Watch_Dogs by Ubisoft

http://www.gamepur.com/news/14617-m...e-resolutionfps-figures-comparison-gta-v.html

Watch Dogs Creative Director Jonathan Morin via Twitter has clarified why development team went for 900p/30 FPS and 792/30 FPS. In a series of tweetes, Morin clarified:

* I said it is one element in every aspect of a game. Watch_Dgos is about dynamism. It could not have been the case
* Everything is related to each other and everything is a choice in game development.
* You decide to have dynamism like ours in a full city than you must embrace it when it comes down to choices.
* You guys can decide to extract resolution from the big picture to make it easier of a choice for you :) but I can't.
* I am not denying that resolution have an impact but its about cost and impact. It is always about that.
* So you guys are free to interpret, it is your right. My job is to make choices based on the game we are making.
* Everything is related to each other even in visual alone.
* Someone who knows a lot about visual can have to pick between a global FX and high resolution and sometime the global FX on with less pixels looks better than the other way around.
* Everything is connected no matter which way you look at it. So when I say it is a "number" I mean among others...
* Visual is a crucial aspect of any game experience no matter which angle you take
But it is not the only angle to consider.
* Everything is an catch 22 in my job :). I could decide to ignore this fact But that would make me one hell of a shitty Creative Director.
* ot that I am perfect, but for me density, dynamism through control of hacking and seamless online are core elements. They are what brings players elsewhere when they play. So when it gets in the way of these then everything else loses.

When one Twitter user compared Watch Dogs on next-gen with GTA V on last gen: "last gen GTA5 blew minds w/ 512k; 6gb now and WD looks like crap! For "density"? Morin replied:

* And its for dynamism I said. Interacting with everything as well as seamless.
* They are tones of things to push in games. WD push visual but also interactivity.
* You can desire to remove AI, seamless, 30fps and some hacks for other stuff
WD was always about hacking as you please in the dynamic beautiful city.

Morin ended the topic on a good note:

"Every spec compete with another in the end. If you dig visual so much you should consider this: Its often not the obvious combinations that gives the best results visually. Its not that simple."
Click to expand...

My question would be...

Where did communications (if any) breakdown between Sony and UBI when it came to Watch Dogs? That Sony felt comfortable enough to announce 1080p/60fps and UBI previously stating two weeks ago, PS4 is 1080p.

Something just doesn't add up...

I do understand "choices" and "hard decisions", but shouldn't UBI have clued Sony in that this wasn't going to be the case - if Sony was under the impression of something else. Either that or Sony outright lied...

Although I'm purchasing the PC WD version... I wish console gamers had choices or graphic option settings on defining their gaming experience.

What would be funny is that; activating a higher resolution and framerate, is to hack some easter egg scenario within WD. :LOL:
 
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Pretty much all games last-gen said 1080p on the box, because they provided 1080p output, even though it was upscaled. They list that so people know it is compatible with their 1080p tv. If the Sony listing was showing 1080p to mean 1080p output, then they're probably correct. Even 1080p60 is probably correct. That is the signal your tv expects. The actual internal rendering resolution and frame rate is something different. I never saw whatever Sony had posted to know what it was, but I'm assuming it was just the regular, "This is the signal sent to your tv" kind of information that is normal.
 
Shortbread said:
http://www.gamepur.com/news/14617-m...e-resolutionfps-figures-comparison-gta-v.html



My question would be...

Where did communications (if any) breakdown between Sony and UBI when it came to Watch Dogs? That Sony felt comfortable enough to announce 1080p/60fps and UBI previously stating two weeks ago, PS4 is 1080p.

Something just doesn't add up...

I do understand "choices" and "hard decisions", but shouldn't UBI have clued Sony in that this wasn't going to be the case - if Sony was under the impression of something else. Either that or Sony outright lied...

Although I'm purchasing the PC WD version... I wish console gamers had a choices or graphic option settings on defining their gaming experience.

What would be funny is that; activating a higher resolution and framerate, is to hack some easter egg scenario within WD. :LOL:
Click to expand...
We have at least one example of Ubisoft reps at the Berlin last weeks press event telling journalists that the ps4 version, not the pc version, but specifically the ps4 version, was 60fps 1080p. So it seems that there is some miscommunication within their own ranks.
So it seems Ubisoft is more to blame than Sony.
 
Pixel said:
We have at least one example of Ubisoft reps at the Berlin last weeks press event telling journalists that the ps4 version, not the pc version, but specifically the ps4 version, was 60fps 1080p. So it seems that there is some miscommunication within their own ranks.
Click to expand...

I am loathe to add to the lunacy and conspiracy theories, particularly as it's an unorthodox notion, but I wonder of Ubisoft experimented with different graphics settings (1080-60, 900-30) and one of these got shown or mentioned to a journalist in error.

It still does't explain Sony's website stating 1080p 60fps though, not unless their website people get their info from random German gaming sites :???:
 
Shortbread said:
http://www.gamepur.com/news/14617-m...e-resolutionfps-figures-comparison-gta-v.html



My question would be...

Where did communications (if any) breakdown between Sony and UBI when it came to Watch Dogs? That Sony felt comfortable enough to announce 1080p/60fps and UBI previously stating two weeks ago, PS4 is 1080p.

Something just doesn't add up...

I do understand "choices" and "hard decisions", but shouldn't UBI have clued Sony in that this wasn't going to be the case - if Sony was under the impression of something else. Either that or Sony outright lied...

Although I'm purchasing the PC WD version... I wish console gamers had a choices or graphic option settings on defining their gaming experience.

What would be funny is that; activating a higher resolution and framerate, is to hack some easter egg scenario within WD. :LOL:
Click to expand...

My question would be...could he have actually said less in as many words considering he said nothing in so many?
 
DSoup said:
I am loathe to add to the lunacy and conspiracy theories, particularly as it's an unorthodox notion, but I wonder of Ubisoft experimented with different graphics settings (1080-60, 900-30) and one of these got shown or mentioned to a journalist in error.

It still does't explain Sony's website stating 1080p 60fps though, not unless their website people get their info from random German gaming sites :???:
Click to expand...

It wasn't a private viewing of the game with a single website staffer. It was a press event held in Berlin last week for all of the german gaming press. Earlier before that they did one in france for all the french gaming press and also gave out prizes, which they didn't do for the german gaming press.

The person who wrote the article was quite technically knowledgeable and played the ps4 version for 90minutes on a 55" tv, and privately noticed occasional framerate dips (which might be an indicator of 30fps, unless he noticed it via juttering and/or tearing), poor AO, lack of AF, ocassionally missing shadows, occasionally low res textures and noticeable Aliasing, and on a 55" screen tv how can you not notice upscaling?
 
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Pixel said:
It wasn't a private viewing of the game with a single website staffer. It was a press event held in Berlin last week for all of the german gaming press. Earlier before that they did one in france for all the french gaming press and also gave out prizes, which they didn't do for the german gaming press.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the clarification. A few UK podcasts I listened too (I think it was IGN UK, Euroganer and/or Videogamer) mentioned that Ubisoft were giving away Watch_Dogs branded Nexus7 tablets at one event. :rolleyes:

I kind of wonder if Ubisoft are just trolling everybody, what with the 'PC graphics demo' that was later revealed to be PS4.
 
www.gamepur.com/news/14630-watch-do...ly-ordinary-animations-last-gen-facial-e.html

In another news, Ubisoft has officially confirmed that Watch Dogs on Playstation 4 will run at 900p/60 FPS and 792p/30 FPS on Xbox One, but still some latest previews of the game raised big question mark on graphics/visuals on PS4.

Spanish website Vandal recently previewed Watch Dogs (the preview was posted on April 23, 2014) and this is what they have to say about game's graphics/visuals on Playstation 4: Translated via Google Translator

"On the negative side, the truth, almost everything else, has greatly disappointed graphically, not by comparing it to the famous demo from E3 2012, but certain details we were not expecting with an open world game at this point in the new generation.

Things like cars and pedestrians suddenly appearing beside, fog on the horizon hiding elements, especially in tunnels, ugly textures, physics leave much to be desired in vehicles, quite ordinary animations, discrete modelling of cars, facial expressions of the last generation ...

Lest you think we ordered too much, when compared with a recent title of the console and open world, inFamous: Second Son, this hits it a look, games seem almost from different generations. And we also had the opportunity to play the PC version, and the truth, things do not improve too much, is quite similar to what we saw in PS4, only a little better."
Click to expand...

If this is true, I might not get the PC version... Ouch!
 
The only two things I'd considered bad about this game's graphics are flat ambient lighting during daytime (flat color, no direction) and the lack of shadows at night. Other than that it looks pretty good.
 
GuestLV said:
looks quite good ,hope plays too
Click to expand...

The gameplay looks pretty cool actually, this is the first video of this game that's piqued my interest. Graphics look okay too but there are way too many conflicting reports atm to make any final determinations. I'll wait to see the final PC version with my own eyes (or Digital Foundries).
 
Laa-Yosh said:
Yeah, we did that one too. No ingame footage there.
Click to expand...

Neat. If you're permitted to answer, how far/close (gap) visually is the PC version compared to the offline trailer (texture assets, IQ, performance, etc..)? Minus the heavy use of FX camera positions and few other cinema tricks of course. My R9 295x2 is hungry... :LOL:
 
Here's an article FXGuide did on us last year:
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/how-digic-made-the-assassins-creed-iv-black-flag-trailer/

As for Ubisoft assets, I'm quite sure that I can't say anything about that.

However I can tell you that no game engine could render any of our scenes, probably not even a single hero character. The base polygon detail might work, as most of the models are in the 100-200K range; but everything is tessellated using subdivision at least two times and hero faces can get up to six divisions. Since those heads are 20-30K on their own it could go up to 50-100 million polygons ;) but the renderer stops when we would get to subpixel levels, so it's usually just a few million. We also model the eyelashes, teeth are about 10K, and we use geometry for the thin film of liquid gathering at the eyelids.
We model heads at such detail so that we can have a fine level of control over the facial wrinkles and skin sliding, which we implement with blend shapes. Most game engines rely on a set of wrinkle maps in the normal channel to get these details, but fading wrinkles in and out just doesn't look as skin folding and wrinkling.

Hero heads have a texture resolution of 6K to 8K, and we use about a dozen maps for color, subsurface layers, specular, roughness, displacement and such. Hair and eyebrows are rendered with hair primitives and we also have a thin white layer of fur that's usually called "peach fuzz". We usually also add a bump map layer of skin detail that's based on scanned silicon casts of real human faces for the tiny pores and micro structure.

The rest of the character is also adding up to a few million polygons and we use cloth and hair sims on a lot of stuff that can take hours to calculate for a few second long shot. Our most complex character so far was the Master Chief in Halo 4 at ~700 thousand polygons (quads mostly, so you can double all of these figures to get the triangle count). Seems like we'll have several characters on our current project that go higher, close to a million...

We also use Massive, the crowd sim software developed for Lord of the Rings movies, so we have AI driven crowds of up to tens of thousands of characters. These are usually a few thousand polygons, so that they're efficient to render but they can still be relatively big in the final frame when necessary. We usually try to leverage ingame assets provided by the client for this, but often we also build game-level normal mapped impostors of our own high res characters as well. Massive is getting used more and more, I think it's been in all of our movies since Watch Dogs (including unreleased and work in progress projects).

Sets and vehicles are also very complex, here we can use various techniques that allow us to basically build a model and write it to disk and never load it into Maya again, the renderer will access the mesh data at render time when necessary. So I can't really give polygon counts but I imagine we get to tens or hundreds of millions, depending on the complexity.

We also cheat a lot with the environment, using matte paintings wherever we can. These can be simple 2D images, sometimes wrapped to planes or cylinders or spheres; but we can also use cards or simple geometry on which we project the elements of the painting (created as layers in Photoshop) to create parallax or depth in scenes with more dynamic camera movement.

We also don't really do 3D clouds and those are all painted too. But all the various effects are not polygon based, the particles are usually rendered as fluids, probably using voxels - I'm not that familiar with this field nowadays. But as the article also mentions, FX simulations are usually saved to disk so that they can be re-rendered faster, and they take up hundreds of gigabytes of space.

It's also worth noting that we break down every scene into a lot of separate layers, basically rendering using the divide and conquer principle. A usual set would have the hero characters using several layers (hair, eyelashes and some optional elements are all separated so that we can tweak them in comp), groups of background characters, set foreground, mid and background, sky, FX layers, and so on. This helps to keep poly counts down a bit, but reflections, GI and shadows and such still require so called "matte" versions of the assets to be present. These have simplified shaders and textures (or no textures at all) but for FX layers to be precise, we need to use the same subdiv and displacement settings on those.

We're also using very high levels of supersampling on everything to get clean edges and sharper details and no visible noise or other artifacts. This is a major factor in long render times, but most layers can still complete in a few hours at most. It's also hard to give complete rendering times because of everything broken down into many layers.

However as I often noted here, game rendering engines are getting close in feature lists to what we're doing - the main difference is that they're using approximations and a lot of simplification. Normal mapping instead of subdivision and displacement, shadow and reflection maps instead of raytracing, pre-baked lightmaps and light probes and such instead of raytraced bounce lighting, and so on. Some of these approximations work remarkably well, others are still quite crude and very easy to spot, especially if you know what the difference looks like.
 
Another note about game assets is that the source models for the normal maps are becoming very complex nowadays - 20 to 50 million polygons is pretty common in the zbrush model, it's close to the level of a 1:1 match between polygons and texels, especially on characters.

But levels are still making use of tiled textures, blocks of reusable geometry, alpha masking instead of actual poly models and so on. And of course heavy instancing.
 
Laa-Yosh said:
Another note about game assets is that the source models for the normal maps are becoming very complex nowadays - 20 to 50 million polygons is pretty common in the zbrush model, it's close to the level of a 1:1 match between polygons and texels, especially on characters.

But levels are still making use of tiled textures, blocks of reusable geometry, alpha masking instead of actual poly models and so on. And of course heavy instancing.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the great response Laa-Yosh.

When developers and publishers contract companies like yours… is often to covey the story in a more cinematic scope? Or is it more than often to convey (err, fudge) what that game engine can do graphically?
 
That's actually a tough question to answer... We're usually tasked to introduce the character(s) and the world, and we usually need to hint at various gameplay features as well, and encompass it in a short story that has enough strength to live on its own. It's probably also because offline CG is still far more capable and probably going to remain so for quite a few years, simply because of the limitations of realtime graphics. So it helps to make that first impression a bit more stronger, being able to deliver on the game's vision without a lot of those limitations.

But perhaps more important is that we have a very capable team lead by a very talented director, with some amazing film making skills, and a lot of experience. And we're not always hired to just build trailers either; our current project has us much more involved in the storytelling aspects of a game, building on all our experience and skills. Unfortunately I can't yet talk about this one either ;)
 
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