The Tomorrow Children

 
Nice! This looks quite cool. I just read something quite similar: in astrophysics, octree based methods are used to include radiation. I have to better understand Tomorrow Child tec to see if it is accurate enough for my purpose.
 
They managed to save 5-6ms on 33ms rendering using asynchronous compute.
http://i.imgur.com/X8FcwRe.png

It's nice to see that devs are experimenting with it already.

edit - Blue is compute, orange is pixel, green is vertex.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
DieH@rd said:
They managed to save 5-6ms on 33ms rendering using asynchronous compute.
http://i.imgur.com/X8FcwRe.png

It's nice to see that devs are experimenting with it already.
Click to expand...
That graph shows a lot of space for more work too (depending on what resources are available in those time slots). Things like behavioural AI might be a nice fit for non-time critical stuff. The GPU should also be getting a lot hotter in future years!
 
Dev has commented about the game on gaf, he mentioned 50+ gamers on the map crafting through destructible environment, all lit by great dynamic lightning. He said that game already looks better than that unveil trailer.
 
DieH@rd said:
Dev has commented about the game on gaf, he mentioned 50+ gamers on the map crafting through destructible environment, all lit by great dynamic lightning. He said that game already looks better than that unveil trailer.
Click to expand...

:oops:

I said.. GOT DAYUM!!
 
Shortbread said:
Yesterday, I had the (slightly scary) pleasure of presenting at CEDEC about the Voxel Cone Tracing tech we've been putting in our engine. We have crammed quite a lot of stuff in there, and it all seems to have come out quite well. So, if you didn't happen to be in Yokohama at the time and want to check out what makes the rendering tech of The Tomorrow Children tick, please check out the slides!

http://fumufumu.q-games.com/archives/Cascaded_Voxel_Cone_Tracing_final.pdf

http://fumufumu.q-games.com/archives/Cascaded_Voxel_Cone_Tracing_final_speaker_notes.pdf
Click to expand...

Shortbread, are you quoting the dev or are you actually in the dev team at Q-Games?

If so, wow! Uber FANTASTIC work on the game. I'm so giddy thinking about playing it that I can't contain my excitement :D
 
Prophecy2k said:
Shortbread, are you quoting the dev or are you actually in the dev team at Q-Games?

If so, wow! Uber FANTASTIC work on the game. I'm so giddy thinking about playing it that I can't contain my excitement :D
Click to expand...

:yes: :no: :(

Shifty Geezer said:
It's a verbatim quote form the link of that text. The Kallisti poster on the blog should be James McLaren as per the slides.
Click to expand...

Ruined my split second of fame... :yes: :p
 
DieH@rd said:
Dev has commented about the game on gaf, he mentioned 50+ gamers on the map crafting through destructible environment, all lit by great dynamic lightning. He said that game already looks better than that unveil trailer.
Click to expand...

Quotes from HiVision (Q-Dev) at GAF:

Hey, it's Dylan here from Q,

Thanks for checking out James' presentation, he put a lot of work into that to try and help people understand what is going on with our engine!

The game has freely deform-able geometry which is why right at the start we decided we couldn't go with the more standard graphics pipelines that need a lot of pre-baked information. However, we *did* want the very nice lighting that those pre-baked systems can give (like the lighting you are seeing in the Silicon Studios demo released this week).

When you guys see this game actually *running* in 1080p on your tvs with the lighting all simply *working* you are going to love it; dig into a mountain and the light spills around correctly, and the shadowing from things cast in all directions natually and realistically. It /almost/ looks like a Pixar movie at times and is the closest to that "rendered" ideal I've seen so far in an actual game (not a tech demo). Although I do have high hopes for Uncharted on the PS4!
Click to expand...

Release information and types of release etc., are entirely up to Sony. Although, because this game is only online, an online-only release does make sense.

The game looks phenomenal so much that its hard to believe its playable.
Click to expand...

Thanks, this is the kind of comment I like to see because I am amazed daily by how it looks. The latest builds actually look a lot better than the footage in those videos now too because we're constantly tweaking and tuning.

The game is a bit of a crazy sandbox experience, we don't force you to do anything really and you can decide either collectively/collaboratively or egotistically to do whatever you want. You could just set up a picnic up in the hills if you like. (of course if everyone does that your beautiful vista might eventually become marred by the sight of the burning town in the distance, but hey, someone will do the work right?)
Click to expand...

I'm not sure where the rumour about changing the name came from? Someone on neogaf jumping to conclusions? :)

The name of the game is "The Tomorrow Children" and it ain't gonna change! :)

The alpha test will be a restricted sub-section of the game, primarily for stabilising our main synchronising systems and getting feedback on those. It's still a ton of fun but some of the world's rules will be slightly different in order to test stuff more efficiently - gravity is still down though.
Click to expand...

Originally Posted by wonderdung
Not quite... these are grabs from a Sony tool. Blue is compute, orange is pixel, green is vertex.

The most interesting thing is how much compute they have vs how simple their scenes are. Which to me implies that the technique is not applicable to most games.

That's not really a criticism. The miniaturized aesthetic of this game is one of its most interesting parts, and the tech and aesthetic complement one another beautifully.

Edit: Also low occupancy in some passes means they may have quite a bit of room for further optimization.
Click to expand...

Actually our scenes have to deal with a huge amount of complexity (because 50+ users can build anything anywhere). The screenshots we have released are a basic town and a few of the mining shots - the users build out the towns to be what they want. The raison d'etre of the engine is to be as flexible as possible.

Because of the cascaded update the only type of game that it has difficulty with are those with fast camera movement (racing, aircraft etc). Although to be honest for those kinds of games I think the system would simply be tweaked to cope, we would definitely find a way.

Capcom's Deep Down is using a pre-baked (it creates them once as the level loads) version of very similar tech. They didn't have deform-able landscape and user content so there was no need for them to do it in realtime and of course their styling is different to ours, but I think the technique works exceptionally well for them too.
Click to expand...

The response has been truly amazing since Gamescom.

We are kind of sticking our necks out a bit on this one, new technology and a new genre, it's been a huge challenge for us.

One side of the game people haven't picked up on yet is that it also has hints of a collaborative Animal Crossing in it (without drawing on that too much), but with kaiju and missile launchers! :)
Click to expand...

Originally Posted by Callibretto
I'm still unclear about how the online works. I've read articles mention that the online is asynchronous. but not sure what that means. are we playing with other people in real time? as in when monster come and you had to defend your town, does it become multiplayer co-op boss battle? one of the preview I read mention that you don't always see other player's action and they're invisible to you. make me a bit confused how the online works
Click to expand...

You live in a particular town with X no. of other people, you can visit other people's towns too. The world and its objects are entirely shared but you only see each-other when you perform actions that can affect other players because you are projected clones all a little shifted away from each-other on the plane of reality.

So for example, if you pick up an object, you will appear in the other people's worlds, stoop down, pick up the object, stand up and then fizzle out of existence (taking the object with you).
When you put it down again, the same thing happens again, leaving the object in everyone's world.
Click to expand...
 
While the art direction of this game isn't my cup of tea, I can certainly appreciate the lighting technique used here. But imagine a LBP game using this technique tho!
 
ultragpu said:
While the art direction of this game isn't my cup of tea, I can certainly appreciate the lighting technique used here. But imagine a LBP game using this technique tho!
Click to expand...

I thought the same thing. LBP2 was already making use of voxel-space lighting to great effect, and their coinstrained 2.5D perspective can afford much greater mileage out of the Cascaded Voxel grid. Maybe you can even lose the whole cascading altogether...
When speaking of aethetics, the art direction is well intentioned... It is trying to be original, and its targeting a cohesive style and visual language, of crafted and carved stuff, which has everything to do with their gameplay, and also might help make some of the possible visual artifacts of whatever system they are using to make their terrain deformable seem intentional. The whole russian/slavic/USSR thing is a little confusing though, it seems very USSRish at times and than it seems like a japanese monster movie at others, and at points it just looks like a bunch of weird undefinable things that happen to be together at the same scene in some instances... And creating a fictional pseudo-USSR scenario for a game is not that new either.
Their amazing lighting system does provide a certain sense of cohesiveness to their materials and objects that many games have to strive to achieve, and still end up failing often. Yet, ignoring the rendering tech, the actual art, the actual models and their animations look a bit amateurish against other contemporary AAA titles. take the evil guy that's shown at the end of their trailers as an example. Sure, he looks like a carved wood doll thing, with big nose and an evil expression, but his head shape is just not very harmonious, and he looks quite lifeless as a result. His main features and expression lines are also not as well defined as they could be given the whole edgy-shapes style they are going for. He does have a lot of unnecessary facets on places that make his head shape loose expressivity rather than add to it. He looks somewhat "eroded". Maybe if they went even more abstracted and minimalistic their artists would have an easier modeling things with more striking character and personality.
 
I think the aesthetic is great. It is reminiscent of "The Sandman" and other classic stop motion animations, combined with a retrofuturistic Soviet propaganda reel.
 
The best part for me (which for some reason nobody talks about it) is that they're using the same technique as TLoU for the character shadows, giving them a very soft look to them.

MORE GAMES NEED THAT :devilish:
 
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