos. Particles, fluid dynamics lighting, poly count, animation, tens of thousands of individual physics objects (like in MotorStorm where the mid sticks to stuff), etc... he made a lot of points in those threads.

He has talked about the immense needs to do that in realtime, and he has asked how it could be done in realtime on a console. Very few arguements have been made on the technical level--almost every assault toward Laa-Yosh has been, "I do not trust you, I trust Sony".

And THAT is what he is tired of. So until some of you guys start talking about how you will get a dense smoke that each particle is lit and reacts like it is controllerd by a fluid physics simulator or how tens of thousands of peices of mud (not to mention dust and smoke and car parts) can get shot up into the air and be physics bodies that stick to stuff realistically he has a point.

If people want to intelligently say, "You know Laa-Yosh, here is an example of similar effects... or here is a technology that can do that in realtime" etc that is one thing. So far 99.9% of the time he has discussed the technical aspect his thread is followed by mckmass8088 with "Sony PR..." That gets OLD.

 

[mckmas8808]

So far 99.9% of the time he has discussed the technical aspect his thread is followed by mckmass8088 with "Sony PR..." That gets OLD.

Why do I always have to be the butt of your jokes. Other guys here agree with Laa-Yosh and explain it nothing like him. Why not get on them for not being hyper technical. Even though I respect Laa-Yosh he is not god. Just because he said it does not make it automatic. Again I respect him, but even he has not programmed for the PS3.
________
Chrysler Dr Platform

 

[PARANOiA]

Even though I respect Laa-Yosh he is not god. Just because he said it does not make it automatic. Again I respect him, but even he has not programmed for the PS3.

Did that remind anyone else of the PSP South Park, where Kenny goes to heaven "He is not god... he has not programmed for the PS3". No offence mckmas, just having a laugh.

 

[archie4oz]

Even though I respect Laa-Yosh he is not god. Just because he said it does not make it automatic. Again I respect him, but even he has not programmed for the PS3.

Did that remind anyone else of the PSP South Park, where Kenny goes to heaven "He is not god... he has not programmed for the PS3". No offence mckmas, just having a laugh.

Ironically I have that episode *on* my PSP...

 

[Nite_Hawk]

And THAT is what he is tired of. So until some of you guys start talking about how you will get a dense smoke that each particle is lit and reacts like it is controllerd by a fluid physics simulator or how tens of thousands of peices of mud (not to mention dust and smoke and car parts) can get shot up into the air and be physics bodies that stick to stuff realistically he has a point.

I wonder if you could do something along the lines of adaptive sampling with the particles in the mud. Basically while the mud is flying through the air you treat it as a single cluster and maybe take samples of particles on the surface to see if they ever intersect anything. One an intersection takes place you break the mud up into different clusters and see which ones intersect. For those that only intersect with mudd (and not the surface) you could maybe fudge things a bit and just leave them as large clusters. If they intersect with the surface, you could have some predefined threshold for how small of clusters you want, and then choose key particles in the cluster that should be used to perform interpolation on the rest and figure out how the they should move. If a cluster has a lot of "pressure" on it in certain directions , it might deform by becoming flatter and wider, pushing other clusters out.

It might be enough to give the appearance of mud without actually treating each particle as part of the simulation. Most of the particles would just be interpolated from they key ones. You'd have to make sure that interpolated particles didn't clip the hard surface they are hitting, but didn't that racing demo have flat windshields? That would make things easier to deal with.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to this paper, but something like this might be even better:

http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/pg/2000/0868/00/08680338abs.htm

Nite_Hawk

 

[London Geezer]

So far 99.9% of the time he has discussed the technical aspect his thread is followed by mckmass8088 with "Sony PR..." That gets OLD.

Why do I always have to be the butt of your jokes. Other guys here agree with Laa-Yosh and explain it nothing like him. Why not get on them for not being hyper technical. Even though I respect Laa-Yosh he is not god. Just because he said it does not make it automatic. Again I respect him, but even he has not programmed for the PS3.

Laa-yosh wouldn't program for anything, he's a CG artist! That's why you should listen to him even more when it comes to CGI. But you believe whatever makes you feel happy.

 

[Nite_Hawk]

So far 99.9% of the time he has discussed the technical aspect his thread is followed by mckmass8088 with "Sony PR..." That gets OLD.

Why do I always have to be the butt of your jokes. Other guys here agree with Laa-Yosh and explain it nothing like him. Why not get on them for not being hyper technical. Even though I respect Laa-Yosh he is not god. Just because he said it does not make it automatic. Again I respect him, but even he has not programmed for the PS3.

Laa-yosh wouldn't program for anything, he's a CG artist! That's why you should listen to him even more when it comes to CGI. But you believe whatever makes you feel happy.

I'm a CG artist too.

Nite_Hawk