Trials: evolution. [xbla]

sebbbi said:
Nice to hear you liked it :)
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Indeed, it was really fun! I played 2-3 "rounds" of 4 player vs with some friends and then randomly some single player just to see a few of the environments. It was a ton of fun and we all walked away commenting that we want it at work/home now :)

sebbbi said:
We really wanted to achieve solid 60 fps, so MSAA was out of the question from the beginning. For a long time we didn't have any antialiasing solution, but when I got FXAA to run at 0.8 ms (with some branching tricks) it was added. It is surely better than no antialiasing at all, but definitely not something that I would be happy in using in next gen titles (when anything better is possible).
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Totally understood and agreed that FXAA is (far) better than nothing. Just wish we didn't have to deal with such old hardware these days...

sebbbi said:
Temporal techniques work very well with 60 fps rendering (smaller time step = frames are more similar to each other = more surface pixels that can be reprojected without problems). I did some experimentation with temporal techniques during the project (and during Trials HD project), but I didn't have time to get any production quality results yet.
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Yeah temporal super-sampling/reprojection is interesting especially for the far geometry as you mention. Again it doesn't really help the 'worst case' (lots of fine occlusion and movement), but it's a somewhat rarer worst case than for other algorithms.

sebbbi said:
Yes... our SDSM-esque technique doesn't help that much with the worst case performance. ... The limited 16 bit range in the shadow map channels does not help either. With that low precision, the variance calculation results in some occasional (but visible) graining. And the graining differs from cascade to cascade, so it's easier to spot the cascade seams.
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Yeah it wasn't a criticism, just a note :) There's only so much you can do in a fixed time/memory budget and I think you've hit a pretty good spot for consoles. It was only rare cases that I noticed it and mostly because I look for it ;) Overall the shadows looked nice and I still can't believe you made EVSM work in 16-bit on a console - tons of props for that, and it really does show nicely when you see a high-frequency shadow projected on the ground. In some cases there's less aliasing in the shadows than on the original geometry, which I find kind of awesome :D

Anyways really great work - can't wait to get my hands on it!
 
Andrew Lauritzen said:
There's only so much you can do in a fixed time/memory budget and I think you've hit a pretty good spot for consoles. It was only rare cases that I noticed it and mostly because I look for it ;) Overall the shadows looked nice and I still can't believe you made EVSM work in 16-bit on a console - tons of props for that, and it really does show nicely when you see a high-frequency shadow projected on the ground. In some cases there's less aliasing in the shadows than on the original geometry, which I find kind of awesome :D
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Yeah... It's kind of funny that the EDRAM based super efficient (4x) hardware MSAA isn't used to antialias visible geometry that much anymore (because of deferred rendering), but it's very good for EVSM shadow rendering. Always fun to find new ways to use old fixed function hardware features :)
 
sebbbi & Andrew, concerning eDRAM, if MS/Sony insisted on eDRAM for various reasons, how much do you think you, as a developer, would want? "If you force us to write to eDRAM, I will not be happy without X amount of eDRAM." ??? Any changes, e.g. would you prefer more of a scratchpad style eDRAM (full read/write), even if it was much smaller, if forced to go with eDRAM? Any architectural changes you could envision with eDRAM that would make you happier as a developer?

And... more Trial's Awesome-Sauce (TM):


EDIT: and an older video (and build) but a lot of cool maps from PAX 2011. I never saw this, looks great:

 
Acert93 said:
sebbbi & Andrew, concerning eDRAM, if MS/Sony insisted on eDRAM for various reasons, how much do you think you, as a developer, would want? "If you force us to write to eDRAM, I will not be happy without X amount of eDRAM." ??? Any changes, e.g. would you prefer more of a scratchpad style eDRAM (full read/write), even if it was much smaller, if forced to go with eDRAM? Any architectural changes you could envision with eDRAM that would make you happier as a developer?
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eDRAM or any other memory tech as a level in the cache hierarchy is great, at any size (that makes sense in the hierarchy). 360-style eDRAM bolted to the ROPs just isn't that interesting going forward even if it were significantly bigger IMHO. Framebuffer bandwidth isn't a big issue except for particles, and you can handle those much better in compute in the future than with "dumb" fixed function raster/blending. Note of course that I'm speaking from experience working on much newer architectures than 360 of course, but those will arguably be a better predictor for next gen consoles than 360/ps3.

So yeah, I'm always happy to get more cache levels (particularly these days large ones between on-chip and off-chip DRAM), but I don't see much need for inflexible scratch pads, particularly for the framebuffer.

But back on topic - nice videos! Man I really want this to come out soon :)
 
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Congrats! On due dates.... hahaha! My wife was over 17 days (!), over 29 days (!! runs in the family), hit a due date dead on, and then 3 and a half weeks early with our most recent. All that to say: It could come any time... or next month :p The good news? Trials:E has built in 4 player so you, the misses, and the new bundle can all play at the same time ;) Ok, I am being silly, but seriously, congratulations. A new one can be a big transition (sleep killer especially) but totally worth it. And totally not joking: games like Trials that seem to work best for me these days: quick pick up but skill based and rewarding gameplay, short load times, 1-5 minutes gaming chunks that can be picked up/put down at any time or played for hours on end, all the while remaining connected to your friends via leaderboards and challenges. You get the thrill of playing a "real game" that requires skill and you see a level of progression both in the game unlocks/medals as well as the leaderboards -- but not the time commitment that other games require.

Meaning when your new bundle of joy finally falls asleep you can quit your current level with little regret... if you have the will power ;)
 
My wife and son slept about 16 hours a day for at least the first 6 weeks, and before that my wife also slept quite a lot, so I actually had quite a lot of time for myself during that time. That did go away eventually though.

One thing you learn very quickly is that having a baby is fine as long as you get enough sleep and with two parents you always make sure that at least one gets enough sleep, even if that takes sacrifices like sleeping in different rooms with/without the baby - having a bed for adults in the baby room is especially convenient, for a variety of reasons. So sacrificing sleep for gaming is a big no-no. ;)

Also, online gaming went pretty much out of the window for me from the birth of my son. Yay for asynchronous multi-player. ;)
 
Arwin said:
So sacrificing sleep for gaming is a big no-no. ;)
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Yes, no doubt, I didn't mean to imply that :) I rarely do that anyways as I just love my sleep too much. As Acer mentioned, I figured trials might fit better into the presumably more random and hectic schedule due to it's very quick games and short load times.

Didn't mean to derail the topic too much; suffice it to say that I'm definitely looking forward to Trials and I imagine I'll appreciate the game design especially much due to shifting external constraints :).
 
It isn't a derail -- this is a very hands on, reality based sales pitch!

Heck, IGN/Gamespot/Eurogamer/Edge etc should create a special award category every year: Best Hardcore Game for Parents. Trials would EASILY win! This game is sleepy parent approved ;)
 
Acert93 said:
Heck, IGN/Gamespot/Eurogamer/Edge etc should create a special award category every year: Best Hardcore Game for Parents. Trials would EASILY win! This game is sleepy parent approved ;)
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Haha, good point :) Perhaps as the gaming population grows older they will ;)
 


Looking very good! Almost as much fun watching Trials gameplay as playing... almost ;)
 
RobertR1 said:
EDGE: Trials Evolution - 9

Congrats Sebbi and team! Amazing score from one of the few mags that matter.
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Thanks! We are really happy about this :)

Yesterday we started releasing series of 32 Trials Evolution editor tutorial videos. I think there will be 2 new videos every day until the release:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL38DB3EFF27B438AA&feature=plcp

And we were in the Gamespot's "Now Playing" show (37 minutes of gameplay):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgIIGQ52y6U
 
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