http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/3/5171942/microsoft-xbox-one-usage-stats-zombies-hours

The interesting thing here is not the Verge's sensationalist sales figure bullshit, but the fact that Microsoft are confident in being able to disclose ballpark figures on rather precise in-game actions...

Shit might well be way more precise than this "teaser" lets on...

Next level stuff, as far as UI testing and R&D plans are concerned...

djchump wrote:

...IAPs ...TRCs....

Wait... TLAs... 

WND, CQU*...

*Is that, 'Will Need Definition, Can't Quite Understand', or 'Women Need Dick, Could Quell Udders'? I can't remember...

Ooh, a question.

So, y'all know about that "soap opera effect" motionplus interpolation thing they whack in tellies now that bumps up the framerate and makes everything look weirdly higher-fidelty - has anyone ever tested this with videogames nominally locked at 30fps?

Brooks wrote:

Ooh, a question.

So, y'all know about that "soap opera effect" motionplus interpolation thing they whack in tellies now that bumps up the framerate and makes everything look weirdly higher-fidelty - has anyone ever tested this with videogames nominally locked at 30fps?

Smoother, but less responsive.

The transitions themselves don't worsen input lag, their processing cost does. Unless we're talking about interpolating a 60-fps game, which only accepts as many inputs per second.

I thought about buying one for GTA IV once, because its frame-rate was so poor that the trade-off didn't seem as bad.

'Tis if I understand it and you employ at least one cccaaawwwssshhh!!!.

Can't build a game if you can't design sound, son.

djchump wrote:

Analytics are prevalent these days - mostly down to wanting to max out IAPs it seems.

Analytics are a huge part of balancing and refining a game once it's live, not just to boost IAPs. In fact I'd argue game balancing / tweaking is the key purpose, but I guess that depends what department you're working out of.

Analytics allow you to spot difficulty spikes / drop off points early and address them, as well as giving info on player interaction with features etc, all of which let you build on what you know is working, and either improve or bin what isn't.

You can also use analytics to entice sponsors / investors, if you're using ads, "hey look X feature gets Y amount of users per Z, if you advertise there you'll reach XYZ people" or something.

There are loads of uses, saying it's just for IAPs is kinda lumping it in with the IAP / no-IAP argument, or at least that's the end of the stick I got.

nick_md wrote:

djchump wrote:

Analytics are prevalent these days - mostly down to wanting to max out IAPs it seems.

Analytics are a huge part of balancing and refining a game once it's live, not just to boost IAPs. In fact I'd argue game balancing / tweaking is the key purpose, but I guess that depends what department you're working out of. Analytics allow you to spot difficulty spikes / drop off points early and address them, as well as giving info on player interaction with features etc, all of which let you build on what you know is working, and either improve or bin what isn't. You can also use analytics to entice sponsors / investors, if you're using ads, "hey look X feature gets Y amount of users per Z, if you advertise there you'll reach XYZ people" or something. There are loads of uses, saying it's just for IAPs is kinda lumping it in with the IAP / no-IAP argument, or at least that's the end of the stick I got.

Very good points - aye, I was being a tad too cynical and dismissive; kickback against the somewhat prevalent drive to add IAPs and monetisation that I see creeping into all kinds of games that I'd rather not see them in.

But yeah, as you say, analytics is a huge boon and vital to any kind of balancing - especially of multiplayer games. I'd totally forgotten about the old Halo heatmaps, stats and the like, so in many ways analytics and gameplay data are really quite interesting in and of themselves.

Right you are then! The challenge is thus:



To create a sustainable hour or two long analogue or simulation of a volcano at that stage and scale. And wether I should be using particles, volumetric reproduction or a mix, and wether i'm almost certainly looking at implementing it in some form on the gpu. There's several great raymarching examples on shadertoy one might use to create a volume, but its going to have to be very fine, and I cannot see it working on its own. Would particles belie their billboarded origin as soon as you get closer to the volcano and navigate around it? Dilemma!

To which bit!

Anyways you're the graphics guy chump, muzzy's the maths unit

LazyGunn wrote:

Right you are then! The challenge is thus: To create a sustainable hour or two long analogue or simulation of a volcano at that stage and scale. And wether I should be using particles, volumetric reproduction or a mix, and wether i'm almost certainly looking at implementing it in some form on the gpu. There's several great raymarching examples on shadertoy one might use to create a volume, but its going to have to be very fine, and I cannot see it working on its own. Would particles belie their billboarded origin as soon as you get closer to the volcano and navigate around it? Dilemma!

Wow, okay, some initial thoughts and I'll have a think about it over the afternoon as well:
- most important rendering feature being volumetric shadowing, given its so dense there's not much light transmission, so volumetric lighting maybe isn't all that important, but nailing the shadowing is gonna be pretty vital to visual sell of the form and scale.
- probably almost as important though is the roiling motion - you can get away with all kinds of fudges and shortcuts if the rendering if the motion is believable; hides a multitude of sins. So how you control/animate/simulate the movement is pretty important. Precanned mesh anim won't cut it, not enough variation, but then again fluid sim is a big ask if you don't have a black box plugin/renderer to handle the sim for you.
- actually, scratch that first comment about the shadowing: I think nailing the motion is THE most important part, everything else can follow on from whatever solution fits best for getting the motion believable.
- options: 
1) particle system: but you're looking at a fuckload of particles, so overdraw is gonna be a killer (especially if you aim to have it on mobile/tablet). Safest/most controllable to render a low number of fairly opaque particles to an offscreen render target (that has scene depth buffer) then composite it back into the scene - then gives you the option of mixed res render if expense is high, offscreen process to add noise/extract normals etc. then can and add further noise in the upscale composite pass. Battlefield distance smoke worth reading up on, but not sure how well the technique will hold up at the huge scale in the vid and up close. Offscreen render you can also get funky with depth write and go for some kind of volume effect (dice translucency the obvious one here).
If using particles as smoke , remember to splay the quad normals out to get the most from the normal map - but you may want to forgo pre-authored normal maps altogether and reconstruct normals from the  offscreen render target for that fully dynamic look (will also cut down on any obvious repeated textures or tiling).
2) volumetric - I dunno much about this kinda stuff as I'm increasingly a bit oldskool dx9 these days; have no experience in full dx11 pipelines. The old vertex texture displacement method could help you get that "noisy roughly spherical dust sources roiling upwards and outward from each other" - getting the octaves of perlin (or whichever noise func you choose) right for that fractal look will help sell it at different scales/viewing distances - have higher freq octaves of the noise func blend in as the camera gets closer to add fine grain detail. Lots of research about this kinda volume rendering as offline (e.g. Siggraph 2013 appear on Clouds for that dreamworks film (puss in boots? Or maybe jack and beanstalk, can't remember) but not all that much for realtime. Write up for that unity anim demo they did had a bit about displacement volume render for the explosions iirc - could be repurposed.
3) overall sim - 2d axis-rotated fluid sim will be bit too mushroom cloudy, where you need asymmetry for the motion, so it may have to be 3d coarse grain but with lots of layered, animated noise to add the texture. Instead of fluid sim, Hand-authored curl noise texture (see Brutal Legend vfx writeup) will give you more precise art control over the movement - will have to be a 3d texture, but will let you easily add occluders and shape the output.

Decisions: 
- particle v volumetric: particle systems normally give you good control over spawn, movement, lifespan and texturing, but difficult to add depth and volume effects such as the necessary lighting and shadowing. Volumetric, much easier to get the shading, but more difficult to control the motion and get the texturing.
Best of both? = render spawning spherical(ish) 3d meshes as a volumetric particle system to offscreen texture/ render target - untreated will give fast depth only shadowmap, then for colour render treat by add noise and vertex displacement, rendering out depth as well because the density of those clouds basically make them solid.
- leave it easy to swap the noise func as you'll probably want to try several different types because it'll be fundamental to the final shape and motion.

If I thnk of anything else I'll add more

You guys should do this on a Raspberry Pi, or something even less powerful. Get a B&B demoscene going.

Worth adding the guy who did the fluid sim did a great pyroclasic effect that seemed useful, hes currently a games dev in scotland, worked for rockstar for a bit? His site is www.dunnalex.com

Secretly hoping he releases his volumetric light thing to the uniy world, and that someone buys me his realtime fragmentation thing

You just broke my head but it sounds like good stuff to learn! The only probs I had with using the pyroclastic effect was wether it would propogate properly and be sustainable for the hour or so long period of time you will be able to see it. Or these types of smoke stack rising

Making a mesh out of the fluid sim sounds beyond me but i could make the fluid sim quite larege and dense and have some form of attractor pull the whole thing in a direction to recreate what it actually did which is drift into the jetstream

Regarding noise generation, i think i could well have that wapped up before the end of the night - theres an amazing noise gen lib for unity which costs 50 quid or so, so need to get the moolah, but lots and lots of noise methids to play with and animate and so on, very useful not just for the fume formation but cloud formation in general (take iqs now famous raymarching shadertoy pretties) and also driving ocen waves which is becoming another preoccupation of mine

If you had interest in dx11 and compute stuff and all id like yu to have a look at the ocean, not really my work i just 'artified' it, it was someone elses translation of eric brunnetns work towards proland, which if yu havent seen, you really should esp what with the guy who translated my ocean thing now deciding t port the whole thing over to unity