Sony Consoles and Updates

[Maryokutai]

Why should this have to do anything with Horizon? It's just Epic showcasing their engine with a moderately interactive demo. I agree that it looks interesting though and I'd love to see it develop into a full game but I doubt that'll happen.

 

The showcase itself was solid. Some things look really nice, some things didn't blow me away. That said the short zoom out in the big room at the end or the entire ending sequence were rather impressive. The level of detail you can see in the smallest fissures at the furthest corner in the room or the complete lack of pop-ups despite the ridiculous amount of detail in the action scene – that was pretty good.

[DANGERMAN]

nice to see @Rikzilla doing a bit of corporate work

[Rikzilla]

1 minute ago, DANGERMAN said:

nice to see @Rikzilla doing a bit of corporate work

 

You're not the first person to say that ?

[DANGERMAN]

to talk about the demo, and this is nit picking because it looks great, and obviously way beyond current gen, but as it's a graphics showcase... There's quite a bit of noise around the character, I don't know if that's some upscaling or AA, or just screen space techniques. Really early in you see the details of a shadow on the rocks appear between the characters arm and body that makes me think it's SS. Control does this a lot, I found it really distracting, I'd rather not have it and have the game look less good all around because you're looking at your character all the time, they're at the centre of the screen, I'd rather save processing time on the edges and in the distance.

 

When it starts moving at pace I thought that looked quite grainy too around the small rocks, again possibly just a DANGERMAN thing, and quite possibly not something we'll see in actual games because it's tied to something developers won't use or they'll save processing elsewhere, or it will just be improved. We did have a generation littered with texture pop in thanks to Unreal Engine though, so who knows, it might just be how a lot of the next generation looks.

 

All this being said, the rough edges at least show they aren't completely bullshitting, it is something that's been made with some limitations at least

[Maf]

It looks seriously impressive. Not to be a broken record, but with no exclusive next gen games I’m not sure how the next Xbox is meant to do that. If it’s next gen games are also being made for the X how are they supposed to support both platforms with the same game and one of them looks like current games do and the Series X one looks like that. I mean I suppose it’s possible just to have the gap be that huge, but I don’t know.

 

Anyway, Sony thread. I don’t have a super good eye for this stuff, really, but yeah, that looks amazing. If that’s really the type of thing to expect from next gen games it’s beyond what I was thinking. 

[DisturbedSwan]

Things.

[one-armed dwarf]

A tech demo isn't a game though, it's a carefully constructed vertical slice that's designed to show off the engine at its most beautiful

 

An interesting caveat here which I saw on another forum

 

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23167794

Quote

 

Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working for a now defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny came in to demo Unreal Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and XBox360 were launched. This was about 2004. Their demo blew away executives in particular. They showed multicolored lights casting multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of the lights was behind a stained glass window, projecting beautiful patterns. Soon after a deal was signed to use the engine throughout the entire studio. In retrospect that was a good decision and I have a lot of respect for Unreal Engine and Epic in general.

However UE3 generation games that finally shipped had none of the visual effects from the early demos. The multicolored shadows could only be rendered with multiple passes, at least one per light, which proved to be too expensive for larger dynamic game scenes. It took years of work from the demo to shipped games, and an army of unnamed engineers to wrestle the technology into a product.

UE4 had a great early demo of dynamic global illumination using something like voxel cone tracing if I remember correctly. To my knowledge that tech demo was never incorporated into the engine and never shipped.

Epic is famous for their demos, and I love them for it... at least now that I no longer work professionally in that field. If anything it charts a long term technical direction for interactive entertainment.

 

 

It is real time though

 

edit that guy just posted this, Unreal Engine 3 tech demos from back in the day 

 

[Rikzilla]

Blakey's logic is like saying the T-Rex tech demo from the original PS1 demo disc is a game because you can make the T-Rex open it's mouth. It is not a game, it's a tech demo, there is a difference between the two. 

[DisturbedSwan]

Things.

[mfnick]

Just watched that UE5 vid. Holy shit that’s incredible. If they can get games looking like that next gen that’s a genuine jump we didn’t get from 360/ps3 to One/PS4. Especially if they can process that size scenery, at that detail at that speed during the end bit. 
 

Saying they could show hundreds of statues at the level of detail was impressive too.

 

I know it’s a tech demo so not to get too excited but still very impressive. 

[mmmark]

46 minutes ago, DisturbedSwan said:

Tech demos are just small short games @Rikzilla if you can interact with it in some way it’s a game. Simple as.

Here’s a another game

 

 

[Rikzilla]

The difference between a gameplay demo and tech demo falls to developer intent. 

If the demo was made to specifically show off a new game, i.e. mechanics, characters, world, then it is a gameplay demo. However, if it was made to show off the specifics of an engine, it's a tech demo. This was the latter; "This demo previews two of the new core technologies that will debut in Unreal Engine 5"

 

Even Epic are going out of their way to call it a real-time demo. The word 'gameplay' isn't mentioned once in this official post- https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/a-first-look-at-unreal-engine-5

 

 

 

 

[mfnick]

Read a few comments saying no LOD and limitless geo detail and illumination could potentially reduce development time drastically. Don’t know what LOD is but surely a good thing if true. And going to be a necessity if games are looking that good in future. 

[Maryokutai]

Yeah, it doesn't really work that way. Remember all the talk about The Witcher 3's downgrade? That basically just happened because when they first showed it, it was a glimpse into how the game looked at that point, basically a tech demo. When they showed the "downgraded" version it was a proper game with a featureset working in the background that had to be processed as well (NPCs and their AI, day and night cycle, weather effects and whatnot). 

 

This UE5 demo might be playable in the loosest sense of the term, but it's basically just a very pretty, real-time rendered movie that gives you control over the speed at which it's played. Outside of things that have a direct influence on its presentation there's absolutely nothing being processed in the background. It's a game, but it's also not a game.

 

1 hour ago, DANGERMAN said:

When it starts moving at pace I thought that looked quite grainy too around the small rocks

 

Keep in mind this is uploaded to youtube and therefore heavily compressed. I'm closely watching Gamersyde to see if they're going to upload a lossless version, that'll be a better showcase for the little details in particular.

 

7 minutes ago, mfnick said:

Don’t know what LOD is

 

It's basically how developers build multiple versions of the same asset which will then be switched around depending on how close or far away you are from it. You basically have a cone in front of you where everything is super detailed. A bigger cone for everything that extends beyond the first one where everything is less detailed. And then a third one with very little detail because it's far away and you probably wouldn't be able to see it anyway. 

[one-armed dwarf]

2 minutes ago, mfnick said:

Read a few comments saying no LOD and limitless geo detail and illumination could potentially reduce development time drastically. Don’t know what LOD is but surely a good thing if true. And going to be a necessity if games are looking that good in future. 

LOD I think is what determines 'level of detail' on stuff as you get nearer to it (further away it is low, nearer it is high)

 

FFVII Remake has terrible LOD, I hope UE5 could fix it if they use it for sequels

[mfnick]

Ah yea, I do know what is meant by LOD now. Very noticeable in some games.

 

Cheers. 

[DisturbedSwan]

Tim Sweeney: PS5 is so impressive it’s ‘going to help drive future PCs’
 

Quote

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says next-generation gaming consoles, in particular Sony’s PlayStation 5, will bring about changes in game development that go far beyond a jump in graphics quality. During a press briefing for the company’s newly announced Unreal Engine 5, which is optimized to work with next-gen consoles, Sweeney says the PS5 is a “remarkably balanced device.”

 

“It has an immense amount of GPU power, but also multi-order bandwidth increase in storage management. That’s going to be absolutely critical,” he says. “It’s one thing to render everything that can fit in memory,” he adds, but a much more impressive feat to render a world that “might be tens of gigabytes in size” almost instantaneously, as Sony’s new console and its M.2 solid-state drive are promising.

 

The new drive, which Sony claims is faster than any on-market device available right now, won’t just make load times almost nonexistent, but will also enable developers to access the data their games are composed of with unprecedented speed. The result is larger game worlds loading much faster than ever before, which could result in drastic changes to how developers approach everything from balancing visual quality and performance to level design.

 

Sweeney isn’t saying that you can’t get a comparable M.2 drive for your PC, even now if you want to shell out for it. Rather, he’s saying the custom drive Sony created and the way it interacts with the overall PS5 data management system makes it faster and more impressive from a development standpoint that anything a consumer could readily buy today, especially considering PC developers aren’t yet building games that take advantage of such speeds. That may change in the future when both new consoles arrive and, as Sweeney predicts, inspire significant upgrades to PC component design and PC-specific game development.

 

As for Microsoft’s Xbox Series X, Sweeney isn’t saying the new Xbox won’t be able to achieve something similar; both are using custom SSDs that promise blazing speeds. But he says Epic’s strong relationship with Sony means the company is working more closely with the PlayStation creator than it does with Microsoft on this specific area.

 

[mmmark]

? That headline is a bit much.

 

edit: sorry @DisturbedSwan I’d hit send a bit early ?

[DisturbedSwan]

?‍♀️

[one-armed dwarf]

The thing is consoles are always the baseline, we haven't seen any game designed around SSDs other than Star Citizen cause of it. So even if they weren't so blazingly fast they would absolutely still open the doors to new ideas about level design, cause you can just say 'fuck off' to all the old spinning platters in a HDD. So it's hard to visualise this stuff right now especially as with current tech we still have great looking worlds that are also large but have not really leveraged any of the capabilities of SSD beyond not having to wait a minute to load a game

 

 

 

 

We were just talking about VII Remake in another thread. An issue I had with it is that it never seemed to load in high detail LODs in places like the Slums and Wall Market, they looked like PS3 assets. I've seen speculated on DF that this could be a RAM limitation rather than the assets themselves, the way Cerny is talking about complementing RAM with persistent storage could massively mitigate issues like this.

 

Bigger and more visually diverse levels. Could mean more verticality. No more of this stupid squeezing through gaps