Playstation OM UK GT Review next month

  • Thread starter gtbillyboy
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I've only played Far Cry 2 which didn't use the cryengine but it's probably based on it. It did look very pretty but it bored me to tears very quickly so I didn't spend much time with it. Personally I don't see how you can make a landscape look like sunrise, mid day and sunset without altering the model but then I'm not a programmer so what the **** do I know ;)

Assuming the cars have dynamic head lights it's going to be very interesting to see what it looks like with 16 of them reflecting off each other :drool:
 
For your delectation:

Dynamic lightmaps


Watch this one to the end ;)


A faster version of Deferred Lighting (Cry Engine 3 is cross-platform)


Distant scenery can easily, cheaply and effectively be lit only per-vertex:


Slightly crude but effective Day/Night cycle on X360


Impressive, if helped somewhat by the art style!


CryEngine 2 CryEngine 3

The point of CryEngine 3 was to bring the features and technology in CryEngine 2 in a scalable format to the current-gen consoles (X360, PS3) and also for the next-gen (supposedly due in 2012...)

GTA IV has day / night cycles, Assassin's Creed 2 has them, too. I'm sure there are others.
 
As Griffith mentions, there's a lot of engines capable of reproducing day-night cycle and dynamic lights, and I happen to think GT5's engine will be the same.;)
btw. I don't remember reading anything about different models in GTA, and if you played the game, you could've seen that everything casts a shadow in relation to sun's position, and it changes real-time! Also, it's different wave lengths(colors) at different times of day, it's just as the sun sets(angle decreases), the rays travel through a thicker amount of atmosphere and blue(shorter wave) gets lost in the atmosphere, and yellow and red(longer waves) become prominent, but it doesn't have to be physically correct in game as in real life. You could fake that effect(since you haven't got the power to calculate every rays refraction/reflection) in a simple way of just adjusting the color and the intensity of the dynamic light(sun).
Check this cool vid from GTA.
 
As Griffith mentions, there's a lot of engines capable of reproducing day-night cycle and dynamic lights, and I happen to think GT5's engine will be the same.;)
btw. I don't remember reading anything about different models in GTA, and if you played the game, you could've seen that everything casts a shadow in relation to sun's position, and it changes real-time!

I did get a bit carried away following the GTA IV news (nearly as bad as GT5!) and read a lot of different write ups on it so can’t really remember where I saw it but I think it was relating to the colour cast on the city, street/building lights coming on etc rather than the position of the sun in the sky and therefore the shadows. I did realise the sun/shadows were real time but wasn’t very clear :dunce:

Also, it's different wave lengths(colors) at different times of day, it's just as the sun sets(angle decreases), the rays travel through a thicker amount of atmosphere and blue(shorter wave) gets lost in the atmosphere, and yellow and red(longer waves) become prominent, but it doesn't have to be physically correct in game as in real life. You could fake that effect(since you haven't got the power to calculate every rays refraction/reflection) in a simple way of just adjusting the color and the intensity of the dynamic light(sun).
Check this cool vid from GTA.

That’s exactly what I was trying to explain but again not very well :boggled: It’s a good point that the changing light colour can just be faked rather than being accurately simulated. I must admit I haven’t the slightest idea of how lighting works in games so maybe it doesn’t have to be more complicated to implement full day cycles that look realistic.

Damn the you tube block in work ;)
 
i'm 100% sure we'll NOT have night in all circuits, day and night cycles and even rain. I think we'll have some night tracks like SS5 in the image and some wet tracks like the one in gt4 but not some dynamic stuff.
 
i'm 100% sure we'll NOT have night in all circuits, day and night cycles and even rain. I think we'll have some night tracks like SS5 in the image and some wet tracks like the one in gt4 but not some dynamic stuff.
Well you can't be 100% sure since you don't know what PD are doing, do you?
 
Well I'm going to ask you to hunt it down. I've not read anything where Kaz basically say's that the PS3 can't handle it. I have seen interviews where he's talked about the possiblity of including it and he did say he would only include it if it didn't impact negatively on the game. But that's a far cry from "The PS3 can't handle it so we're not including it", he didn't say if it would be in one way or another.

Ok mister, fortunately for you I found it. Unfortunatley for me, my recollection wasn't too accurate.

Go to 48:00 in this awful interview (first place I looked thank god):

https://www.gtplanet.net/kazunori-yamauchis-techcrunch-ces-interview/

The interviewer asks about graphics, day/night and weather. When KY mentioned ray-tracing and dismissed it as something for the next generation consoles, I interpreted this as his response to day/night in particular, thinking ray-tracing would deal mainly with lighting. Like the only way they could implement a realtime lighting change in game. He says this could only be handled by the next generation - and not the PS3.

However, ray-tracing (as I have learned) deals really in all aspects of graphic production. This was his response to where the future of graphics lies, not lighting or weather or anything in particular.

So really KY didn't confirm anything one way or the other as usual. This has nothing to do with whether they can create a day/night cycle given the PS3's capabilities. My comment about KY saying PS3 coundn't do day/night was wrong, but I still wouldn't get my hopes up for day/night in GT5 haha.
 
i'm 100% sure we'll NOT have night in all circuits, day and night cycles and even rain. I think we'll have some night tracks like SS5 in the image and some wet tracks like the one in gt4 but not some dynamic stuff.
Amm...let me get this straight, game journalists that have actually had a chance to play the latest build of GT5 and made an interview with KY himself, say that there will be night racing on every track and dynamic weather too, but then you come along, 100% convinced that that won't happen. And you 100% KNOW this how exactly? doh...

Fredzy: Yes, you were wrong, day-night cycles can obviously be done(have been done by other developers), but he is talking about the next step in graphics and ultimate accuracy, which can be accomplished by ray-tracing, but of course, not in this generation of consoles/PCs, because rendering even a relatively simple scene, done with ray-tracing on a powerful PC, can take a few minutes just for one frame!;)
 
...
Also, it's different wave lengths(colors) at different times of day, it's just as the sun sets(angle decreases), the rays travel through a thicker amount of atmosphere and blue(shorter wave) gets lost in the atmosphere, and yellow and red(longer waves) become prominent, but it doesn't have to be physically correct in game as in real life. You could fake that effect(since you haven't got the power to calculate every rays refraction/reflection) in a simple way of just adjusting the color and the intensity of the dynamic light(sun).
...

Yes, the mechanism is fairly well understood and I think an adaptation of the underlying physics was presented to a computer graphics conference years ago :dopey:

Anyway, in this post, there are a few links - atmospheric scattering is in there somewhere! :P [EDIT: first couple of posts here and pretty!]

That vid is absolutely fantastic, by the way - I'm usually waaay too busy being murderous and maniacal to take that much notice 👍

Ok mister, fortunately for you I found it. Unfortunatley for me, my recollection wasn't too accurate.
snip!

Ah, thanks for finding it! 👍 Seems we're not going to know anything until shortly before its release!

Ray tracing is interesting, though it'll completely screw up the video hardware market - or maybe it'll be the next big boon (like multi-monitor / 3D gaming is right now).
 
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Not sure I follow you. Surely a risc GPU will still be faster at it than a processor?

More than likely, but the optimal balance of the separate components within the GPU will probably be different for ray-tracing as compared to ordinary raster-methods, on account of the different bias of the types of calculations performed. Not to mention that a whole new API will be required...

Not a huge issue, though we're likely to see a couple of generations of hardware pass by before they've nailed the architecture and API.
 
Ah yeah - I get that now. I thought you might have been getting at dedicated H/ware not being required and all the work going back to the main board, thereby leaving Nvidia and ATI short of a business plan.
 
Ah yeah - I get that now. I thought you might have been getting at dedicated H/ware not being required and all the work going back to the main board, thereby leaving Nvidia and ATI short of a business plan.

Have you seen AMD's Fusion? It's one of a few emerging "GPGPUs"... Hardware development is highly cyclic, it would seem.

Back in the day, it was revolutionary to have all the different calculation / operations units on the same chip - then they separated stuff out again - now they're putting it all back :rolleyes:
 
Griffith:
Cool links!;) I like that vid!:)
P3nT4gR4m: FYI at the present time, in 3d programs, CPUs do all the rendering(the more CPUs/cores, the better/faster) and GPU is just used for the simplistic views while you're setting the scene up. In the future, until they present a viable faster alternative to current silicon based chips, we're looking at parallel computing(more cores(CPU/GPU)), because they can't increase the frequencies considerably more, without melting everything!:P
 
Griffith:
Cool links!;) I like that vid!:)
P3nT4gR4m: FYI at the present time, in 3d programs, CPUs do all the rendering(the more CPUs/cores, the better/faster) and GPU is just used for the simplistic views while you're setting the scene up. In the future, until they present a viable faster alternative to current silicon based chips, we're looking at parallel computing(more cores(CPU/GPU)), because they can't increase the frequencies considerably more, without melting everything!:P

Where on earth did you get that from?

EDIT: Sorry, I assume you mean in raytracing?
 
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Griffith & Speedfreak - thanks for the videos and links, as I thought it is pretty complicated but anything is possible. The Geomerics Enlighten one is amazing!

I'd also forgotten how good GTA IV looked, I was often in a rush or being to destructive to notice the details.

Seeing all this is starting to make me think it's perfectly viable to implement a reasonably realistic daytime cycle in GT5 but I still think it's only relavent to the longer endurance races.

It may be that changeable lighting conditions are going to be implemented anyway as part of the dynamic weather otherwise it wouldn't be very realistic!
 
I'm another gamer who thinks there will not be dynamic weather and dynamic day/night cycle. This is too much of a jump for PD from the last GT games, it is simply unbelievable. PD promissed Online for GT4 very loudly, but then failed to deliver.
 
Griffith & Speedfreak - thanks for the videos and links, as I thought it is pretty complicated but anything is possible. The Geomerics Enlighten one is amazing!

I'd also forgotten how good GTA IV looked, I was often in a rush or being to destructive to notice the details.

Seeing all this is starting to make me think it's perfectly viable to implement a reasonably realistic daytime cycle in GT5 but I still think it's only relavent to the longer endurance races.

It may be that changeable lighting conditions are going to be implemented anyway as part of the dynamic weather otherwise it wouldn't be very realistic!

Lighting is one of the most important factors in creating realistic looking graphics and the more realistic you want, the more expensive it is to compute. It's not only direct lighting from a lightsource to the object either, indirect lighting also plays a big part and can have a massive influence over the results even though it could be quite subtle and that can be very costly and in a lot of cases probably not realtime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_illumination

Having day/night cycles may be possible but also could depend on whether or not KY wanted to sacrifice some photorealism for it.

But as you said, lighting would have to change with dynamic weather, just thought, shadows become less defined (lose sharp edges) going from bright sunlight to clouds scattering light, among other things.
 
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Lighting is one of the most important factors in creating realistic looking graphics and the more realistic you want, the more expensive it is to compute. It's not only direct lighting from a lightsource to the object either, indirect lighting also plays a big part and can have a massive influence over the results even though it could be quite subtle and that can be very costly and in a lot of cases probably not realtime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_illumination

Having day/night cycles may be possible but also could depend on whether or not KY wanted to sacrifice some photorealism for it.

I'm guessing there aren't many things he would sacrifice photorealism for!

I know from the Killzone 2 bullet trailer you could download from PSN and watch the different layers separately that there is a hell of a lot that goes into the final image and a lot of it is very subtle. It's the subtleties that make all the difference though such as the surface of skin being transparent which affects the way light reflects from it.

But as you said, lighting would have to change with dynamic weather, just thought, shadows become less defined (lose sharp edges) going from bright sunlight to clouds scattering light, among other things.

therefore there are less shadows which would free up resource?
 
therefore there are less shadows which would free up resource?

Not entirely, there could still be shadows, just less contrasting and with softer edges.

EDIT: I suppose it could get to that point, and if it was wet then you might have reflections more than shadows.
 
Stonemonkey:
Yes, I meant ray-tracing in programs such as 3dstudio/maya etc.
Anyway, I think it will be a combination of dynamic lighting and some trickery, because you obviously can't do proper ray-tracing and global illumination, resource-wise. Other games did it, so I believe PD can do too.;)
 
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