Ubisoft's Lighting And Physics Tech For Splinter Cell

[Hardknock]

There are some amazing scans out there that are pretty easy to find if you do some searching

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/789/789307p1.html

"The main ingredient we are using as a distinctive mark is the intensive use of per pixel Ambient Occlusion (AO)," Danny LePage explained. "As we are going to deliver a fully interactive environment, AO was the perfect technology to make the large number of object we showcase on screen look absolutely integrated, and not part of a simulation." Ambient occlusion is a technique that darkens a region (in this case, the region is as small as a single pixel) if it is blocked from direct light.

Since this is a dynamic technique, it means that the brightness of an area will change as the environment is manipulated. If Sam walks up to a wall, he'll block some of the ambient light that would have reached the surface of that wall and it will cause the area in front of him to darken in a realistic shape. When he steps back, the brightness is restored. These soft shadows will appear on everything, even causing Fisher to occlude light on himself. In the previous generation of Splinter Cell games, Sam was rendered separate from the environment. Now he follows the same rules.


The real-time demo we saw of this mock environment showed how several swinging lights cast numerous shadows.A more easily recognizable improvement in the lighting is the use of multiple sources. In the lighting demonstration we were given, UbiSoft showed us how they can have up to three spotlights cast in a single area to cast overlapping shadows. If you've ever been in a football field at night, you may have noticed how several lights from different angles can create a series of shadows. Expect to see that same phenomenon in Conviction. To make the effect even more pronounced UbiSoft has made the game take place in a fall setting, a time of year when shadows are most dramatic.

The last new technique we were shown featured the use of indirect lighting. When you shine a light on an object, some of that light will reflect back off of it. That's what gives an object color. If you shine a light on a green poster, it looks green because the poster is good at reflecting green light. This reflected light is now indirect lighting. It doesn't come from the original light source, but it can still illuminate the room - or anything around it, casting what appears as a green glow on nearby objects.

German Mag:

- According to the article, every single object that is rendered on screen has physical properties and most of them can be used by Sam. For example, Sam can pick up furniture and use it as a weapon, or throw printers at enemies or papers in the face of enemies to gain the upperhand in fights.

- Melee fights are much more than "press this button to hit" this time around. There's different context sensitive attack buttons and as mentioned before lots of environmental interaction.

- The devs state the fact that they are exclusive to the 360 allows them to do much more than if they were multiplatform (duh) but they also state they doubt they would be able to achieve what they're doing with the game on the 360 on the ps3 even if it was ps3 exclusive.

The lead programmer told the magazine he doubts they would have been able to pull of the lightning effects they have right now on the ps3. That's the only thing they say straight out, but they do state they believe they're much better off on the 360.

Game Informer:

* New form of lighting called indirect lighting means that the way light reflects off your surroundings affects how light is cast on you and nearby objects. Light reflecting off a large red poster will cast nearby things in a slight tint of red

* "In previous games, we had 2,000 or 3,000 animations, now we already have over 10,000."

* The animation system is based on the concept of Biometrics which just means getting the character to move naturally and fluidly. They mention how they want to eliminate pressing a button to pick something up and seeing Sam slide into place in front of the object before he interacts with it. They say an animation of Sam running up to a chair, picking it up and throwing it took 8 months to work out. I'd be willing to be they got it right. The screens of him progressing through the animation look very good. Also, there will be physics tied to the chair Sam is holding, so you'll bump into things with the chair and it won't just go through a wall.

* They mention a sort of hypothetical gameplay situation where Sam takes out a guard with some crazy melee combos. He then grabs the guard and throws him through a pane of glass or over a table (knocking over all the stuff on the table). Sam grabs the guard's radio and listens in on police radio chatter. He hears that they're sending in police after him through the front door. Sam opens the back door but doesn't go through; instead, he hides under a table, a guard walks in and investigates the open door. At that point, Sam could sneak out the front door, or he could knock over the table he's hiding behind, use it for cover and open fire on the guard. OR he could sneak up on the guard, handcuff him to a rail and kicks him down a flight of stairs. wow.

Some pics:

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360...plinter-cell-conviction-20070517105431485.jpg

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360...plinter-cell-conviction-20070517105446188.jpg

I think this game looks amazing. Any ideas as to why these things would be harder to implement on PS3?

 

[aselto]

I think this game looks amazing. Any ideas as to why these things would be harder to implement on PS3?

I'm sorry, I couldn't refrain from posting that.
In the IGN article devs state that advanced crowd simulation doesn't make their engine sweat. I surely hope it is (will be) rock solid 30fps (although a little bit of screen tearing has always been there in Splinter Cell). These lighting techniques surely seem very demanding.

 

[idsn6]

The indirect lighting looks like the ambient cube method of Source to me.

 

[Titanio]

I think this game looks amazing. Any ideas as to why these things would be harder to implement on PS3?

Not sure. Looking at the two techniques discussed specifically in your quotes, there are PS3 projects treading that sort of territory, I think. And companies who specialise in this kind of GI-ish stuff (e.g. Geomerics, Fantasy Lab) have spoken very highly of the PS3 as a particularly good fit for their work. Apparently Cell is rather useful in conjunction with the GPU for that kind of stuff, more than might be the case with other kinds of technique.

Who is the source on the german magazine translation? I don't know if it's from the same article, but I saw it claimed that such comments in a Finnish article were a bad translation, and that they had simply restricted themselves to saying that they could do more than if the project was multiplatform (which makes sense without reflecting on any hardware's capability).

Anyway, I like the apparent focus on animation also. Needs to happen more and more!

 

[Ether_Snake]

The indirect lighting looks like the ambient cube method of Source to me.

I don't know what that is but I doubt it did real-time radiosity. The image clearly shows that light bounces on the green and red posters and then this bounced light illuminates the surface of the white objects.

 

[Todd33]

Sounds like more BS hype. I wonder how much money they got for making it exclusive, is this the first that is not a PC title as well?

 

[Kaotik]

Sounds like more BS hype. I wonder how much money they got for making it exclusive, is this the first that is not a PC title as well?

I think it's coming for PC too, just not for other consoles.

 

[patsu]

I think this game looks amazing. Any ideas as to why these things would be harder to implement on PS3?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion

Ambient occlusion is a shading method used in 3D computer graphics which helps add realism to local reflection models by taking into account attenuation of light due to occlusion. Unlike local methods like Phong shading, ambient occlusion is a global method, meaning the illumination at each point is a function of other geometry in the scene.

I suspect they are commenting on Cell's NUMA (local memory) architecture because the algorithm needs to check global state in a tree walk regularly.

If so, we have already seen a few very successful attempts at solving this problem on Cell.

e.g., CABAC decoding in AVC playback (Cell can handle 40mbps using 3 SPEs while critics from MS camp claimed it was impossible), Parallel Breadth First Search (where Cell outran a 128 node Blue Gene)

The trick is to partition/pack the data and stream them asynchronously to a double buffer set-up for processing.

 

[deepbrown]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion



I suspect they are commenting on Cell's NUMA (local memory) architecture because the algorithm needs to check global state in a tree walk regularly.

If so, we have already seen a few very successful attempts at solving this problem.

e.g., CABAC decoding in AVC playback (Cell can handle 40mbps using 3 SPEs while critics from MS camp claimed it was impossible), Breadth First Search (where Cell outran a 128 node Blue Gene)

The trick is to partition/pack the data and stream them asynchronously to a double buffer set-up for processing.

Doesn't Uncharted have Global Illumination? And ambient occlusion is apprently "a very crude approximation to full global illumination." Sorry if that's off target...it just struck me in the article you provided

 

[Kryton]

Doesn't Uncharted have Global Illumination? And ambient occlusion is apprently "a very crude approximation to full global illumination." Sorry if that's off target...it just struck me in the article you provided

It's crude compared to full GI, but effective in most cases. There's a brief presentation on it here.

I imagine this is similar (if not identical) to what Crackdown uses to get their 'ray traced' effects?

Edit: This isn't the only way to do GI deepbrown (the Wikipedia article for GI lists many).

 

[Cheezdoodles]

Doesn't Uncharted have Global Illumination? And ambient occlusion is apprently "a very crude approximation to full global illumination." Sorry if that's off target...it just struck me in the article you provided

Uncharted does NOT have real GI.

I dont think any game has provided us with real Global Illumination yet, there are "cheats" like ambient occlusion that gives you less detailed and less advanced effects that are similar to GI, but its still rather far away from the real deal.


GI is very very very very expensive in terms of computing power, something we only see in CG-renders.

 

[almighty]

Ive seen the magazine article on the SC:C and ive gotta say the lighting while impressive was'nt like "omg the best ever and beyond PS3" when i saw it in the screen shots

 

[Cheezdoodles]

Ive seen the magazine article on the SC:C and ive gotta say the lighting while impressive was'nt like "omg the best ever and beyond PS3" when i saw it in the screen shots

I find it incredibly hard to judge lightning by static screenshots (if not impossible)

 

[almighty]

I find it incredibly hard to judge lightning by static screenshots (if not impossible)

Thats true but you can tell from screen shots if lighting looks realistic and TBH it looks in the screens no better then the last SC game. And id put money on it not looking much better in motion aswel.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

Thats true but you can tell from screen shots if lighting looks realistic and TBH it looks in the screens no better then the last SC game. And id put money on it not looking much better in motion aswel.

But previous SC lightning\shadows already looks very realistic in still shots (of the envionment), many games do. I find your generalization and predictions from just a still shot, absolutely amazing.

 

[Tap In]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion



I suspect they are commenting on Cell's NUMA (local memory) architecture because the algorithm needs to check global state in a tree walk regularly.

If so, we have already seen a few very successful attempts at solving this problem on Cell.

e.g., CABAC decoding in AVC playback (Cell can handle 40mbps using 3 SPEs while critics from MS camp claimed it was impossible), Parallel Breadth First Search (where Cell outran a 128 node Blue Gene)

The trick is to partition/pack the data and stream them asynchronously to a double buffer set-up for processing.

wow a technical answer with info to a technical game question on B3D (console forum) rather than just an opinion!

thanks Patsu, good post

 

[Skrying]

wow a technical answer with info to a technical game question on B3D rather than just an opinion!

thanks Patsu, good post

You spend to much time in the console forum.

 

[Tap In]

You spend to much time in the console forum.

you are correct sir.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

Uncharted does NOT have real GI.

I dont think any game has provided us with real Global Illumination yet, there are "cheats" like ambient occlusion that gives you less detailed and less advanced effects that are similar to GI, but its still rather far away from the real deal.

I frankly don't think it will ever happen. All the techniques that exist are all limited in their applications and limited in how far up they can scale. Studios like Fantasy Lab have nice videos and all, but there's enough lacking from what they show and especially from what they say to suggest that there's less than meets the eye. That, and a lot of their claims the way they're worded come out patently absurd.

There are a mess of techniques out there for dynamic AO and dynamic light-bounce capturing that look good on paper, but you try them out and they really don't scale up well at all. I mean they become impractical long before you've reached the kind of scene complexity we've come to expect of the... Dreamcast. And by the time we're capable of handling that level of scale, people will demand more anyway, and I see that as a cycle that will carry on long after everyone currently posting on this board is dead and buried.

I can almost, maybe, approach 5% belief on what Ubi is claiming about their engine, not so much because it's possible in the generic sense, but because Splinter Cell itself is a game that lends itself to claustrophobic settings (which is part of the point). That, and a lot of things that they say they can do can be partly achieved by representing objects in greatly simplified ways (e.g. the character as maybe 6 boxes) and performing dynamic AO based on that representation... and in turn keeping dynamic activity to a minimum (which is also partly a given since we're talking about a stealth title). Additionally, there are ways to cheat when static objects like a wall-mounted poster reflect indirect lighting onto the scene. It's just when they put it in a context that makes it sound as if it's not just limited to that without actually saying as much which really makes me shake my head and sigh.

It doesn't stop people of course from making all sorts of claims that they have solved the "realtime global illumination" problem. All I can say to that is that they are lying. If they'd said something like "we have fast realtime approximation techniques that can enable us to achieve GI-like effects," I could accept that. Unfortunately, it's much more important that they throw out a buzzword that attracts eyes than it is to say something plausible.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It doesn't stop people of course from making all sorts of claims that they have solved the "realtime global illumination" problem. All I can say to that is that they are lying. If they'd said something like "we have fast realtime approximation techniques that can enable us to achieve GI-like effects," I could accept that. Unfortunately, it's much more important that they throw out a buzzword that attracts eyes than it is to say something plausible.

I don't know if they mean it as such, but when they say, "they have solved the 'realtime global illumination' problem," I hear, "we have fast realtime approximation techniques that can enable us to achieve GI-like effects." Joe Public isn't sophisticated enough to appreciate the difference, and if it looks 'good enough' on the screen, I don't think it's unfair to say they've solved realtime GI. The only time that become an issue is when you upset CG renderers who are all keen and excited to reduce their rendertimes, only to find the engines aren't anything like suitable.

In this case, what's being shown looks quite an achievement along the lines LBP. The question is how it scales and works in the complex game (dice are nicely lit, but as you say it'd be easy to use a simple box as occlusion geometry and get the same results). Until we get some proper vids, I'll reserve judgement, but hope they have got something that works well as it makes a huge difference to lighting.