The technology of Alan Wake *spawn

[Svensk Viking]

Perhaps this doesn't belong to this part of the forum, but I can't see how they initially had planned this to be open-world...
Now when the game is confirmed to be linear, and the game is running in sub-HD and has some tearing, I can't see how they would have made it work in an open-world environment

But then again, I am no techhead

 

[dragonelite]

Perhaps this doesn't belong to this part of the forum, but I can't see how they initially had planned this to be open-world...
Now when the game is confirmed to be linear, and the game is running in sub-HD and has some tearing, I can't see how they would have made it work in an open-world environment

But then again, I am no techhead

The game seems to have a very large draw distance.
So the tech could be there. Not sure if dropping the open world is a technical thing or more story based like remedy says.

 

[Arwin]

Perhaps this doesn't belong to this part of the forum, but I can't see how they initially had planned this to be open-world...
Now when the game is confirmed to be linear, and the game is running in sub-HD and has some tearing, I can't see how they would have made it work in an open-world environment

You're seeing this from the wrong angle. When they initially designed the game's rendering pipeline, they optimised it so that it could hande an open-world environment. However, along the lines they had to give up on this decision (for whatever reason, probably a combination of technical issues, game design and story). If they had designed the game to be linear from the start, they could have chosen a different rendering pipeline that could be optimised for so-called 'corridors', which allows for much more detail and (typically also) a higher resolution.

 

[Svensk Viking]

You're seeing this from the wrong angle. When they initially designed the game's rendering pipeline, they optimised it so that it could hande an open-world environment. However, along the lines they had to give up on this decision (for whatever reason, probably a combination of technical issues, game design and story). If they had designed the game to be linear from the start, they could have chosen a different rendering pipeline that could be optimised for so-called 'corridors', which allows for much more detail and (typically also) a higher resolution.

What I am trying to say is, that if this is the result of their engine with the open world taken out, how would the tearing, resolution and such have been if it still was open world?

I get that it is easier going for linearity from the beginning(eg God of War 3, Uncharted 2), but surely an open world engine must still get some horsepower freed up when making the environments smaller?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

What I am trying to say is, that if this is the result of their engine with the open world taken out, how would the tearing, resolution and such have been if it still was open world?

The same. If you build a tractor to pull a Boeing at 10 MPH, and then connect a caravan instead, it's going to go ten miles an hour. Only if you know from the outset that you won't have a heavy load and instead are entering a caravan race, you can build a completely different vehicle to different specs.

If the open world argument is true, I'm sure the AW engine could take a free-roam game and render exactly as is in AW, whereas, say, the Uncharted engine would struggle with texture loads and whatnot. However, if true, it's also the case that they have the wrong tool for the job, an open world engine for a corridor-shooter game, and the economics of game development could be having an impact on the end results.

 

[Svensk Viking]

The same. If you build a tractor to pull a Boeing at 10 MPH, and then connect a caravan instead, it's going to go ten miles an hour. Only if you know from the outset that you won't have a heavy load and instead are entering a caravan race, you can build a completely different vehicle to different specs.

If the open world argument is true, I'm sure the AW engine could take a free-roam game and render exactly as is in AW, whereas, say, the Uncharted engine would struggle with texture loads and whatnot. However, if true, it's also the case that they have the wrong tool for the job, an open world engine for a corridor-shooter game, and the economics of game development could be having an impact on the end results.

Ok, thanks for explaining

I have always thought that lesser scale makes it easier pushing eye candy than when rendering a bigger scale

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I have always thought that lesser scale makes it easier pushing eye candy than when rendering a bigger scale

Which is correct.

 

[zed]

It's more gpu for shadow maps no? Lots of fill rate and vertex work which the gpu is good at, it can overlap much of the work. It's gpu is also good at branching which makes using cascaded shadow maps easy. Or did they go some other route for the shadows in this game? Thought it was just shadow maps but I've only seen a few pics...

If you wanna have fast shadows youve gottta minimize the amount of work the GPU does, you process the scene first on the CPU.
Ive been doing this for ages eg see
http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=156027&page=23
I believe I showed the first implementation of a spotlight casting shadows with a texturemap, now this is 8 years ago. hardware then had no shaders or shadowmaps etc. IIRC it still worked with a single light at ~20fps on a gf2mx. with the hardware of ~2006 (like what I have) it absolutly screams, since theres now shadowmap/(shader lesser degree) support, 20 spotlights onscreen @ >100fps @720p on my card which is similar to a RSX

 

[zed]

OK with the benifit of hindsight now Ill give my opinion (encompasses a few games, carmack understands this)
never believe a companies promises sony/MS/nvidia/ATI etc
i.e. if u do such + such it will be brill later on run at 100fps no worries, true ATM it runs at 2fps but trust us with the next hardware iteration its gonnna run 100x quicker, you dont wanna be left in the slow lane do you?
get it runnning at a decent speed today, OK the next hardware iteration wont show a 100x improvement, it just improves what u have (by a lot), which is a decent implementation but most importantly youre not letting youself into the hands of promises (which u cant control)

the mantra is KISS, dont wait for the hardware to catch up to you, give it what u have + let the hardware just give a faster/better version.

 

[Billy Idol]

It depends on distance and screen size, as long as you're in the blue area, Alan Wake will look the same.
Also looking at the chart you really need to have a large HDTV or sit very close to a smaller TV/monitor to appreciate 1080p, so I think games will still not be 1080p mandatory, but I hope 720p and HDMI will be standard, as in no analog outs. SDTV should die already.

here is a very good read on this topic:

http://filmicgames.com/archives/35

 

[sogeking]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-alanwake-tech-analysis

 

[2real4tv]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-alanwake-tech-analysis

Couple questions:
Why not triple buffer, I remember a discussion going on about 360 not using it was their ever and explanation?

Day night cycles, dynamic weather..is it still in the game?

It seems to me the game started tearing the most when multiple light sources were on screen...whats the bottleneck?


Even though its held as a AAA title I'am starting to believe the budget wasn't that huge.

 

[Billy Idol]

Couple questions:
Why not triple buffer, I remember a discussion going on about 360 not using it was their ever and explanation?

Day night cycles, dynamic weather..is it still in the game?

It seems to me the game started tearing the most when multiple light sources were on screen...whats the bottleneck?


Even though its held as a AAA title I'am starting to believe the budget wasn't that huge.

If I remember the discussion correctly, trible buffering increases the memory hit.
And Alan Wake engine is definitely memory hungry (just look at the low res textures in screenshots released all over the web...).
So this might maybe the reason Remedy did not consider it at all (action seems to be slow paced, so input lag should not be a big issue for this game!?)

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If I remember the discussion correctly, trible buffering increases the memory hit.

This is due to the multiplying factor of trible buffering. Although everyone likes trible buffering (it's hard to resist!), what starts out as one extra trible buffer ends up being hundreds before too long.

 

[ultragpu]

DigitalFoundry article mentioned camera based motion blur in AW, is object based motion blur not present then?

 

[Billy Idol]

This is due to the multiplying factor of trible buffering. Although everyone likes trible buffering (it's hard to resist!), what starts out as one extra trible buffer ends up being hundreds before too long.

Ah, ok! Does this mean that tiling increase the memory hit as well when using trible buffering?

 

[psorcerer]

If the open world argument is true, I'm sure the AW engine could take a free-roam game and render exactly as is in AW, whereas, say, the Uncharted engine would struggle with texture loads and whatnot. However, if true, it's also the case that they have the wrong tool for the job, an open world engine for a corridor-shooter game, and the economics of game development could be having an impact on the end results.

After all the lies from the "developers" I don't think anything they tell is "true". Even the motion capture that they claimed to be "state of the art" and "better than Heavy Rain" is absent in released game and the lip-sync only will be added by patch.

And for Uncharted engine: it's indeed an "open world" one, they have streaming of assets inplace, memory defragmentation and dynamic LOD, this is more than enough to make a sandbox game.

 

[Kameradschaft]

http://au.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objec...an-wake-20100504064329427.html?page=mediaFull
This is an ingame 720p shot taken from IGN, not sure how reliable their capture device is. But, if it is indicative of the final game then I am enlightened to see how badly a 540p buffer can ruin the overall visual. The textures are down right awful and the low poly placeables don't help either, really hope this is just IGN's way of capturing .

After playing the game I can assure you that this isn't IGN's way of capturing, this is what the IQ looks on a 40" LCD.

 

[L. Scofield]

After all the lies from the "developers" I don't think anything they tell is "true". Even the motion capture that they claimed to be "state of the art" and "better than Heavy Rain" is absent in released game and the lip-sync only will be added by patch.

Well it is better than Heavy Rain's. Specially if you consider eyes actually move

And for Uncharted engine: it's in deed an "open world" one, they have streaming of assets inplace, memory defragmentation and dynamic LOD, this is more than enough to make a sandbox game.

Hasn't this been discussed already in another thread?

 

[assurdum]

Ew, this is some kind of heritical question you ask here Mr Mod!
I really hope (and I ultimately believe) that it is programmer limits!
For me it is obvious that Remedy had some serious troubles during the development of this game and that they did not master the Xbox360!!
I read an interview in my local game Mag, where even one of the Remedy heads admit that they loose a lot of dev time due to wrong choices (iirc, they planed this game as an open world game at the beginning and rejected rather late).

Don't let me wrong but if after six years or less of development not have learned anything to master or optimize the 360 hardware to the better, I don't know how many years needs more... the time waste in wrong decisions it's part of the job imho probably AW engine isn't suitable for the 360 hardware. An engine based more on unified shaders & or high buffers would be a better solution for the 360, like bayonetta.