Uncharted 4: A Thief's End [PS4]

[DieH@rd]

From the very first 'teaser', yes it looks worse. But still, in the gameplay video it's all very impressive.

Even though the most recent video "dragon fire" looked like it was simulated at ~20fps, the impressive thing was that players could throw tornado spells and redirect the flow of fire.
youtu.be/07S6rFgOSdg?t=841

But game was sent to heavy retooling, who knows what is its form now. Tech demos were awesome, who knows if we will ever see that kind of quality ingame
youtube.com/watch?v=DX0gaUOR1xY

 

[L. Scofield]

Well you are comparing a dragon breathing fire and a Jeep on fire. I think it's safe to wait until we see more of Uncharted 4 and if it has an big set piece involving fire to make a final judgement. Deep Down is definitely impressive but you posted a video from September 2013, it's supposed to have a 2015 release date so we'll see if the final version lives up to that demo.

The reason why they're not even remotely in the same league is because on is playing back sprites while the other is running a full blown volumetric fluid simulation.

Wasn't the fire in the newest Deep Down trailers already downgraded?? Or do I remember this incorrectly...

They toned down the level of detail, but the simulation remains. The video I posted is from the downgraded version.

Yet the fire and smoke looked way better in UC4, it really gives me that killzone and motor storm CGI look in term of volume and lighting.

The smoke from KZ2's CGI video was actually volumetric and also cast shadows. This looks on par with the smoke in Ryse. I think Knack does something like this as well.

 

[milk]

Guys, calm down with the fire thing. Both are impressive for different reasons.
From a real time physics simulation standpoint, nobody beats deep-down. Fine. They are duing true volumetric fluid simulation and tracing against it in real time. Technically complex, but they update at half-frame-rate, simulated at a relatively low frequency (compared to the tiny fumes on UC4 jeep scene) and are rendered at very low res.
UC4's jeep was heavely scripted, so ND would have little reason to develop a true fluid sim for it, but I've never seen any other game with scripted fire animation (and there are many others) that animated and rendered them this well. This is still worth respect.

 

[ultragpu]

The smoke from KZ2's CGI video was actually volumetric and also cast shadows. This looks on par with the smoke in Ryse. I think Knack does something like this as well.

Definitely more killzone CGI than Ryse. It looked to be doing more complex stuffs in the animation, thickness of the plume and how the lighting blends with the smoke than Ryse.

 

[London Geezer]

Definitely more killzone CGI than Ryse. It looked to be doing more complex stuffs in the animation, thickness of the plume and how the lighting blends with the smoke than Ryse.

Not to be a party pooper, but seeing how that's essentially a cutscene, that smoke could easily be just a big fat polygon with an animated texture that only looks amazing because we'll never see it from a different angle.

 

[orangpelupa]

thats like PS1 era where FMV was mixed in here and there with real 3d for awesome graphics.

 

[bunge]

thats like PS1 era where FMV was mixed in here and there with real 3d for awesome graphics.

 

[Nesh]

where does it mix FMV? I think he is talking more about examples like Fear Effect, Nova Storm or Final Fanatsy where in some cases it was running FMV's and added the real time models on top

 

[Karamazov]

apocalypse introduced FMVs as textures, so in a way he is right

 

[Laa-Yosh]

So it's the bones that move and not the skin? Because it looks like the opposite is happening. Is animated fat a more fitting term, how else can you describe this?

Shifty explained the technical side perfectly. As for how to call it, well, nice character deformations? I think game dev riggers also tend to call them "helper bones" or "helper joints".

I guess it's a good occasion to post this video again

Even though Judd does not work at ND any more, the actual runtime technology on the PS4 is very similar, but the additional performance obviously allowed them to dial up everything - poly counts, number of bones etc.
And of course those new rigging tools discussed before allow them to add even more complex stuff in Maya and just bake the results into bone based deformations quickly.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Thanks! So i guess it's relatively easy to do computationally what they are doing on Nates face, why aren't more games using similar bone animations in the face?

Adding a feature like that to a character will always be about two things: the time end effort for the riggers and artists to implement it, and the runtime performance and memory costs of the additional bones and such. Drake is the main character of the game and the player will probably look at him 90-99% of the time (unless there's some unannounced stuff of course), not to mention several hours' worth of ingame cutscenes, so it makes a lot of sense to do all kinds of this stuff, even chest hair that moves in the wind

BTW, apparently the cutscenes are all realtime now and not streamed from disk.

 

[Clukos]

Thanks for the info guys. By the way this technique seems to be used at all times, or at least in mid-action cutscenes as well. This is from the scene in the car during the chase, the PSblog uploaded a HQ snap on flickr, the deformation is pretty clear here as well

Am i correct in presuming that the "redness" on his ear is some use of SSS?

 

[VFX_Veteran]

Am i correct in presuming that the "redness" on his ear is some use of SSS?

Yeap.

 

[iroboto]

just curious, but if this UC4 is using the TLOUR engine - is there an expectation of triple buffer latency during play? I don't imagine it impacting player performance much (this doesn't look like a twitch game to me), so I think it's quite a good solution.

 

[ultragpu]

Thanks for the info guys. By the way this technique seems to be used at all times, or at least in mid-action cutscenes as well. This is from the scene in the car during the chase, the PSblog uploaded a HQ snap on flickr, the deformation is pretty clear here as well

Am i correct in presuming that the "redness" on his ear is some use of SSS?

Man that HQ screenshot really makes hellava difference, can't wait for a high bitrate feed. I wanna see every single details in them explosions and mud.

 

[Sigfried1977]

apocalypse introduced FMVs as textures, so in a way he is right

Also introduced the world to the band Poe. And then the world swiftly forgot about that very band.

 

[orangpelupa]

i have the HQ video from Sony's Press page. But its 2 GB -___- no way im able to upload that

but if you need screenshots, i can do it.

 

[London Geezer]

i have the HQ video from Sony's Press page. But its 2 GB -___- no way im able to upload that

but if you need screenshots, i can do it.

Gamersyde will no doubt come to the rescue.

 

[scf]

Share the link then

 

[scf]

Oh so you have downloaded it! What upload bandwidth do you have? We could share it via torrent.