Ryse: Son of Rome [XO]

No idea. To be clear, and I thought I was but to be explicit, I'm not comparing Ryse to Beyond Two Souls in any gameplay sense but having read a lot of reviews of BTS and the many previews of Ryse I spot a theme. Graphics looks great. The Gameplay isn't too complex or deep.

I didn't like Heavy Rain and had high hopes for BTS but it looked like it suffered the same problem: a lack of deep gameplay. Based on a whole bunch of previews of the 2 hour play session many sites had, I'm sensing the same for Ryse. No doubt, as was the case with BTS, for those who are a fan of the period, genre or story, they'll love it.

 

The dismemberment is already quite well enough disturbing to me, I don't think they should make it any more realistic. If anything, I'd prefer it not to be there at all...

The water simulation is almost certainly an offline simulated mesh, streamed in using their Alembic importer. So technically it's the best water in any game, but it's still unfair to compare it to interactive implementations

 

Yeah, that could be. Still, very good attention to detail. Normally you'd just see those waves pass through the model with no changes at all.

Are those kind of point cache style simulations expensive memory-wise?

 

Guy floats pretty well with all that armour on, but it does look pretty awesome.

 

I don't think so, they'll probably need a read-ahead buffer for vertex positions, and even for this water thing the mesh is probably just a few hundred thousand vertices at max.
Streamed deformation data needs a vertex id and a new position per frame, and I don't think you need to import vertex normal data.

To put it in perspective, they have 75 thousand vertices on Marius himself and on average each has generic stuff like position and normal, then at least 2 floats for UVs, then at least 3-4 bone influences, and then who knows what other bits of data. Now something like Drake used close to this amount of data (similar poly counts and such) on a PS3 with 1/10th of the same amount of memory.

Also, Alembic is used in VFX for caching out all deforming objects and then feeding that data to the lighters in a dedicated app like Katana. They do this because reading cache when scrubbing on the timeline forward or backward is much faster then letting all the skinning and simulation run. And they do this for far more complex scenes with at least as complex meshes (but sometimes much more complex) and the cache is not even on the local hard drive - and it's still almost realtime. So while I'm no programmer, I'd say this thing should work well enough in a video game.

 

Great explanation, thanks.

 

Yeah thats one of the new features of the latest Cryengine.
I believe they call it geomcache.
If we are ever going to reach CGI quality in games I would imagine things like this are really going to help us get there.

 

It's not going to help much with anything that's interactive. Games tend to be very interactive...

 

I dont know if You guys noticed, but they have nice procedural textures for wounds
http://i.imgur.com/4vtjDAH.jpg
http://i.minus.com/i7RXSwtlRvtTt.gif

 

Wow that's crazy now that you bring it up.

BTW I'm currently watching the Twitch feed and really love the look of that beach sand...very well done.

They explain why that is in the Twitch feed.

 

Now they have footprints in the sand (i believe it was missing in the E3 version) , pretty neat .

 

Could be pre-determined wounds, depending on the combat system; but if it really is procedural, I guess they'll make sure to mention it in a publication after release. Looking forward to that kind of stuff already

 

The game does look surprisingly aliasing free. We'll see, I guess. Maybe the way they're mixing temporal AA with edge-detect methods will be the next big way of doing it.

 

I dont think its exact representation of cuts on the body, but they probably take type of attack and generate it on the body on the fly.
Its definitely not stage based texture replacement, first stage cut on center of the chest, second vertical cut etc. Probably its more like scratches on cars in Forza and GT.

Like this guy has cuts in different places than one from the image above:
Blood drops seems to be randomized as well on those cuts.

 

Could be a decal kind of thing, not sure if it's possible on dynamic geometry but as far as I know deferred rendering is a good fit for this type of effect.

 

It can add to the atmosphere though. Cloth flapping on the wind and things like that.

 

Yeah well, theoretically they could cache out cloth deformation for base animation cycles, but even those can get altered, blended etc. which could make the canned simulations look wrong. But for realtime in-engine cinematics it's a no-brainer IMHO, I expect the major engines to follow Crytek in their next iteration.

 

Well I don't mean using it on characters but mostly for environment detail.

 

Those new picks that have been released; are they all from the same build? Because some of them look a bit weird, the overall image seems to have inherited the PS4 BF4 Blur and there are no shadows on the ground in some pics and there are in others. In some scenes the characters look like they have been cut out and stuck on the background. I guess in motion it will be not so obvious but in these stills some are definitely looking wrong!?

 

Any specific examples?