Ryse: Son of Rome [XO]
- Thread starter dragonelite
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DavidGraham
Veteran
I have seen a whole walkthrough of Ryse in HD, I took some notes and I would like to know if they are accurate:
1-The game has limited tessellation, mainly on terrain pieces, and main characters.
2-LOD is medium
3-Smoke still has no shadows
4-Some fire and explosion effects have no dynamic lights, but they are few and far in between
5-Dynamic shadows are almost absent except for some fire placements and torches
6-some textures have low res, mainly on the clothes of enemies.
let me know if any of these points are wrong.
1-The game has limited tessellation, mainly on terrain pieces, and main characters.
2-LOD is medium
3-Smoke still has no shadows
4-Some fire and explosion effects have no dynamic lights, but they are few and far in between
5-Dynamic shadows are almost absent except for some fire placements and torches
6-some textures have low res, mainly on the clothes of enemies.
let me know if any of these points are wrong.
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I finally started playing this game. I just got to the British Isles. The combat is actually kind of fun, once you get the hang of it and know what to do. I'm also having a hard time with the Pilia segments. It's almost like Crytek is forcing me to use them in battles because I can't seem to defeat the mob without using these clunky things (I'm currently stuck at the part where I need to take down the chains so my ships can land in the beach). Also, I fucking hate these 3rd person cameras at times. If you're fighting a group of enemies (when are you not in this game?) near a wall or something, you will most likely totally lose sight of your character and get killed. This is why 3rd person games suck so much ass imo.
Anyway, the graphics look pretty good and the frame rate so far has been rock solid. Marius' character is very detailed and sharp even during real time combat. The enemies, while they look good, don't seem quite as detailed. It might just be Marius' shiny armor that makes it seem that way though. The hair still looks like ass though, on all the characters. And I kind of see what people mean by the distant blurring. Everything close is sharp and detailed, but there is definitely a depth of field effect going on with distant stuff. But overall, this game looks fantastic. If this is the starting point for "next gen", I will be very pleased with MS' hardware choices.
Anyway, the graphics look pretty good and the frame rate so far has been rock solid. Marius' character is very detailed and sharp even during real time combat. The enemies, while they look good, don't seem quite as detailed. It might just be Marius' shiny armor that makes it seem that way though. The hair still looks like ass though, on all the characters. And I kind of see what people mean by the distant blurring. Everything close is sharp and detailed, but there is definitely a depth of field effect going on with distant stuff. But overall, this game looks fantastic. If this is the starting point for "next gen", I will be very pleased with MS' hardware choices.
L. Scofield
Veteran
I don't know about the second point but the rest seems accurate.
It seems that at some point Crytek was researching shadow-casting particles but for some reason such technology was never implemented:
Ike Turner
Veteran
Particle Shadows have been implemented in CE a long time ago... and are present in Crysis 2 and 3 (PC) but broken...
DavidGraham
Veteran
Thanks.
Maybe you mean self-shadows? or the ability to become shadowed? this is entirely different from casting shadows.
L. Scofield
Veteran
Particles in CryEngine come in two types: sprites and geometry. Geometry particles can receive and cast shadows. Sprites however can only receive them so effects like smoke don't cast shadows.
Characters have no tessellation.
Now, please, could you finally stop getting crazy about this buzzword? It has almost no importance at all, especially on today's console hardware, for anything character related.
It's quite that you have very little understanding of character related technologies, so please just trust me on this one. It does not matter.
DavidGraham
Veteran
Has no importance? I am sorry but I expect a next gen game to have a minimum set of features before I call it next-gen :
1-No discernible polygonal edges on characters, especially the main ones.
2-Dynamic Lights from all sources that emit lights.
3-Dynamic Shadows at least from flashlights or torches and some muzzle flashes .
4-Smoke shadows.
Tessellation was created for a reason, to address point number 1.If you are set to ignore it and focus on high poly meshes that still can't do the job right, then this is an incompetence on your part.
RenegadeRocks
Legend
Tessellation does not have an AI algorithm to make sure it adds polys only where needed, so I don't think it will become mainstream or if it is advantageous at all. It is akin to making a low poly model and then adding iterations of meshsmooth hoping the character looks better with each, and hoping it would offer a performance advantage over hand crafted models. The character will just keep going "rounder" not necessarily better.
Tesselation is advantageous only in very limited situation, like tesselating water mesh only where required or some environment geometry when it gets close.I don't see it becoming a mainstream technique for Characters at all. IMO.
Tesselation is advantageous only in very limited situation, like tesselating water mesh only where required or some environment geometry when it gets close.I don't see it becoming a mainstream technique for Characters at all. IMO.
Laa-Yosh is saying tessellation will not help with that on characters. You can only solve polygon edges on characters with either high res models in the first place, or something fancy like silhouette mapping.
I believe tessellation creates some difficulties for the animators since they can't control the tessellated mesh as good as hand modeled ones. The base poly count for nextgen title is already high, 85k for Marius, 100k+ for each main character in The Order and 1million for Dark Sorcerer (Garrd Damn), the use of tessellation is simply not needed since the silhouette is near perfect already.
I would rather tessellate the bricks, stones and water with the given resource.
From what I heard the 1 millions poly of Dark Sorcerer is an error of the Quantic Dreams PR. it is 100k for the sorcerer and 70k for the gobelin...
I heard that too but then saw a live demo of wireframe mode in which Cage showed it was in fact 1million polys. We'll probably see more about it at E3 of even GDC maybe.
Okay, let's get through this again.
Tessellation is basically a dumb algorithm in all its implementations that can only "smooth" out a surface. The simplest way to imagine it is to take an 8-sided circular shape - as its divided to 16, then 32 and then 64 segments, it gets progressively closer to the perfect circle.
There are theoretical and practical issues with this process.
First, it smooths everything, so extra polygons have to be added to keep sharp details. This takes considerable artist time, and increases the base polygon counts (and every extra polygon gets tessellated and rendered, too).
Edge creasing can be introduced but it's not a reliable or all-around solution either, and makes iterative workflow very hard.
Second, perfect smoothness is completely unnatural, no living creature is like that. Characters in particular are designed with very complex forms, lots of various extra pieces and elaborate costumes. Think any space marine or fantasy orc. Also, any type of anatomy (faces, bodies hands etc) has incredibly complex forms and shapes, once again no use of smoothness.
This problem can be somewhat remedied by displacement mapping; this is basically offsetting each individual vertex based on a texture map, thus modeling a more complex 3D surface at rendering time.
But extra pieces like pouches, belts, spare clips, armor etc. can't be displaced from a smooth surface so this technique is most useful on stuff like dragons with horns and scales.
However proper displacement requires a lot of vertices, since the texture pixels have to be mapped to them at least 1:1. Today it's very common to use multiple 2K maps per character so you'd need at least 5-10 million vertices at least (and thus, the source models for normal maps are in that range).
This creates a problem with today's GPUs because they're not efficient at rendering small polygons at all. I'm also not sure how many vertices the GPUs can push through tessellation - Crysis 2 performance issues suggest this may be problematic at the very least.
So, in the end we have workflow issues, artistic issues, and technical/performance issues, all of which for a questionable quality result. Thus in the end it's far more efficient to manually add extra polygons where they count, and use discrete LOD models generated automatically by content creation software.
Tessellation is basically a dumb algorithm in all its implementations that can only "smooth" out a surface. The simplest way to imagine it is to take an 8-sided circular shape - as its divided to 16, then 32 and then 64 segments, it gets progressively closer to the perfect circle.
There are theoretical and practical issues with this process.
First, it smooths everything, so extra polygons have to be added to keep sharp details. This takes considerable artist time, and increases the base polygon counts (and every extra polygon gets tessellated and rendered, too).
Edge creasing can be introduced but it's not a reliable or all-around solution either, and makes iterative workflow very hard.
Second, perfect smoothness is completely unnatural, no living creature is like that. Characters in particular are designed with very complex forms, lots of various extra pieces and elaborate costumes. Think any space marine or fantasy orc. Also, any type of anatomy (faces, bodies hands etc) has incredibly complex forms and shapes, once again no use of smoothness.
This problem can be somewhat remedied by displacement mapping; this is basically offsetting each individual vertex based on a texture map, thus modeling a more complex 3D surface at rendering time.
But extra pieces like pouches, belts, spare clips, armor etc. can't be displaced from a smooth surface so this technique is most useful on stuff like dragons with horns and scales.
However proper displacement requires a lot of vertices, since the texture pixels have to be mapped to them at least 1:1. Today it's very common to use multiple 2K maps per character so you'd need at least 5-10 million vertices at least (and thus, the source models for normal maps are in that range).
This creates a problem with today's GPUs because they're not efficient at rendering small polygons at all. I'm also not sure how many vertices the GPUs can push through tessellation - Crysis 2 performance issues suggest this may be problematic at the very least.
So, in the end we have workflow issues, artistic issues, and technical/performance issues, all of which for a questionable quality result. Thus in the end it's far more efficient to manually add extra polygons where they count, and use discrete LOD models generated automatically by content creation software.
DavidGraham
Veteran
Thanks for the info, though I already knew about some of the problems of tessellation (like the collision issues and performance hit), especially it it was added as an after thought feature. However I do know that if properly taken into account it can yield fantastic results, especially when combined with displacement maps.
As for performance Fermi and Kepler demonstrated a great capability in hangling small triangles. Crysis 2 runs extremely well on current generations of GPUs.
As for performance Fermi and Kepler demonstrated a great capability in hangling small triangles. Crysis 2 runs extremely well on current generations of GPUs.
L. Scofield
Veteran
CryEngine 3 does support character tessellation though I don't know if it's used in Ryse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KuNw8bjDwc&t=34s
1. Yeah, there seems to be tessellation on terrain, like rocks similar to Crysis 3.
2. Dunno what You mean by this? Medium, like medium setting in Crysis 3?
3. All particles receive shadows and lights, its very cheap in current CryEngine versions.
4/5. It depends of artists placement, but yeah soldiers with burning swords do not cast shadows, but most torches in the game cast shadows.
6. Yeah, it happens.
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Now, this sentence I do not get. Can You elaborate more?
I hope You dont expect to every light source, no matter how big in radius it has to cast shadows in next-gen games on consoles, because it wont happen. Same goes for textures, not all of them will be high res. Consoles are upgrades from last gen, but they are still pretty weak.
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