Thanks for sharing. I’ve only had a quick flick through but have to say that that’s some impressive stuff - particularly the character shot at 3:20 (The Walking Dead), just wow!
I’m psyched for System Shock, My guess is that I won’t find it even close as fun as Shock 1 and 2 were, but I’m weak when it comes to sci-fi action games in this style so needless to say, it will be interesting to see how well they do!
The gameplay trailer for Metro is much more inspiring than that clip. Definitely getting it. Huge fan.
Witchfire seems like it might be fun. Very pretty graphics as well. Of course, we are talking about the guys who made the Ethan Carter game, which was easily one of the best looking games of its time, and that was on UE3 (or whatever that engine was called). I think they just use photogrammetry for everything to produce that level of detail?
Probably most of the prettiest games I’ve seen have been on cryengine, but A4 and the Ethan Carter guys buck that trend.
If the title plays to a specific engine’s strengths it will likely perform better on that engine. Unity and UE4 excel at different things.
If the title needs significant source code access you can get it in Unity or UE4 but it’s still typically an expensive and invasive procedure regardless of how much source needs changing, and at that point it’s neither UE4 or Unity but obviously custom work.
So basically the argument is: what performs better out of the box? In this case, Unity performs better out of the box for typical generic titles as UE4 is a bit too expensive out of the box for console. You need to cut a lot of cruft. In Unity’s case you need to figure out what cruft to add. So they’ll meet in the middle.
Pre SRP I would put money on UE4 performing better with everything turned on, but worse with SRP involved. Script wise it’s a no brainer - C++ is faster if the developer is actually competent.
Honestly, I’d be happy to use UE4 or Cryengine or Unity, depending on a project’s needs. My current project is easier to complete in Unity. Not sure I would be able to complete it in UE, so there’s that.
In the end what performs better really is down to what the project needs and how much money you’ll throw at it, if you assume time = money.
All I’m taking from this is “in 2018 you’re way over your head”… The level of detail on some of them are frankly ridiculous, some of the props probably took a week and you’ll bypass them in about three seconds.
If this level of quality is the defacto standard for upcoming releases, umm top down it is… LOL!.
How often I feel this way. It seems photogrammetry is taking over – which is awesome, but kind of sucks for little guys just learning how to sculpt trash cans and twigs.
As much as I hate to sound like one of those false prophets, I think there’s no alternative to hardcore procedural generation (especially offline, as a workflow tool) for indies that want to stay somewhere on the rear horizon of AAA games, particularly in terms of scale. It’s got a lot of difficulties to overcome to be anywhere near complete as an approach to creating game worlds, but I can’t see any alternative unless indies want to run headfirst into an exponential wall of resource investment.
Being a bit of an artist myself I appreciate the craft, but it’s always struck me that there is something fantastically wrong about spending even 1-2 hours to craft some tiny bit of environmental art, when each screenful can contain hundreds of items and each minute of gameplay can contain tens of screenfuls of art. I think that given the likelihood that games will be, almost as a rule, bigger and more detailed going into the future, it’s not enough to simply tweak efficiencies by using better tools, trying to get a little bit faster or maybe re-use some assets here and there. Using normal methods, even if you halve the time that it takes to make a given bit of art (which is already a bad hypothesis given that art will continue to get more detailed), not only is it going to be a case of diminishing returns but the overhead of creating thousands and thousands of items individually is going to remain.
I think you have to start at the beginning and look at art as a cohesive body of information, made of pieces that relate to one another to a greater or a lesser extent, and try to figure out what are the rules that allow you to extrapolate from one piece of information to a new one in a way that does not disfigure the structure of the information body, and to formulate the range and type of differentiality that allows something to be unique but still fit into the stylistic set.
Because of that I’m actually not really excited about photogrammetry, because (if you didn’t have to create it yourself), it’s basically a way to reduce work by reducing flexibility to near-zero, which I think is a bad start. You don’t actually achieve control of something fundamentally complex, you just copy it from the world in whatever way the world decided to instantiate it. I think it’s something of a dead end for games, unless you are able to apply to it the sort of software that would enable you to create something pretty great from scratch anyway.
Anyway, I’m working on procedural tools for my game. Planets, asteroids and spaceships are on the menu right now. If I don’t succeed, I’ll probably just stick to text games so that I can have a life.
That aside, I definitely agree with this. Procedural generation and systems are the answer.
Of course as already mentioned there’s no guarantee that this makes a game “fun,” but that’s almost completely unrelated–whether a game is fun or not has almost nothing to do with the amount or detail of content, which is the majority of what procedural generation is concerned with.
Something else this makes me wonder about: mocap. I’ve always imagined mocap as the gold standard of animation. But in reality, how is it all that different from photogrammetry? Aren’t they basically the same idea, an attempt to brute-force fidelity?
It’s not clear that this is the case, although it’s something that I’d prefer to do myself.
That’s right, in fact one of the biggest problems right is that AAA studios are developing and taking up procedural technology at a much faster rate than indies. It’s just another thing where indies get complacent, and the gulf increases even more.
But the thing about procedural generation is that the quality and volume of the output content is not linearly related to the amount of funds or human resources you put in it - at this early stage it’s probably nearly the case but I think in not too long the ability of AAA studios to extract an advantage by applying money to developing procedural tools will reduce. Not just because of the nature of the technology, but I think that also many powerful online resources will emerge like Artomatix that are interested in providing cheap subscription access to stuff that people would not be able to develop on their own.
Of course AAA will always be ahead of indies in every way, but I think part of the value that indies provide is to be able to experiment ahead of the curve, and with procedural stuff I think we have sort of failed to make the most of the opportunity so far.
At least in terms of the games that I am interested in, I think it’s been done wrong. It has been used as a way to promise ‘infinite content’ when that content is often not really worth playing. I don’t like the idea of procedural generation being used as a way to achieve infinite anything, because anything that is infinite is de facto boring and meaningless. A story without an ending is meaningless. It’s a good signal I think of a game that’s going to be a huge waste of time, and not only that, it’s a valueless goal IMO to even want to create a game that people don’t stop playing.
I also think that too many interesting procgen tools and tricks have come from AAA games. Sure they have money, but I don’t think the indie scene is lacking talented, creative people which is what you need to develop procedural stuff. I think possibly what has happened is that indies tend to lack the kind of discipline and direction that fulfills short-term goals (10x - 100x increase in art production speed/efficienty for example) instead of skipping directly to OMG infinite universe MMO. The two most promising projects that I know of, No Mans Sky and Limit Theory, succumbed to lack of clear direction and lack of discipline (IMO).
My favourite idea of a litmus test for procedural generation is to create a city or a town that people find interesting to explore (in my case, I will be making a spaceport). The reason why I think this is because
A city has a natural structure and hierarchy, and if your procedural generation algorithm is lacking structure, or is driven by perlin noise or some other excuse, it will fail to produce anything interesting in this regard;
A city is something that grows out of a collection of purposes, not just in its physical structure but in the set of interactions that occur within it over a specific amount of time. To create an interesting one, you are forced to create a set of real goals that drive the agents that move around inside it, and to allow those agents and the pursuit of their goals to shape it over time in every way.
A city is FINITE. It has a focal point, a center, that doesn’t exist anywhere else, and each place relates to that focal point in a specific, meaningful way.
I think that if it is not possible to achieve a procedurally generated city or town that’s worth exploring, it’s certainly not worth creating an infinite amount of them. If the No Mans Sky devs had playtested a single interaction with aliens in isolation, they would certainly have known that there was something missing. The problem is that it seems to me that it is perceived that multiplying it in number somehow increases its value, when that actually has little (if any) inherent value.
Remember how P.A.M.E.L.A. quite frequently was mentioned here pre-release as the posterchild for “fancy looking Unity games”? I found it sad to read that apparently they’re struggling hard with Unity bugs at the moment:
My guess is that I won’t find it even close as fun as Shock 1 and 2 were, but I’m weak when it comes to sci-fi action games in this style so needless to say, it will be interesting to see how well they do!