It's been a while since I've been through that seminar, but the point you're on about has Kenny referring to 'light baking' in some of their earlier games. This is a common technique for adding seemingly complex lighting to games without having to do the calcs in real-time. Expensive lighting (such as global illumination/radiosity) is calculated as a pre-processing step outside of the game, where the results are then 'baked' into the textures to be used for the gam...
Keep in mind that Sony's next-gen libgcm api for the PS4 and Microsoft's dx11 variant api for the next Xbox will both be designed for those specific architectures in mind. The current generation of consoles are known to pull 2-3 times the draw call count of a PC with similar spec graphics chip - there's quite a high abstraction penalty on the PC versus the 'coding to the metal' possible with consoles apis.
Comparing hardware specs of a console to a PC coun...
@DoomeDx,
Havok still has to be integrated into the engine, along with the interface to it that will allow other systems to provide input and use the output from it. Then there's also the animation system, audio engine, artificial intelligence + pathfinding, gameplay layer, resource management + core systems, wider use of gpgpu tasking, a host of other possible middleware solutions (Scaleform, Enlighten, Bink, etc.) to maintain and interface with, not to mentioned the oth...
Real or not, if we consider the scanning tech we have from the likes of those at 'Infinite Realities' amongst others, and also look at the advancements in skin shading over the years by folks like 'Jorge Jimenez' (Iryoku/Activision Blizzard), this isn't beyond the realms of possibility in today's age. Of course, it would still be quite the technical feat.
Personally, I'm on the fence for this one. Could do with having an uncompressed high res clip ...
If I recall correctly, Avalanche relied upon procedural generation tech for both Just Cause 1 and 2. I can't remember to what extent, but it certainly would have given them more space for other in-game assets. There's also the repetitious nature of jungle environments making everyone's life easier. I get your point, though.
Grailly, you're right. There's not much of anything yet. I spent a lot of time looking up the Nvidia/Epic voxel-cone tracing GI method in UE4, so I'm pretty certain I didn't miss anything. I'd like to see more myself.
The only screenies out there are from the 'Elemental' demo, some early Fortnite 2 ones (not really demonstrative of anything but stylized graphics), and a few clips from a 'Game Informer' vid with Epic's Mark Rein showing ...
It's easiest to think of ram as nothing more than a storage area for the data required by a piece of software at run-time, whether it be a game or a full-blown operating system.
The main performance constraint comes from how quickly we can transfer data between ram and a processor rather than the ram capacity itself. The higher capacity benefit will mostly show itself in the form of richer game assets and some of the more memory-hungry rendering effects we see these days,...
"If you define games as art"
Well, every definition of the word 'Art' out there seems to dispel your reasoning. http://bit.ly/11QgGN0
That was primarily R* Vancouver, not North.
Additionally, I think it's North who are working as lead on 'Agent' too, if I'm not mistaken.
Not quite. The Mass Effect trilogy used Epic's Unreal Engine 3 from the get-go. The Kotor games used Bioware's in-house Odyssey engine. Both engines are completely unrelated.
The costs of SSD's are shooting down so fast at the moment. If we assume xmas time next year as the earliest release possibility for new consoles, a lot can happen in that time.
@Mikefizzled, regarding SSD life-span.
The life-span limits you mention are so out of reach for most people that they aren't worth worrying about. I mean, the Samsung 830 256gb hdd, for example, has a suggested write cycle limit of 3000 cycles. That's 256gb*3000 = 750 tera...
Amongst the best, yes, but I wouldn't label us as the best. It's a needless classification. Even though we've been losing a lot of talent in recent years as our AAA devs close down and as better opportunities are presented from overseas, the games industry certainly wouldn't be what it is now without the UK. That goes without saying, but then again, we can say the same for the U.S, Canada, Sweden, etc. It's not really an industry confined by borders as most dev teams are f...
So many people seem to think that a new engine is all about next-gen visuals - simply, nope. An 'engine' is just as much for the public as it is for the developers who need to utilise the features of an engine.
The tool-chain you can see in that 10 minute UE4 'tech walkthrough' vid is also considered part of the engine, and that was a just a small part. Epic have a load of supporting software they've created to work as part of the engine interface. Designe...
The jobs over at his new studio, '22 Cans', indicate he's going into the mobile marketplace with casual/social gaming in mind. As much as I'd like to be proved wrong, I don't think we'll be seeing any more deep-storied games from Molyneux if that's the case.
To those mentioning 'Black and White 3', I'm quite certain he doesn't own the ip rights to that, so it's out of his hands completely.
The OP needs to edit the title - it's misleading. Indie devs are not the same as big main-stream and triple-A studios, that's why 'Cliffski' was specific and not generalizing.
I, too, am a programmer, and working with managed directx and xna is not the same as working directly with the XDK and pure c++, is it? When did I mention assembly, let alone suggest writing games in assembly? Besides, assembly still has it's place in performance critical parts where a knowledgeable programmer will be able to do more than the compiler with all optimization tags on. If you're telling me it doesn't, then that's your loss.
Took a few minutes to l...
A lot of people here seem naive to the fact that a 6670 in a pc is not the same as a 6670 in a console.
One of the main things that developers have to fight more with on the pc are the calls through the the graphics api (more often than not this is directx). On the consoles, however, the devs have a lot better access to the hardware and ways around the consoles api to write very specific tasks at a low level. This is intentional. What does this mean, though? Well, it means th...
I don't know why people are disagreeing with you. Your point has been made several times by other people, and yet the majority just ignore it and read it in their own way.
Anyway, I'm actually commenting 'cause that's some nice work you've got there. Do you have an website with your portfolio work viewable?
Technically, that's incorrect - it won't be an illusion. That's what normal and parallax mapping does.
As you may or may not be aware, tessellation involves recursive sub-division of existing polygons into more of 'em, then sampling something like a height map to deform the new geometry. The primary difference being the CPU not acting as a bottleneck, because it's only 'aware' of the original LOD pre-tessellation poly model. The polygon counts is r...
They're putting Jimenez' (iryoku.com) years of skin shading research/experience to good use I see.