The Next Next Gen Thread o/\o
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All this tech stuff is great but it is all for nothing if the games design is poor. Honestly, I'd prefer devs didnt waste time and money on unnecessary graphical pushing if it means games have to cost millions to make. Not sure thats how it works but it seems a lot of wasted time and money at times on stuff that most of us cant really see the difference in.SFV - reddave360
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It's not graphics, though, it's greater granularity of control from increased framecounts, like erasing drunkenness from proprioception. It might lead to certain genres rising in popularity. Or not. -
@Red
It depends is the answer.
Certainly costs more in workstations for staff.
Is it any more time? From an art point of view probably not when talking about quality of assets and artists are almost always driven to push things, its in the nature and I suspect programmers are the same. Quantity of assets certainly adds up.
Engines (well Unreal as far as I know) are getting much better at streamlining this sort of process.
The big thing will be UE5's auto LoD stuff. That will save a huge amount of art time that isnt fun art time. We won't see the results of that for a year or two though.
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I hope UE5 has lower input lag than UE4. Fightmen based on UE3 were typically much more responsive.
LivDiv wrote:pretty much nothing did what Raymond did.
Everybody loved him.
Native resolutions are the biggest hurdle, because if 4K screens could handle these 1080 performance modes without downsides...
But then as someone who won't buy a 4K telly, that suits me. -
There's a bit about 30/60 and how that can heavily affect development in this talk with two of the Golden Axed devs that John Linneman did not long ago.
It doesn't matter whether you as a user can visibly think you can tell the difference between 30 and 60, games play different between 30 and 60, people respond faster. So when you are designing you have to pick one like really early on, and you have to stick to it because your combo windows, your platform distances, like the jump distances you design around, they change. Like jumps would get probably about 10% smaller between if you go from 60 frames to 30 frames, just because the efficiency you're expecting people to be able to do for timing that jump goes down. There's a lot of stuff that goes into that, where 60 frames is worth considering just from a design perspective for the playability of something and how you want to design it. -
Its all in the balance though and people do want graphical improvement.Escape wrote:It's not graphics, though, it's greater granularity of control from increased framecounts, like erasing drunkenness from proprioception. It might lead to certain genres rising in popularity. Or not.
There are several retro re-releases of fighters out there that should only be limited by the outputs hardware of the console.
People still want to play the pretty new game at a lesser delivery standard.
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GurtTractor wrote:Like jumps would get probably about 10% smaller between if you go from 60 frames to 30 frames
Or you'd apply ledge-locking if you're running at 25fps like an OG Tomb Raider! -
In general I think 4k in gaming is the most overrated but most used boast out there.
I will take framerate but personally am happy with 60 and certainly prefer consistency over anything, native 1080/1440 then work on shaders, anti-aliasing, HDR, bitmap detail, particles, effects, load times and so on.
4k is for movies and sports. -
I'm sure there'll be a time when 4K makes a lot of gaming sense, but for this gen at least, I agree.
I sit about 10' from my 80" projector screen and don't think I'd notice a lot of difference between 1080 and 4K. My eyes are just slightly worse than average after having them lasered last year, so I think the real problem with 4K isn't that it's unnoticeable, but that games still don't have enough hardware power to take full advantage. -
4K is probably great for top-down strategy/management games where being able to see as much detail as possible would come in really handy.
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On a really big telly or PJ, yeah. There are some fightman stages that really don't suit being so big, so I zoom out for those games. There's a volcano stage in Tekken 7 that Rouj loves picking, LIKE HE KNOWS.
Windowed gaming was another CRT benefit, of course, although you'd rarely want to go any smaller than their already-small screens. -
LivDiv wrote:@Red
It depends is the answer.
Certainly costs more in workstations for staff.
Is it any more time? From an art point of view probably not when talking about quality of assets and artists are almost always driven to push things, its in the nature and I suspect programmers are the same. Quantity of assets certainly adds up.
Engines (well Unreal as far as I know) are getting much better at streamlining this sort of process.
The big thing will be UE5's auto LoD stuff. That will save a huge amount of art time that isnt fun art time. We won't see the results of that for a year or two though.
Yeah, the assumption that more detail is a waste of time is isn’t really super accurate in my limited experience. The assets made for games these days are always far, far higher serial than what we end up seeing. You bake your maps at double the resolution you apply them at, to get better results on the lower end.
The current issue is engines needing to cheat stuff at real time, if you could just texture your character at 4k res texture maps and have it run, artists would prefer that than prepping everything at 4k and using engine tricks and shortcuts to make stuff work in talk time. I’ve banged on about this a ton but it can’t be stated how much of a time sink retopologising and baking maps is.
You basically need to imagine the asset being made twice, because of how engines work. Every asset basically starts of at an impossible level of detail
for a game engine because that’s how you end up with stuff looking good, there’s no way to sidestep that. Real time implementation is the big thing. All of the steps that need to be done at the moment because of bottlenecks - artists are always going to make the best looking stuff they can possibly make because it’s their passion. Making stuff look amazing is a lot easier at the asset creation level thanks to a wealth of scanned libraries and so on, it’s all the stuff to plug it into the game and have it run that’s the issue. If UE5 can solve some of that, it’ll be a game changer.
Rigging is also a huge time sink as well, and you need to do that wether your game
is Journey or TLOU.
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Currently making hair for a real time character and it’s baffling how much of it is just cheating stuff based on 10 year old systems. Apparently a good hair groom can take anywhere up to two weeks, but the creation of hair cards is the same process whether it looks awesome or awful, the engine’s ability to push the polygons for good hair is more of an issue - it’s holding back artists who need to find workarounds to match intent.
Anyway I am waffling. Back to shouting at xGen and its appalling user interface. -
I know it’s not a gaming console but just looking at the new Macs and the OS takes up 30gb of storage. Crazy that consoles need at least 5x that. WTF are they doing with all that space? -
acemuzzy wrote:It's not the OS taking much of the space, I don't think, it'll be the fact they're now using it basically was ram/memory (in-game and for instant restore). That disc space needs ring fencing I imagine, even if not being used...
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Regarding 4K, I look at Demons Souls on a 1080p screen and I'm struggling to see how it could possibly look better. When I'm actually playing the game itself, I know for sure I would never notice.
The problem with 4K is that the shift just isn't enough for most people to warrant thinking about parting with the kind of cash required for such a shitty upgrade. Most people don't care. Myself included.
MS have been extremely savvy with the Series S and I think we'll see that pan out in the long run. -
60fps is the most important thing to me and has been since big titles started hitting it. It makes so much difference.
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60 FPS makes such a difference, looks and plays so much better. 4K on a nice big tele is not to be sniffed at either.
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Send messageDemon's Souls doesn't really benefit from prioritising image quality over performance because they didn't have the time to add effects like ray tracing but at 1080p you could have stuff like ray tracing at 60Hz and Insomniac did a vague tease on Twitter that they might add that to the PS5 Spider-Man games. You can get your money's worth out of the computing power at 1080p.
I think the Series S was a good idea but now it's out the in the wild I wonder if they focused on severely undercutting the digital PS5 over solid 1080p performance - there are already games running at 900p where you'd expect them to hit 1080p and games stuck at 30Hz because they lack a lower-resolution equivalent of the 60Hz performance mode available on Series X."ERE's like Mr. Muscle, he loves the things he hates" -
Tbf, with four new consoles out in the wild, and the last gen still being catered for, the next-gen launch window was only ever going to be a clusterfuck of poorly optimised games, patches and bug fixes, and that's before you even think to factor in the effect the Pandemic will have had on development. It's a bloody miracle that anything got released at all, and actually works at all.Come with g if you want to live... -
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Send messageg.man wrote:Tbf, with four new consoles out in the wild, and the last gen still being catered for, the next-gen launch window was only ever going to be a clusterfuck of poorly optimised games, patches and bug fixes, and that's before you even think to factor in the effect the Pandemic will have had on development. It's a bloody miracle that anything got released at all, and actually works at all.
Yeah, I was hoping the initial DF comparisons would give an idea how the new consoles shape up next to each other but it feels like we're just seeing variences in optimisation so far and not necessarily what the hardware is capable of."ERE's like Mr. Muscle, he loves the things he hates" -
They were saying that demons souls took 3 years to make. So to make a only next generation game (the only one we have) it takes a minimum of three years when you have the following: the whole game already made as a basis. Obviously the size of the bluepoint team is critical but I think it puts in perspective how long it will take (and the resource) to make a pure next gen game.
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mistercrayon wrote:They were saying that demons souls took 3 years to make. So to make a only next generation game (the only one we have) it takes a minimum of three years when you have the following: the whole game already made as a basis. Obviously the size of the bluepoint team is critical but I think it puts in perspective how long it will take (and the resource) to make a pure next gen game.
I think thats the point I was making and maybe I got it wrong in terms of how graphics are worked but it still feels that Development is focused on stuff that just might not be worth it. Obviously, I dont work in Game dev so its all very much from way outside looking in but if a good chunk of the Demon Souls time is going on Graphic assets then it feels we are barking up the wrong tree a little.
You can have the most beautiful graphics in the world but if the immersion isn't good or the game plays like a dog it really is all for nothing. I do find its more design and effects that grab me from a visual point and not how many pixels are being moved around as such. Quite possibly it all has to go hand in hand. But for the time I had my switch, I felt it did graphics as well as anything that was really needed. I think Doom as the only game which really felt a bit less running on the little machine. The likes of Zelda, Mario and Mario Kart all zipped around and visually worked beautifully.SFV - reddave360 -
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Send messageDemon's Souls used lots of labour-saving stuff in its design. They made use of tesselation and had a tool that let them, for example, decide where they wanted some damage on a wall and AI would sort it for them instead of it having to be done by hand. There's a lot of work going into making tools that will allow us to have 4k shinies and games that are physically possible to make."ERE's like Mr. Muscle, he loves the things he hates" -
I think things like the sculpting tools and others like you see in Dreams could be really helpful for developers, at least for making quick prototypes. I haven't tried it but I feel like VR sculpting and level design must surely speed some things up a lot too.
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There are lots of tools, resources and engine improvements that have really changed the game a fair bit and with more to come.
The stuff in that UE5 Tomb Raider style video from a few months back showed off many of the artistic tools available and coming soon.
Much of this stuff serves to remove the repetitive, non-creative donkey work.
Not having to do LOD models will cut times down massively as Tempy detailed yesterday (earlier today?).
The libraries of models and materials now available through companies like Quickly and their Megascans create starting points and cut out industry wide repetition.
There are other things as well. Being able to work in relative real-time as an artist, all be it with slightly slower framerates or fidelity is incrediblely useful and can save a ton of time.
I only really know Unreal but other engines will have similar. Unreal allows blueprints to he made. These are starting points of basically anything. So a shader artist could make a "Rusted Iron" blueprint for example that is unchangeable except for a few parameters they dictate. Another artist, maybe a junior or a less technical more creative artist could take that and tweak those parameters only, maybe rust depth or coverage.
This keeps a consistent theme across art departments but also prevents the need to start from scratch or for less tech people to have to dig through menus.
There is a huge amount out there. I dont actually think a next gen game should take significantly longer from an art point of view. The exception of course being if they are treading new ground, exploring new possibilities allowed by the hardware.
An Assassins Creed or CoD really should be about as demanding now as last gen. -
Told you the PS5 was ‘a bit big’.
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(This kind of ‘modern trompe l’oeil’ on big animated outdoor screens is all the rage in advertising just now. Probably because it looks good filmed on a phone and posted to social media.)
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Yeah seen quite a bit of that stuff on the gram from design channels.
Does it still look good from different angles or is everyone posting from roughly the optimum angle? -
Everyone’s posting shots from the optimum angle. The shot above is from the ad agency, predictably.
I’ve seen amateur footage of some of the Star Wars ones shot from off-centre and they looked pretty ropey.
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