The Tomorrow Children

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 naturally 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!

So this is the demo Dylan is talking about as far as trying to achieve similar lighting techniques. Cool...
 
Time-lapse Recording of Day Transition

Demonstration of Town Lighting

Demonstration of Materials and Light

Can't wait... :cool:
 
Time-lapse Recording of Day Transition

Demonstration of Town Lighting

Demonstration of Materials and Light

Can't wait... :cool:

Q Games meet ICE Team and Dylan Cuthbert answer many question in GAF. It seems Uncharted use some Voxel Cone tracing technology...

Some of the stuff is subtle but it adds a huge amount of "presence" compared to older tech.
KillZone and Infamous also use some very good techniques but they don't have dynamic worlds like we do in the Tomorrow Children. We encode the lighting in a system called "voxel cones", which means the lighting itself is fully volumetric. When you are playing it and seeing the world around you it makes it feel solid and "there".

You will see this tech being used by these other devs soon, and it will produce even more mind-blowing results I think! I'm pretty sure Uncharted 4 will use a variant of it


2VFinbB.png
 
Yes, Our lighting and reflections use the voxel cone volumetric information to reflect what is off-screen too; most modern games (right now at least) use on-screen only techniques.

Very good and if Uncharted use the same thing like Deep Down it will be great...
 
While I apreciate them sharing info - in english finaly haha - about the game tech, I can't shake the impression that that blog post was written by a not very technically informed person who was told about the working of the game engine and told to write about it.
The way some stuff is phrased there is simply wrong.
 
Back
Top