Considering their size (a few hundred people for the whole studio AFAIK), Remedy consistently punches above their weight when it comes to graphics. Off the top of my head only Remedy and CD Projekt Red are able to compete with the big dogs (Unreal, Unity, EA Frostbite) when it comes to image fidelity and performance. Their GDC/siggraph/etc presentations are fantastic for anyone interested in computer graphics or technical art.
Alan Wake 2 is easily one of the most beautiful (from a technical perspective - IMO also from an artistic one but that's a 100% subjective thing) games ever released and it still looks good even when you turn all the settings down, which is a true achievement. It's hard to make a game scale down to older hardware while still looking good.
Though as commentators like Digital Foundry have noted, the game runs really badly if your GPU doesn't support Mesh Shaders (they mention the use of those for culling in the article). Mesh Shaders in this case enable a lot of really smart culling and dynamic level of detail so that things like coffee cups or tires can be perfectly round without having the 'every NPC has 10k-poly teeth in their mouth' problem that's currently sabotaging Cities Skylines 2's performance, and this is one of the big advantages offered by Unreal 5's Nanite.
The original modern tile-based rasterisation architecture is from Bitboys (also Finnish ex-demoscene), via fabled vapourware Glaze3D, which eventually made its way to AMD and Nvidia.
> without having the 'every NPC has 10k-poly teeth in their mouth' problem that's currently sabotaging Cities Skylines 2's performance
Sad to see an otherwise good comment end with a misconception. The problems with the performance is much grander than just "teeth rendered but not visible" (https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/), although I guess it's a illustrative point. Missing LODs and lack of culling are the grander issues.
"Teeth rendered but not visible" is just saying "missing lods and lack of culling" in a rhetorically more effective way. I don't think anybody thinks it's the teeth specifically causing the perf issues, they're merely a concrete example.
The article you linked specifically points out how expensive and unoptimized the teeth are. I'm not sure why you linked it, if it undermines the point you're trying to make?
One is a small company developing a city builder in Unity, the other are ex demoscene GPU gods building a custom state-of-the-art engine themselves. Nuff said!
Do people still trust CDPR? I bought 2020 when it came out and was incredibly disappointed at the unoptimised buggy shitshow that it was. I'd waited for it since it was first announced, and am even into the genre enough to feel a little angry buzz in the back of my head at how much that franchise (obviously including the RP game) rips off Stephenson/Gibson etc.
Have they pulled a No Man's Sky, since, or something?
REDengine doesn’t do multiplayer at the moment, but it could in the future if they kept developing it / more games with it. I’m sure they’ll make great games with Unreal too
Frostbite is its own sub-company within the E.A umbrella. While Frostbite is used by the titles from DICE and we share parts of our offices, the two companies are rrally distinct for a couple of years now.
Frostbite had roughly 300 employees when I joined 2 years ago.
Remedy are basically Future Crew famous for Unreal/Second Reality (demo). Who else should push GPU to its limits than the ones who defined/popularized modern computer graphics?
Here's a 60fps video of the same demo. The demo-sceners work really hard to make everything 60fps(1 vbl), so watching it in any other frame-rate feels wrong.
Nitpicky: for a lot of parts that would have actually been 70Hz (from the 320x200 VGA mode 13h), and having run the demo back in 1993 it definitely was not as smooth as in the video above on my 486/66MHz (and the Pentium had only been out for a few months at the time).
You don't exactly need Mesh Shaders or any other state-of-the-art techniques to cull 99% of C:S2's polys. Just some simple stuff that games have done since the 90s.
>Alan Wake 2 is easily one of the most beautiful (from a technical perspective - IMO also from an artistic one but that's a 100% subjective thing) games ever released
I just don't see it. Looks like RE2make to me. And as far as art direction Dishonored 2/DOTO are dramatically better looking
Capcom's engine is extremely impressive especially the fact it can handle extremely beautiful triple AAA games then they can also go around and port old nintendo DS games as well.
I usually can't stand playing anything at 30fps, but the combat and pacing are deliberately slow in Alan Wake II, and I've been surprised how little it has bothered me (quality mode on PS5).
That's fair, as it's your preference. It's my preference too to use steam just because it's where I have the most games and I like keeping things tidy and in 1 place. Though it's not an ideological stance, which "refuse" leads me to believe. I'm genuinely curious about the reason an adult would take that position. Last time I asked (a couple of years ago) on Reddit I didn't get, ummm, mature responses.
If there is a game I'm interested in, I'd use whatever is cheaper/available for it.
My reason for refusing to give the Epic store money is pretty simple: Paid exclusives are bullshit. Especially when they're used as fodder to promote "competition", when such things are anything but.
A lot of games are exclusive to Steam. People are currently pretty angry about Sea of Stars, which explicitly committed to a GOG release, and then decided not to have one.
Return to Monkey Island also released as a Steam exclusive.
That’s fair. I view it as just business. It certainly doesn’t affect me or any consumer. It only affects Valve, which I don’t care about. Maybe valve should pay developers more. Epic takes far less than steam does from developers, so I definitely understand the appeal to developers.
No it isn't. I can play lots of games on my machine. I can't play, specifically, Alan Wake 2, since it's unavailable for purchase either standalone or an a platform that supports Linux.
Of course it's their choice where to release it, but saying, specifically, that it doesn't affect any consumer is just plain wrong.
It does effect you. Its a reduction of choice that benefits no one.
And since there's a vastly bigger audience on Steam vs the Epic Store, I don't really think that split matters as much as people would have you believe.
As long as storefronts have to compete for games, this is what that looks like. There's not really any way to get rid of exclusives without hurting competition. Would you want a law passed for games to be required to be put on certain storefronts? For storefronts to be required to accept all games submitted to it? Either one would hurt competition by giving too much power to either the game publisher or the storefront.
No I think what I want is pretty obvious. No exclusives. I don't honestly care what shitty storefront something is on, as long as its not limited to one. That's literally my only gripe.
Besides publishers are already free to decide where the games they publish go or don't, so I'm not sure where the "too much power to publishers" thing is coming from.
>I don't honestly care what shitty storefront something is on, as long as its not limited to one.
But that's not unique to paid exclusives. That's not even unique to Epic, Valve's own games are exclusive to a single storefront. You should boycott them for the same reason.
There is a cost to releasing games on multiple storefronts, forcing games to release on multiple stores only hurts smaller developers. Some smaller developers also skip storefronts altogether. Minecraft and Factorio were initially sold without any storefront. Is that still considered limited to one and therefore an exclusive?
>Besides publishers are already free to decide where the games they publish go or don't, so I'm not sure where the "too much power to publishers" thing is coming from.
I'm talking about cases where the storefront doesn't want to sell the game. Say the game has adult content, or the game has is just unfinished and not good. If storefronts are required to carry games. Otherwise games that only get accepted to a single store will continue to be exclusive to that single store.
Same thing with smaller developers, are they expected to cater to the whim of multiple storefronts to be able to release a game? One of my favorites, Zachtronic's Opus Magnum was rejected from GoG initially.
I'm strictly talking about the ones that are paid timed exclusives, nothing else. No where did I say anything about being anyone being required to do anything. You added that.
If a publisher chooses to do a single store front, then fine w/e. I don't have a problem with that. Its when a storefront bribes a publisher to keep a product exclusive to one store, in an attempt to force consumers on to that store that they likely otherwise wouldn't have used, that I have problem with.
I was going off your initial point of what you want: No exclusives. Not just paid timed exclusives.
>Its when a storefront bribes a publisher to keep a product exclusive to one store
That's not a bribe, that's a business transaction. Do you bribe a store to give you a product?
>If a publisher chooses to do a single store front, then fine w/e.
This contrasts with your previous: "as long as its not limited to one"
So now publishers are allowed to choose one storefront, but somehow they can't be paid to make that choice? How should they be making that choice if not by how much each storefront is offering?
This usually applies but for Alan Wake 2 Epic is the publisher. So your argument is like getting angry at Valve for not releasing their games (dota, cs, half life, etc) on Epic store or GOG.
Well I wasn't specifically thinking about Epic the publisher there, because yes I agree that is dumb and I didn't actually know that Epic was the publisher here. I thought it was just another dumb exclusivity thing.
I agree with you. I want to play Alan Wake 2 on PC and since it is only sold on the Epic Store I will buy it there.
If it was on Steam I would have likely bought it on Steam. But it’s not. So in my case at least, this exclusive is effectively driving me to buy on the Epic Store.
I find it sort of funny that many (not all) complaints about the Epic Store are the same things gamers complained about when Steam was released 20 years ago.
I think it is only fair to compare the Epic vs modern Steam. That Steam had the same issues 20 years ago, is kind of irrelevant if expectations have risen.
Same reason I don’t want to have a half dozen streaming providers. I don’t want to have a bunch of different stores and launchers with different games on each.
Plus it’s a terrible store front from all I’ve heard and I do not wish to support it
In the first example it's still really jarring how much their feet slide around on the ground, or sliding in place as they walk into an object without moving. I wonder when this will ever be solved.
Don't get me wrong, the engine is incredible and the visuals and systems are some of the best we have seen.
It's always a tradeoff between responsive movement and realistic movement. RDR2 has very realistic animations, with the tradeoff being slightly "floaty" controls.
Personally I prefer snappy movement i.e. when I press left the screen character moves left immediately. A more realistic looking animation system introduces a delay while you wait for the feet animation to "catch up" to player input.
I guess the problem there is pretty fundamental - in reality you'd be tensing muscles and shifting your weight etc before the snappy movement, but the game only knows that you want to move when you move the stick or push a button - so it either has to show that realistic motion after your button press and introduce latency, or sacrifice the realism in the animations.
Correct, this is an issue in nba2k but it’s become a fundamental part of the game. As they made movements more realistic they introduced a delay. So when you try and get around you opponent you direct half a second before you move, but your defender also has to move their player - not in reaction to the screen but also in anticipation of your move in order to defend you. I actually think this is more like real life which makes the game better, but a lot less frantic than basketball arcade games of the past.
Guild wars 2 does something similar. When you’re running around on your own, the game responds instantly. But all of the in-game mounts take a moment to react to your steering. Responsiveness, jump height, horizontal speed and turning radiuses all differ massively depending on the mount you’re using. As a result, long distance navigation is a complex puzzle requiring you to choose a good mount and a good route at the right time and manage your energy bars and cooldowns. Do you try to hop up this ledge with the griffin you’re already on, or take the time to swap to the springer and clear it in a big charged bounce? Was there a better way around this ledge? It’s shockingly fun.
This is also why 2D jump platformers like Megaman have triangular jump trajectories instead of parabolic trajectories. For snappy controls you leave the ground at the instant of the downpress and peak when you let go of the button. As the game can't know how high you intended to jump at the time the jump begins, the trajectory can't be parabolic. (At least, not on the way up.)
You could instead have the button downpress "charge up" energy and then begin the jump when the button press ends, which would allow for more realism, but also introduce a delay.
Considering you walk around and don’t have a problem with it, I’d wager that putting a more realistic walk model into a game and changing the control scheme to be a bit more natural would lead to a learnable system for control that would achieve both goals. Say ZMP
> Considering you walk around and don’t have a problem with it...
I think humans are worse than this than you might think. Give it a try! Walk around and try to change directions on the fly, maybe have a friend shout suggestions to you. I can make maybe 2 or 3 adjustments per second, which gives about 400ms response time. That's about where RDR2 sits, and players criticized it for being unresponsive.
Tangential but a lot of sports drills are along these lines.
A great tennis drill is when your coach hits the ball to you and randomly yells "LEFT!" "RIGHT!" or "MIDDLE!" after you've begun your swing. Then you have to hit the ball in that direction. Helps hone your reaction time and helps you to have a "neutral" swing that doesn't telegraph your intentions to an opponent.
People take ~150 ms to react and press a key, the ~400ms in running/walking is because you need to first shift your feet into a new orientation and let gravity change your momentum. The physical distance signals need to travel down the length of your spine, and the need to move your feet is larger distance before any change can occur etc.
Watch a sprinting football player dodge. Their feet go in the opposite direction as they want to move the same way you move an inverted pendulum. If you want the top of an inverted pendulum to move left you move your hand to the right. It still looks very fast because you don’t see the initial ~200ms delay between deciding to doge and the point when their feet start to respond.
Most martial arts will teach their own type of footwork optimized for the style, but it’s common to use a shuffling motion which keeps people’s feet close to the ground. It allows for a more rapid change in direction but is slower and less effective than normal walking if you actually want to get somewhere. Fencing and Kendo want more mobility where wrestling and Judo wants more stability etc.
I played RDR2 and was very happy to walk away from the molasses like movement once finished. It was realistic in both its behavior and cadence and I can emphatically say, give me fantasy (better/faster) movement in a playable fantasy world. Imagine waiting for a real time washer and dryer cycle in a video game because it’s “realism”. There are limits…
There you 'actively' walk and 'manually' keep balance. It's an interesting experience, but it makes walking a conscious act, it becomes something you do.
Arguably that is less realistic than just moving an analog stick, for most people walking is just telling your body to move in direction x.
I really enjoyed that game but I made the mistake of trying to finish my highway before beating what I think was the final boss so I burned out and never finished it.
The default cooperative online mode ends up being a lot less interesting than going at it entirely by yourself offline from start to finish. All the clutter wrecks the immersion/isolation while the freebies end up wrecking the leveling.
Of course there is already measurable lag from when your brain tells your hand and fingers to move, to when they actually move!
An interesting personal anecdote I have:
I damaged my back with bulging disc, which caused horrific sciatica nerve pain.
When I was able to walk again, I had some nerve damage.
This meant I had lag in my left leg!
I’d tell the leg to move instinctively when walking and there would be a delay. The entire walking movement of the leg was present, but just with a noticeable lag!
It was weird!
Eventually it healed fully, or I adjusted. Not sure which! :-)
Yeah a friend of mine had this and he had to get surgery to not lose his left leg to permanent numbness due to the disc pressing on the nerves. I know one other person with the exact same issue and solution, and am also under the impression that without surgery only bad things happen.
I can't see how zero moment point (ZMP) is relevant here? I think what you are saying is why don't we use the same algorithms to control game characters as robots? If its a robot or game character the issue is the same. You can try and predict the next movement but if you are wrong you again have the same problem and the response time suffers even more.
Controllers use analog input for the sticks. I guess you could create a system which uses a dead zone where the player "signals" their intention by partially moving the stick in their desired direction.
This would be incredibly cumbersome though, and the payoff would not be worth it.
There's a good workaround for this presented some time ago at GDC (although it was still simplified). In Overgrowth, if I remember correctly, your body core is responsive, even if your legs have to catch up. You lean, because you'll stay running in that direction. Which is actually closer to the realistic movement.
To elaborate on this, there is a third aspect being glossed over: the correctness of the animation itself.
They could alter the animation such that feet don't slide across the ground and keep responsive movement. The result would be a worse quality animation, because the movement of the legs would not appear to be pushing the rest of the body around. Instead, it would look more like the feet are following the rest of the body retroactively, while holding onto the ground.
A good example of this is Factorio's spidertron. When the spidertron moves, the legs follow with a walking motion that perfectly tracks the ground below. In this case, it's a great-looking tradeoff, probably because there are so many legs, and not much animation done to the body itself.
As mentioned in other comments, I think a big thing is the difference between the older way of doing it ie you have a character object that you move along a vector and the animation is supplementary to this to make it look like they're walking, vs animating the walk and then having the animation/movement of the character itself actually move the character through the world (which almost nobody seems to do).
The third option is inverse kinematics: you move the world across the character, and the character reacts by moving its feet to positions that make sense.
Oh yeah for sure, but I'm thinking more for the realism of the simulation, we don't move like that irl so it would make sense to simulate roughly how we do when it comes to games.
I guess it's all trade offs at the end of the day, dev effort vs game style vs priorities.
I’ve always preferred the Wolfire approach[0]: animation should “do no harm” to player control, it’s only there to add flavor, never at the cost of game responsivity
I think there is also a difference between realistic and believable. The original Half-Life had IMHO more believable leg/feet movement. In HL, the feet were much more "stuck to the ground" compared to most modern games where they just slide around.
It appears much more believable to me than the character pathing demo, where the character moonwalks 1/2 the time. The entire pedal structure is extremely stiff compared to how humans move (feet, thigh and torso can all turn nearly 90 degrees, but they hardly turn at all in the demo). The other demos are better, but their bodies still appear stiff, like they are suffering from hernia.
I do too, but also think it greatly depends on the game. For example, Hollow Knight designed to have snappy response to player input from the start and I loved it. In RDR2, I find the floaty behaviour adds another layer of realism.
> It's always a tradeoff between responsive movement and realistic movement. RDR2 has very realistic animations, with the tradeoff being slightly "floaty" controls.
In GTA V characters have two different animation modes, the realistic one based on Euphoria when using the third-person camera and the "do what the darned keys are saying right now" when using first-person. Always seemed like a sensible compromise to me, though first-person movement is particularly snappy and direct, more so than pretty much any other FPS, which typically still have some inertia.
I don't see how that enables foot sliding unless it's a lazy solution tho? A no foot-sliding solution can be snappy, you just have to increase animation speed so the character is "ready" to execute the players input faster.
I think the real issue is the difference between moving the entire character as an object, with the walking animation being supplementary to that vs the walking animation being central to the character whose object moves because of the animation.
But for a game like this, arcadey instant direction change type movement doesn't really seem warranted either.
If you look at npc locomotion, there's no foot slide, and for a character there is, but the character feet are out of screen most of the time when walking.
I've played the whole game and never noticed this.
It’s a solved problem already. Various IK systems will tackle it properly and some games will have your feet IK follow the terrain and hands IK push up against surfaces.
However it’s a trade off of performance (the constant ray casting and IK solves aren’t free) but also responsiveness.
Many games opt for faster locomotion and responsiveness instead.
At the end of the day, it’s a technically solved issue and has been for years, but as with every single thing in game design, it’s a choice and trade off.
IK doesn't "solve" the core problem of realistic character motion. Sure you can tweak foot positions to stop them from sliding but the farther they get from the original animation data the worse the result will look. It's no panacea.
There are new approaches to generating realistic character motion being shown at SIGGRAPH every year, getting better and better, but the best ones are largely too expensive for games to adopt. Plus, for player-controlled characters, at a certain point you run into a fundamental tension between control responsiveness and physical realism of animations.
IMHO IK provides enough to counter the issues the person I was replying to was mentioning.
Now of course you can go above and beyond that for more realistic motion and , but having worked in the space, I would Serguei that is also solved without requiring recent research. Most recent motion research is about novel motion generation but the general problem of dynamic adjustment to authored animation has been solved by several systems already. But just like my original comment, there’s both a development and runtime cost to all of this.
Alan Wake II actually does have the best approach to this animation issue that I am aware of – motion matching, which is mentioned in the blog post. Used by Naughty Dog and many others. But as the other comments point out, there is still a fundamental tension between responsiveness and animation accuracy.
Probably a pretty critical aspect; typically, the camera is angled in a way where you do not see your character's feet [1]. This was less true in Northlight's previous title, Control [2].
I've seen a demonstration of a solution on the YouTube channel Two Minute Papers - it was actually about an algorithm that blended animations so that the transitions looked natural.
I wonder how long it will be before we stop using animation and switch to an actual bipedal physics simulation where the agent actually knows how to walk and jump and run.
GTA IV's tech was quite ahead of its time (2008), with the integration of Euphoria (which had to be integrated in-house by NaturalMotion engineers inside Rockstar's studio @ Edinburgh).
The other comment correctly pointed out that NaturalMotion was acquired by Zynga, who in turn got acquired by Take-Two (parent of Rockstar Games).. So who knows, perhaps we'll still see an updated version in the sixth major instalment of the franchise.
Euphoria was used for a subset of animations, for the most part traditional mocapped animations (and a lot of them) were used to drive character movements. I don’t know if motion matching was used on GTA4 but it was on other Rockstar games at the time and subsequently.
Characters blended to the hand written, custom, euphoria behaviors in certain situations… it handled falls, stumbles, deaths, etc. Generally it replaced ragdoll physics but wasn’t used during most character movement behaviors.
I'm surprised it's still a problem. Years ago a basketball game franchise bragged that the PS3 allowed them to do foot planting with inverse kinematics. Years before that, Shadow of the Colossus shipped on PS2... with IK foot planting.
Conflicting requirements stemming from the psychological illusion of movement spontaniety.
People don't want the realistic, slow response. Normally people aren't aware of how early their body starts a movement, the conscious brain has the illusion of just having decided it but it's actually started much earlier.
That's it, there's the tradeoff; if they want legs to move naturally, they have to fight against what the user inputs. There's a setting in the Witcher 3 so that the character can turn on a dime / instantly, less realistic but more fun / responsive: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/difference-between-standard...
Inverse kinematics is used but, again, that does not solve the problem of the trade off between response time and realistic movement. It simply "snaps" the feet to the ground.
A lot of the problems occur during movement, when responsiveness doesn't even matter. I still have yet to see a game where it's impossible to get randomly stuck at a fence or rock that instantly stops one's movement for example. Making the character dynamically avoid such minor obstacles would make the game more responsive, not less.
And games with fancy animations are often not just less responsive, but also less controllable in general: in Witcher 3 the character cannot walk backwards or turn in place, so you can literally fall off a cliff in front of you by trying to walk away from it. In terms of movement the only difference between Geralt and his horse is the turning radius.
Responsiveness doesn't play a role in what I'm talking about. And if Boston Dynamics can integrate it into real-life robots to some degree then it can also be done in games.
That first video looks like deliberately testing the pathological case for locomotion. The second video looks hugely much better. In fact, it's so much better that I half wonder if the first video (which is shown as a demo of their voxel based pathing, not their animation system) is from before they implemented motion matching animation.
Its refreshing to see something different than another unreal engine based game. It must be extremely challenging to have your own inhouse engine. The engine is one thing. The tooling to build levels, animations etc is maybe even harder. I guess it also gives some advantages. More control over low level architecture gives you more opportunities to optimize. Harder with a all purpose engine like Unreal. Cant wait to play this game.
This is why sad to see Cyberpunk moving to Unreal, it's a solid engine, it takes advantage of all CPU cores, unlike unreal.
I'll never understand why have stuttering issues because of shader compilation, and most other in-house engines don't have that problem. And why it hasn't been improved yet, and even if they release an update to improve this tomorrow, it will take years to see games take advantage of it.
It's a huge resource sink to develop and manage your own engine (Cryengine in this case). No one wants to buy it because proper documentation, support, and updates for the engine would cost CDPR even more to produce. Making your own engine is only really feasible if you have a unique use-case that the existing engines don't provide (this is what led Bethesda to create the Gamebryo engine back in the day).
Ultimately, it's more efficient from a cost and productivity system 98% of the time to use something off-the-shelf.
CDPR makes Red Engine for their games, but has been using Unity and UE for other titles.
Bethesda didn't create Gamebryo. Gamebryo was an extremely prolific game engine back in the day made by a now-defunct company, Numerical Design Limited thogh the rights live on. Gamebryo was used by Rockstar, Firaxis, Ubisoft, and others, including some current Korean MMOs. Bethesda did indeed use it as the basis of their Creation engine.
Generally, you should pick tools for the purpose you need. An off the shelf engine may not help tell the story you want to tell—which Remedy has clearly decided with Northlight.
The death of in-house engines is one we should be sad about, because it creates a monoculture of game vision—more games will be more similar then they are different—it's easiest to use defaults when you have other decisions to make.
> The death of in-house engines is one we should be sad about, because it creates a monoculture of game vision—more games will be more similar then they are different—it's easiest to use defaults when you have other decisions to make.
I'm not so sure about that. We've seen incredible innovation on top of Unity and Unreal (and Gamebryo still). There are some tell-tale signs a game might be running on one engine versus the other, but among games on the same engine there is an incredible variety in everything creative done on top of the engines from art styles to gameplay to even indie business models. Unity has plenty of flaws but we've seen so much more diversity in games since Unity has provided a base platform that better lets especially small developers focus on their unique creative visions rather than reinventing low level primitives yet again. A rising tide lifts boats, right?
The sad thing about the death of in-house engines is that the tide doesn't rise more each time one dies. Game companies should open source more of their in-house engines as they retire them. (CDPR should open Red Engine now that they are moving off of it.) Game companies should externalize (if not open source, then open/easy licensing with source access) more of their in-house engines while those engines are still living. I don't expect more engines to be properly productized like Unity or Unreal, but it would still be interesting to see more engines shared in more interesting ways outside of single developer/single publisher silos.
We know Remedy can do very interesting things with Northlight and it seems to have some tricks other engines can't do, so it would be nice to see if developers that aren't Remedy can also do interesting things with it. If Remedy ever retires Northlight it would be nice to see how it did some of its tricks in a way other engines can learn from.
I hope valve doesn't fumble the bag with source 2, and actually makes it a viable competitor in the engine space.
My limited exposure to it (via s&box) is extremely positive, the hammer mapping tool is absolutely amazing to work with, and from what I've seen way ahead of unity / unreal on this front at-least.
Our marketing folks would say the characters are more responsive and lifelike than ever before; our internal dev notes described it as "the characters won't bump or get stuck into objects in tight spaces".
The perennial problem with marketing language seems to be that everything needs to be reworded to "make sense" to someone who doesn't know anything about the actual product that is being marketed.
Do you need to understand graphics programming to understand "The character won't get stuck in tight places"? They seem to do this because that sounds way more practical and way less magical than "The character is more lifelike!"
I would love to know how they feel today about using D in their ecosystem, that is, if they still are, and see what challenges they have faced during AW2 development.
I don't think it was ever officially confirmed, but word is they excised all the D from their codebase after Quantum Break. They're certainly not looking for D programmers now.
Same. My guess is that they no longer use D, seeing as the person doing those talks no longer works there and other big places like Facebook have ceased using it. But I'd love to be proven wrong!
As with many things at games studios using a different language (or unique technology) is usually driven by a single person. Once they leave or move out of the place where they could contribute and maintain it, unless it has support and buy in from the rest of the team and studio, it starts to gets replaced.
From the grapevine I heard there was one person that advocated for writing in D, though I'm not sure if they are still there or not any more.
Somehow the movement of the characters feels still quite uncanny to me. In the video about the "voxel-based character controller" the walking looks more like gliding. And in the first few second in "NPC locomotion" the walking just does not seem right. I think it is the fact that each step looks exactly the same and everyone uses the same step size. So the character are awkwardly tightly coordinated. One can see more variety later in the video, when the characters change individually between walking and running. That looks much more realistic. -- I wonder what makes it so difficult to generally achieve more variety in the movement details.
A lot of it becomes un-noticeable when you’re in the middle of the action. You’re too busy looking at other things.
Although to support your point, pretty much every friendly NPC is stationary. Once the hostile zone in on you you’re not looking at how they walk - they’re shrouded in mist anyway.
IMO control was a tech demo for all of this and it also supports why the enemy count is much lower and framed as a horror story.
Wait, so they have an ECS game engine with a AAA renderer and nanite-like tech along with a lua based scripting engine and Hollywood level facial animation?
They should release the engine. It's a solid competitor to Unreal (more scalable due to ECS, easier to write with Luau)
Epic Games funded the development of Alan Wake 2 and the game is also an Epic Games Store exclusive (which I painfully found out wanting to buy the game but being on Linux), so I assume competing with Unreal would burn some bridges there
That's technically not true – they've licensed it out to Facepunch to create a sequel to Garry's Mod (which was one of the most popular Source 1 games): https://sbox.facepunch.com/about/. It is the only one we are aware of though.
True yes - but Source 2 is now eight years old (and has been in development for probably 14 years) and has only been licensed once.
I won't be surprised if there are some other licensees eventually but it seems like Valve isn't overly interested in making the engine usable in the same way that Unreal, CryEngine, Frostbite etc are.
I don't think the engine itself is buggy, or at least not all parts. Source 2 has been used in Dota 2 since 2015 and they also shipped Half-Life Alyx using it in 2020; neither is consider particularly buggy.
I feel like calling it nanite-like is going to far. They have adopted the meshlet pipeline but that's mainstream for bleeding edge rendering. I haven't seen any mention of using compute shaders to actually render small triangles like nanite does but maybe I missed something?
When I got my 3090 back when it was first released, I was excited to finally play Control with ray tracing on, no luck. Now with Alan Wake 2 it barely runs High with ray tracing off.
It's a visually stunning engine but it's just too demanding IMO.
ECS architectures are used in a number of young open source game engines, such as Bevy[1]. I haven't done game development for a long time, but hearing about an architecture that does away with the heavy and complex OOP you often see in games makes me want to dip my toes in again and check it out.
There's also a history in applying ECS in older things, it started taking off in early 2000's, it's been bread and butter (though not universal) for long now, also in some open source engines. See eg https://github.com/Adelost/entity-component-systems-study#re...
Seems Alan Wake still has a bit of foot sliding. I wonder if they're still essentially playing an animation while moving the character "object" in a direction.
Surely someone's already come up with a system where the character object isn't directly moved but instead moved in relation to an anchor, ie anchor foot to ground, taking a step naturally moves the character, now the foot in front anchors to the ground as the foot behind lifts.
Done this way it would be cool to simulate slippery surfaces along with the ml animation models to get interesting "scrabbling for grip" effects like you see in the BD robots whenever they're kicked/on ice.
Something like that could work well with NPCs but would most likely introduce delay into the controls on the player character.
Basically gameplay beats the animation in this case. On top of this a lot of the time you don't see your characters feet or if you do you are not really focusing on that during gameplay and won't notice them sliding.
I suppose that's true. I just find it jarring that they've made their decisions for that based on reactivity whereas the entire visual style/physics etc are all "realistic".
Once we figure out how to render games in true photorealism, it's gonna be so interesting to see how often studios make these sorts of stylistic/practical choices with animation.
As I posted elsewhere, foot sliding is a solved issue technically. But you have to balance every single decision in game design against things like cost per frame and responsiveness.
This isn’t some gotcha that the game devs didn’t notice or don’t know how to fix. It’s one they likely either decided had drawbacks or wasn’t an issue in practice.
I always think glimpses of the custom tools used in game dev are really cool. I work in large scale ML systems and I wish there was similar effort put into tools for observability and debugging of neural networks.
I'd be tempted to work on game dev tooling one day if there were more remote work opportunities.
I like wandb but really it's just an aggregated metrics platform and it's cloud based design limits what's possible due to bandwidth constraints.
I like this tool from Nvidia [1] for exploring CNN feature maps. That's more in line with what I'm talking about but it's is an offline tool. I am imagining tools that provide this granularity of information about networks in real-time during training.
Man, all these graphical enhancements and they still can't design a proper camera. Off-centre camera systems, aka "over the shoulder" cameras make me motion sick. I need the player to be in the centre of the screen or everything feels lopsided. By all means, do the RE4 zoom thing when the player aims a gun or similar, but while moving the camera should be horizontally centred. Halo tried something similar with giving the crosshair a vertical offset and while it didn't bother me personally, a lot of people complained it made them sick, so they added an option to move it back. The visual system in a lot of folks really doesn't like being off-centre compared to the body it's tasked with moving.
> Man, all these graphical enhancements and they still can't design a proper camera.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the camera, it's just not to your taste. They've made zero risky or offensive choices with the camera.
> Off-centre camera systems, aka "over the shoulder" cameras make me motion sick. I need the player to be in the centre of the screen or everything feels lopsided.
This is a you problem, though, and an extremely rare problem overall (rare enough for me to literally never hear about it in 25+ years of gaming). I don't think it's reasonable for you to expect the world of game development to cater to your very niche, specific issue.
Most games that position the camera behind and centred have to zoom out or go weirdly high so you can still see what the character is looking at/heading towards. The off-centre camera allows you to be at the same height/viewpoint as the character and still see what's in front.
Look at the Red Dead Redemption 2 camera position when walking vs Alan Wake 2, totally different viewpoints. Both are different artistic choices, I'd say both work well for each game.
Yeah i agree but i think this ship has long sailed - over the shoulder cameras are pretty much everywhere these days. I avoided several 3rd person perspective games for this reason alone (some even had me feel nauseous) and eventually had to force myself to get used to it since i wanted to play some games that switched to it (e.g. Mass Effect 3). Nowadays i can play a game using it without feeling off but i still prefer it when games put the character at the center of the screen.
(also i yelled at more than one game that had an option to switch shoulder but not put the character at the center - if you are bothering to implement this why not also add the center option? :-P)
Yet another team that switches to Luau for scripting; they even made their own VS Code extension.
I gave Luau a try recently but the syntax for external type declarations is undocumented and unstable, which made it awkward to test properly, and the available VS Code extensions default to a Roblox environment until you mess with their settings.
So mixed feelings for now, I guess this is why they built their own tooling for it.
That's not it, I mean the "declare" statements that aren't even listed in the grammar, but are needed to give the type checker information about C API exports; I had to discover them by digging through source code. The analyzer even hardcodes a bunch of them.
luau-lsp for example ships this globalTypes.d.lua file[1] for Roblox development and lets you configure your own.
I wonder if Alan Wake 2 would be possible in Unreal Engine 5. And look similar. Its a bit ironic because it was actually sponsored my Epic Games.
The lightning is really gorgeous in the game and as always I think raytracing is not really worth the performance impact if. The game looks almost the exact same without.
I wonder if you could tune the lightning in UE5 to look like that, I always wonder how much of a games looks is actually the engine and how much is just the art direction and the devs skills to get out of the engine what they want.
I think the game itself was rather disappointing. Too much walking sym, combat was downgraded and less fun, made worse by too few save points at times so you fear to die to not get annoyed to do sections over and over again that makes you hesitant to play on hardest difficulty.
Conclusion wall is way to basic and simple you can just quickly trail and error it. And it FORCES you to advance things on the wall that are clear anyway. I had it only one time where I left it for a while and when I look back into it she was like "we already got this" and put on a bunch of cards automatically, but generally speaking you need to advance it all the time. There is one situation, there is a place, where a reviewer passed by countless times and it turns out the key item you need ONLY appears when you advance the wall. Kind of stupid game design.
Its a movie game mostly, a "press button to advance story" game. The first was like that as well but I think it had better and more gameplay, better pacing that was actually fun.
Writing was obnoxiously pretentious and dragged on for too long. After 10 hours the same Alan Wake tropes get repeated over and over again and the game ends is a cliffhanger to shill some DLC. Really makes me loose my last bit of faith in the gamers, I already do not trust game "journalist" anymore for a long time but I at least could rely on userscores in the past, this game is like praised into high heavens by everyone for no reason. The best think it has to offer is graphics but they to not make for a good game.
There are large areas in the game the story does not even lead you though, just some stupid collectibles and these boxes with stuff you do not need. I did not even find the crossbow and did not care to look up where to find it, just had a bunch of arrows. I think the game got many people a boner because of the graphics and their brain shut off. The actual game is actually not that good.
And not to forget now how insanely woke the beginning of the game is, thanks to Sweet Baby Inc. they hired to rewrite the game with some woke trash dialog in the beginning and of course the race swap of Saga who was written a white Fin women. Her self made sweater does not fit her at all. 0.5% of Finnish women are black but hey DIVERSITY so they could just keep the story and hot two birds with once stone. My issue is not that she is black, my issue is that she was FORCED in by a company that should not exist, accompanied with woke cringe dialog. Because Remedy does not really care but is taken over by the woke mind virus. If they come up with a original story with a black lead they write themselves I am all for it, but not like this. But nobody cares and I am going to get downvoted for this, I know how it goes.
Technical achievements aside, this game is delightful, particularly if you're a fan of Twin Peaks or scandi noir. Highly recommended if you have a penchant for the weird or macabre. A milestone in interactive storytelling.
I'm a few hours in, and it's enjoyable, but I'm not blown away by the gameplay as much as the graphics and sound design. It's a fairly linear affair with a lot of backtracking, and I find the Mind Place system tedious. It's a glorified menu system that blocks off progression until you've pinned some notes to predetermined places on the board, or watched some cutscenes where the character miraculously figures out what to do next. It's not engaging in any way, and just takes me out of the core game loop.
But I love the numerous references to Control and Max Payne, and how they've integrated it into the same universe. I can't wait for the Max Payne remakes, and hopefully the next installment in the series. I just wish it could be done without association with Rockstar. They ruined the experience of MP3, which was a solid game, but Rockstar's Social Club launcher is a garbage piece of software.
> watched some cutscenes where the character miraculously figures out what to do next
Some of your criticisms are fair I think, but this is actually deliberate and explained as the story continues. Saga is clearly doing more than "profiling".
I think it deserves a lot of praise, but also some criticism:
* While it may keep their creative vision "pure", the lack of lower graphical settings makes it run pretty terribly on an RTX 3080, which is very frustrating. You can brute-force this problem away with DLSS, but I like native resolution and I'm sick of DLSS being used as a crutch.
* The difficulty is all over the place. "Story" mode is likely too easy, while "Normal" varies between being reasonable and damn near impossible. A weaker enemy can take 2 bullets in Story, and 10 in normal. That's frustrating when ammo is so tight early on. In general, the game lacks a good "progression" of difficulty. It's a roller-coaster instead of a curve.
* To add on to the difficulty, the mechanics do not feel as consistent in AW2 as AW1. Why do some enemy types have a shield you need to burn away, while others don't? (Despite looking similar) For others, it's unclear which ones will vanish with a little light and which ones require an intense light - and what exactly gets them to disappear. Why can't the flashlight have a bit more grace when a target leaves the crosshair for 0.1 seconds? Why do so many enemies have extendo-reach and teleporting? Why isn't dodging timing better telegraphed? Etc.
* The story, at least so far, hasn't hit the same highs for me. It feels a little like we're doing the same thing over again, and it doesn't hit as hard the second time after the reveals and twists from AW1 are already used up.
I'm on a 3080 and it ran fine for me. Did you turn off ray-traced direct/indirect lighting? Those really require a 40 series, even at low quality levels. Is your native resolution 4K? At 4K I needed to turn on DLSS, but I was also able to set most of the quality knobs (other than RT) to medium or high, not low. I wonder if maybe you're running into some sort of driver problem.
I turned everything to the lowest available setting, except textures, which I kept on high. I checked and that setting doesn't seem to make any difference on my card.
Native resolution is 1440p.
Most of the time it hovers around 60-ish, but it dips into the 40's occasionally and is overall inconsistent. To me, at 1440p, that's not acceptable.
Drivers are the latest Nvidia offers, but I didn't scrape the old ones out with DDU - hopefully that's not necessary.
Just use DLSS. It looks great and the graphics settings are designed around it. I'm not sure if the earlier DLSS versions were crappy, but this latest one doesn't seem to have any weird artifacts.
I much prefer setting DLSS on performance and playing with medium settings and raytracing on a 3090. The game looks way better that way.
To your gameplay points, you're pretty heavily incentivized to aim for the head. I played on nightmare difficulty and most normal enemies went down in 3-5 headshots. I think being unable to tell if the shadows in the dark place are hostile or not is very deliberate, to create a sense of unease.
I don't like the kind of artifacts or presentation that DLSS creates. It's a different kind of image than one with native, but say - lower foliage density or a lower-resolution mesh, etc.
Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=309aaFblCJI, then watch the next few videos in the series until the end of Control (Control Pt. 1 => Alan Wake Pt. 1+2 => Control Pt. 2) and you will be completely thoroughly caught up
It has though. There are hints "everywhere" (not to be specific, otherwise I'll spoil it) in the game, but it's not vital to play AW2, I would add what you said about AW1, "you'll miss some details."
AW2 is a step forward to the shared universe of Remedy.
Am I the only who have no interest in graphics fidelity, but would like to see more physics engines created to play with? Like a fully destructible world would be fun.
There was actually a regress in this respect. Some ten years ago there was a "destructible physics" boom in many big games, but nowadays most games abandoned it. There seems to be a trade-off between graphical fidelity and the opportunity for physics-based manipulation of the environment.
Not to take anything away from Control. That game is a absolute masterpiece but the destruction in that game is largely cosmetic and often inconsequential to gameplay. So much that it could be pre-fractured offline.
The game seems to use relatively simple flat geometry, like concrete walls and large glass windows. I would be surprised if they kept the destruction physics with the intricate geometry of Alan Wake 2.
The game "The Finals" has an impressively destructible world, and good quality graphics to boot. It just completed an open beta period, but will return soon for a full release.
"ECS meant that iteration was quick because adding new or modifying existing systems or game objects was easy, and performance gains were clear when saving and loading the Case Board."
and there's an accompanying screenshot with perhaps 20 objects on a case board.
I scanned through the rest of the article with one question in mind: what the hell? ECS is not a solution to putting 20 photos on a case board. You're pushing 100Ks or Ms of objects and need performance and are willing to suffer for performance = ECS. Not this.
So, despite world class developer, I did not find the article credible. The main cause of the lack of credibility is the author of the article did not anticipate the reader glancing at the case board and the ECS claim and saying: bullshit. Alternatively, they did anticipate the claim, and were told to ship the article anyways.
We built a new Voxel-Based Character Control that enables smooth navigation in cramped, complex and dynamic environments; it makes character movement more natural and fluid.
Fluid movement can be a problem, but "Voxel" is not what you did here, it's a marketing term. Maybe start with how a 2d collider for a 2d game should perhaps be a sphere smaller than the character (not a square, they get stuck on corners), and then say sth interesting about how you solved 3d. I am fairly certain that "voxel" isn't what happened, esp with the prior of "ECS".
ECS isn't just useful for performance. It's a better way to architect games and other sorts of software in a more data-oriented (rather than OOP oriented) way.
In much the same way that your run of the mill AbstractFactoryGeneratingFactoryGeneratorSingleton involves writing a bunch of not so useful code, and then someone comes along and "improves" it by changing that final Singleton to Dependency Injection:
ECS also has a lot of overhead. You almost certainly don't need ECS, and whatever you're writing would almost certainly be much simpler without ECS. Use ECS because it solves a serious problem that you have.
Edit: And my seriously downvoted point was putting objects on a "Case Board" does NOT justify an ECS; it's a problem with a /lot/ of good and good enough solutions. Were there any problems that needed an ECS, or did the article just want to say ECS (and voxel) because it's hip?
Having written Unity, Godot, Unity DOTs, Bevy, an obscure ECS engine called kivent, and even rolled a java engine from scratch at one point I somewhat disagree with this statement.
When people think of overhead, they might be thinking of the jankiness of Unity DOTs and it's lacklustre ECS integration with a preexisting editor designed for Unity's Gameobjects world.
The truth is, an engine built with ECS from the outset has ergonomics that go beyond merely writing better multithreaded code. It truly enforces composition over inheritance when done right. Overwatch is an example of a game written using ECS that generally doesn't have hundreds of thousands of entities bouncing around
Overwatch has networked gunplay and uses ECS to deal with that hard problem.
Cool. I get why ECS is used there. Hard problem, meet the formalism that I will use to think about you.
A case board is not a hard problem. Using composition or a functional style instead of OOP is not a hard problem, or at least not a hard problem that ECS solves.
I'm not sure that we're talking past each other now, but I did want to at least respond to your point about Overwatch and note that ECS is used to solve an actual, hard problem there.
(edit: ECS doesn't solve networked gunplay. but it could be part of a solution, and even as part of a solution ECS can totally justify why it's there, because again: hard problem.)
Alan Wake 2 is easily one of the most beautiful (from a technical perspective - IMO also from an artistic one but that's a 100% subjective thing) games ever released and it still looks good even when you turn all the settings down, which is a true achievement. It's hard to make a game scale down to older hardware while still looking good.
Though as commentators like Digital Foundry have noted, the game runs really badly if your GPU doesn't support Mesh Shaders (they mention the use of those for culling in the article). Mesh Shaders in this case enable a lot of really smart culling and dynamic level of detail so that things like coffee cups or tires can be perfectly round without having the 'every NPC has 10k-poly teeth in their mouth' problem that's currently sabotaging Cities Skylines 2's performance, and this is one of the big advantages offered by Unreal 5's Nanite.