What does Naughty Dog's engine get right? *spawn

[JB9861]

the thread can be returned to grandmaster's investigations of particular titles.

So I'm seeing a lot of praise for Uncharted and I've seen DF also shower their engine with praise in several articles. Right now I can only seem to find the following two, but I know there's a couple more that I've seen in the past.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-tech-analysis-uncharted-article

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/final-fantasy-xiii-how-will-it-work-on-360-article?page=2

Perhaps I've asked before, but what is it about this engine that makes it so "exceptional"?

Where is Guerrilla falling short in comparison to them? I'll be honest and say out of all the high profile games that the PR claims the competition can't do or will have a hard time replicating, this is probably one of the titles I have the hardest time taking seriously. I also want to make clear I think Naughty Dog is very good and I'm not really trying to hate or come off as if I'm hating on their recent success with Uncharted franchise. They've been around for quite awhile so its all well deserved. And they were pretty successful early on with Crash Bandicoot too so good for them.

 

[Arwin]

Well, I'm not an expert, but off the top of my head:

- good AA
- high quality HDR lighting
- fantastic shadows
- excellent water shaders and reflective wet surfaces
- extremely high-res textures
- efficient no-load-times streaming system from BD to HDD Cache to Memory
- 7.1 surround with dynamic occlusion
- efficient poly culling managing to basically be able to have a poly per pixel at 30fps without wasting much on overdraw, and a high draw distances (we all know the view from the top of the Hotel)
- dynamic depth of field based on where your aim hits the environments
- motion blur

And then of course there are full replay with free cameras for all of that too.

Sure, some of this is good artists, but the tech is pretty outstanding. And sure they'll have had to make some shortcuts here and there, but the overall package is unique and very high quality.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

So I'm seeing a lot of praise for Uncharted and I've seen DF also shower their engine with praise in several articles. Right now I can only seem to find the following two, but I know there's a couple more that I've seen in the past.

That's not really the idea of the DF thread, to discuss all and every topic hit upon there! It's for latest discussion as it breaks. 2009 articles being revisited should be done so in a new thread, like this one.

 

[corduroygt]

There's also the rock solid 30fps under any circumstance, including multiplayer, which means they could possibly have gotten away with double buffering and still have no tearing.

 

[Kasersky]

the list on its own is not really outstanding most games do those things but its more of how they coalesces, plus the media so adamant to championing this game helps too.

the kinda thing which imo stand out the most is the animations which are overdone to an extent which makes it look more cartoony than realistic but the game doesnt go for realism and more of a stylized look.

thats the thing if you've seen the la noire trailer the facial animations are deliberately over exaggerated by the original actors but thats cause subtle things would probably not show up well in-game.

 

[AlNom]

high quality HDR lighting

Somewhat subjective when it comes to their bloom implementation. i.e. how their fire lighting gives objects a very deep red bloom instead of a brighter yellow component. There's a peculiar saturation in general though.

 

[KKRT]

I would add, great animation system and SSAO.

The biggest problem of this engine is textures filtering i think.

 

[Arwin]

Somewhat subjective when it comes to their bloom implementation. i.e. how their fire lighting gives objects a very deep red bloom instead of a brighter yellow component. There's a peculiar saturation in general though.

Is this comment about Uncharted 2, or 3? Anyway, I love their sunlight. Oh, and the game sports amazing variation too of course.

Not the best quality vid I could find, but this section is just one of many that I think shows off the tech of the game well. It looks still waaaay better though in the actual game on a HD screen.

 

[AlNom]

Is this comment about Uncharted 2, or 3? Anyway, I love their sunlight.

It's done in both of those. In Uncharted 2, I noticed it early on in the jungle when the time of day was sort of late afternoon or something and Drake was getting a fairly red/orange glow to him. Just looked a bit strange. The red-orange lighting is about the butt-end of the issue, so it's not much of an issue with the other colours. The saturation of the bloom still bugs me. Maybe it's just an art issue.

 

[MJP]

It's not that really do anything that's totally unique or out of the ordinary, but pretty everything they do is done well. Their tech is also well-catered to the type of game they're making (as well as the platform), which isn't something you get to see a whole lot.

Along with Guerilla and their in-house ICE team, they pioneered pretty much every cool technique used on the PS3. A lot of the stuff in Edge comes from their work. They were the first do deferred SPU lighting, which has since been implemented even in multiplat games.

 

[MJP]

It's done in both of those. In Uncharted 2, I noticed it early on in the jungle when the time of day was sort of late afternoon or something and Drake was getting a fairly red/orange glow to him. Just looked a bit strange. The red-orange lighting is about the butt-end of the issue, so it's not much of an issue with the other colours. The saturation of the bloom still bugs me. Maybe it's just an art issue.

I'd imagine that could be something the artists have control over. Their filmic tone mapping approach also tends to produce more more saturated/contrasty colors, which is also probably a factor.

 

[Turok]

I think the best thing about the Uncharted games is that it's so consistent. If you focus on the individual aspects of the graphics, such as particle effects, texture fidelity, and whatnot, you might find some games with better textures/particles, but very few games seem to have a high fidelity for most, if not all of their graphical aspects. Most games have noticeable tradeoffs, but Uncharted 2 practically doesn't.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's done in both of those. In Uncharted 2, I noticed it early on in the jungle when the time of day was sort of late afternoon or something and Drake was getting a fairly red/orange glow to him. Just looked a bit strange. The red-orange lighting is about the butt-end of the issue, so it's not much of an issue with the other colours. The saturation of the bloom still bugs me. Maybe it's just an art issue.

I don't recall noticing bloom oversaturation, but isn't that typical of RGB HDR buffers? It's certainly the case for RGB specular highlights leading to cyan patches of sky and pure-red blotches on car bonnets.

 

[JB9861]

Not the best quality vid I could find, but this section is just one of many that I think shows off the tech of the game well. It looks still waaaay better though in the actual game on a HD screen.

The following chapter is also good. I've played through the actual game on a HD screen.

 

[Shai-Tan]

A game like Enslaved looks great but it doesn't have the animation blending of Uncharted and actions which can't be interrupted which gives a big feeling of input lag over the actual frame rate whether it's dropping too low or not. I think it's also maybe the design philosophy to make every scene look good not only an attribution to the engine or the technology. They put a lot of effort into making some of the enclosed areas have very nice textures then in other levels the skybox area is very detailed whereas a game like Enslaved is using a more one size fits all philosophy with some things looking nice up close and medium then everything all hazy in the distance. There are some tradeoffs like in the prologue of Uncharted 2 where some scenes looks oversaturated and low res because they spent their budget on something else in the scene but the designers tend to do a good job allocating.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

- high quality HDR lighting

HDR isn't only about lighting, a properly built engine is aware of it from the start.
It should have a proper gamma correct pipeline from texture loading through lighting calculations (including realistic attenuation) to tone mapping. Sooner or later we'll also see shaders implementing energy conversation, where internal math guarantees that the amount of light leaving the surface through diffuse and specular reflection is not greater than the amount of light it receives (this is a new trend in offline CG, prime example is the metal shaders in Iron Man VFX from ILM).

It's not just the bloom and the ability to adjust the exposure when you move from inside to outside.

- extremely high-res textures

There's more trickery to that in the art department than you'd think.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

In the end, my opinion is that Naughty Dog has a development team with excellent artistic taste and lots of talent and it has been staying together for more than a decade, through three console generations. The fact that they can get inventive with their tech and their features is more of a middle step than the main reason for their success. Experienced core teams are very important and pretty hard to make up for when starting a studio from scratch.

 

[zed]

Since I was the first person on this site to say uncharted 1 had brilliant tech
Ill tell you what naughty dog does right!

* Their engine has no weaknesses, everything it does is the best or near the best with the comparable console games at that games launch. i.e. for any other game I can pick out flaws but with uncharted1/2 (for the time) they were minor

 

[Akumajou]

So I'm seeing a lot of praise for Uncharted and I've seen DF also shower their engine with praise in several articles. Right now I can only seem to find the following two, but I know there's a couple more that I've seen in the past.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-tech-analysis-uncharted-article

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/final-fantasy-xiii-how-will-it-work-on-360-article?page=2

Perhaps I've asked before, but what is it about this engine that makes it so "exceptional"?

Where is Guerrilla falling short in comparison to them? I'll be honest and say out of all the high profile games that the PR claims the competition can't do or will have a hard time replicating, this is probably one of the titles I have the hardest time taking seriously. I also want to make clear I think Naughty Dog is very good and I'm not really trying to hate or come off as if I'm hating on their recent success with Uncharted franchise. They've been around for quite awhile so its all well deserved. And they were pretty successful early on with Crash Bandicoot too so good for them.

If you read some supposed "tech blogger" making superiority claims on a 3d engine a game dev made for a first person shooter versus a 3d engine a dev made for a 3rd person shooter adventure game you cannot take them seriously.

Uncharted is a great game series and the tech is used efficiently.

Killzone is a game that is making alot of progress, I think its a great game and will be buying the Helgast Edition day one and its tech is amazing and efficient so much so that fps on PC are not doing the same level of effects unless they have more current hardware.

 

[MJP]

Sooner or later we'll also see shaders implementing energy conversation, where internal math guarantees that the amount of light leaving the surface through diffuse and specular reflection is not greater than the amount of light it receives (this is a new trend in offline CG, prime example is the metal shaders in Iron Man VFX from ILM).

Implementing energy conversation for analytic lights is pretty easy when using a simple BRDF like Blinn-Phong, we do it in our shaders at work for our dynamic lights. It definitely helps give a better balance between the diffuse and specular reflectance.

There's more trickery to that in the art department than you'd think.

Indeed. Obviously a good streaming implementation or efficient use of memory will help, as will good texture compression and gamma-correct texture sampling. But ultimately it's all going to come down to how well the artists make use of their limited resources throughout the scene. Uncharted uses plenty of repeated textures, but they're clever in how they apply them so that you don't notice the repetition.