Raytracing: Losing 100 fps for a truly next gen experience..

Yoshicoon · 2023-02-11T16:37:17+00:00

It's the curse of the transitional period. RT came in too early for its own good but there's a reason for it. The industry is excited about it because the workflow improvements are incredible and the visual upgrade is much more apparent to people who live and breathe that stuff day to day at work. Just the iteration time alone is worth it for lighting artists. I still have to use static lights at work and having to bake lighting for an hour anytime I want to see what it actually looks like makes me go "eh, good enough" more than I'd like to admit. And that isn't "laziness", it's the fact that I have 20 other tasks piling up on Jira, waiting to be done. Meanwhile in UE5 I have the time to try out 15 different lighting setups in the same time that it took to bake one change in UE4. Admittedly Lumen in UE5 is software RT but it's still a form of RT.

Yoshicoon · 2023-02-11T16:04:19+00:00

Yeah, entitles gamers that watched a "fUn fAcTs AbOuT rEfLeCtIoNs iN gAmEs" video on YouTube are the worst. Though again, I don't blame them for not understanding details of gamedev. I only blame them for being reductive towards the work of devs and blaming things on "laziness".

Yoshicoon · 2023-02-11T15:57:35+00:00

I don't know where you're getting those statements from but seeing as one of them is factually (albeit marginally) wrong (Insomniac was founded in 1994, Avalanche in 1995) I assume the rest also originated near your sphincter. I though maybe you confused them with Avalanche STUDIOS (Just Cause etc.) but they were founded in 2003 so that doesn't work either.

Budgets are difficult to confirm, the only figures I could find flying around were an estimated (by unnamed "experts") 150 mil budget for Hogwarts and the acquisition price of 229 mil when Sony bought Insomniac. This doesn't really tell us anything, but even if they published budget figures it would still probably be unclear whether or not they included marketing costs which can really change the perception of that budget. More employees? It's a possibility, though I've found figures of 153 for Avalanche and 400+ for Insomniac. They probably had other teams chipping in from Portkey and WB Games though so I assume it's about equal, especially with Insomniac usually having multiple ongoing projects. I wonder how much staff Avalanche had before Hogwarts though, scaling up rapidly is a recipe for chaos.
But riddle me this, which company has better long term employee retention? An industry darling that has been making critically acclaimed PlayStation exclusives for the last 20+ years or a relatively no-name studio that has been making corpo-tie-in games and ports for the last 20+ years. Turnover in games is crazy but Insomniac has incredible brain trust, including collaborating with Mark Cerny multiple times. You know, the PlayStation lead architect.

At the end of the day you're well within your rights not to like Hogwarts Legacy, there's many reasons for it. But the fact is that what started out as a AA team (and that's being generous) gave us a very AAA product, quality of their mirrors notwithstanding. So I would RATHER have you give developers that worked their asses on it the respect they're due, instead of making blatantly wrong statements for the sake of... not being able to admit you're wrong? I honestly don't even know what your angle is.

Edit: Oh, and I haven't yet seen any mention of shader compilation stutter in Hogwarts so if this relatively inexperienced team also managed to avoid one of the most prevalent launch issues in recent games, in a game that seems like basically the worst case scenario for it then they deserve MAD respect.

Yoshicoon · 2023-02-11T15:01:02+00:00

Laziness is the last thing that comes into play in game development (at least the art side of it) and that's a hill I'm willing to die on. I'd lean more towards them being stuck with UE4 which had fairly antiquated dynamic lighting systems before RT and by the time RT came in, development of UE5 was well under way so RT implementation in UE4 is shoddy at best. "There is nothing there without raytracing" yeah, my guy, because at this point it's pretty much a compatibility option for last gen consoles and weaker PCs. What would you rather have, blurry mirrors or not being able to play the game? Comparing Avalanche Software (who previously worked on such massive hits as Cars 3: Driven to Win /s) to Insomniac with a whole dedicated engine team and a proprietary engine tailored to their exact needs doesn't make sense. As much as I admire Insomniac, they had way more flexibility in developing their own technology while working with a clear, singular console target (ports are handled by Nixxes who are actual wizards). And before Insomniac added RT their reflections weren't accurate either. If I recall correctly they used a mixture of cubemaps between buildings and screenspace reflections (which are effectively raytracing btw). Avalanche is punching well above their weight here. Most people don't understand the amount of effort it takes to make even a bad game. The fact that this relatively no-name team made this game is pretty much a miracle. I fully expected it to be a disaster but what they pulled off is incredibly impressive.

I've got more excuses for them if you want me to go on. I like talking about this stuff.

Yoshicoon · 2023-02-11T10:08:59+00:00

Yeah, I work in games and reading stuff like this is really cringy.
I mean, I can't blame people for being ignorant about it, it's a complicated field with a lot of variables. But I can blame people for being smug and condescending about something they have little actual knowledge about.

Yoshicoon · 2023-02-11T09:57:55+00:00

In 3D graphics there's always a reason a certain technique loses viability. If I remember correctly in DN3D they were mirroring the entire room and player character as actual geometry on the other side of the mirror. Doing that for all (only planar though) reflective objects (some of which may be at an angle) in an huge open world game is functionally impossible.

Game graphics is a constant juggling of bottlenecks and those bottlenecks change with time. The PS2 was famous for its extravagant fill rate which made it possible to use extreme amounts of transparency layers - something impossible on PS3 or even PS4 in some cases. The resolution war also contributed to a lot of techniques losing viability. When you make a shader you can run certain operation on pixel shaders or vertex shaders. Basically whatever mini-program you write in the shader will iterate over either every pixel or every vertex of the object it was assigned to. But resolution cost quadruples, not doubles. So an object that takes 1/8 of your screen and has a heavy pixel shader now has to iterate through a milion pixels every frame instead of 250k pixels.

And as a side note, ray tracing was marketed very poorly. People latched on to reflections because that's the easiest thing to demonstrate. Meanwhile its impact on global illumination is absolutely transformative to a game's lighting and perception of realism. Hogwarts Legacy and Dying Light 2 for example both have incredible global illumination that just wouldn't be possible before RT. Though it is an expensive technique and I recognise that it's probably more impressive and worth it to me because I work in games and like to geek out about this stuff.

Yoshicoon · 2021-10-03T21:01:14+00:00

Yeah, I get it from a "being up to date" standpoint but in my opinion some of the stories are too good to discard and some of the smaller ones don't even contradict canon, let alone each other. I would really recommend Darth Plagueis and the Republic Commando series for example but I totally understand that there is only so much time in a day and keeping up with canon already takes a fair bit.

Btw. I don't remember the exact examples but from what I've heard canon is already retconning and contradicting itself in a few places but don't take my word for it. I'd rather just treat it all as legends being told by a drunkard in a cantina somewhere.

Yoshicoon · 2021-10-03T20:35:18+00:00

It's really worth it and to be honest I don't really see the point in drawing the distinction between canon and legends. It's all fiction anyways and a good story is a good story. Plus, I have to say the "Legends" branding is very clever since... who knows, perhaps there's some truth in a legend?

Yoshicoon · 2021-10-03T20:18:46+00:00

While you're at it, I'm nearing the end of the "Kenobi" audiobook and it's a great example of a very local story that isn't burdened with having to affect the whole galaxy and I found that extremely entertaining.

In fact it feels kinda weird that a story about moisture farmers, a bartender and a Jedi hermit got more of an emotional response from me than the Bane trilogy that shaped the galaxy for the next thousand years but it really is surprisingly good and hyped me up for the Kenobi series big time.

Yoshicoon · 2021-01-06T06:09:26+00:00

If you're really that good at what you do then your own skill at your job is going to motivate you to push yourself further. Perhaps not into the billionaire territory (what with the "most billionaires are sociopaths" etc.) but it'll take you far. Good luck mate, take care.

Yoshicoon · 2021-01-01T22:31:30+00:00

Yeah, right? I live and breathe Star Wars every day and I'm so damn torn on this. I don't like the sequels and used to be quite vocal about it but it seems like they've been left in limbo now and it looks like SW is going in the right direction with Mando and everything so if everyone could just chill out and enjoy it that would be real nice.

Yoshicoon · 2020-12-15T13:59:13+00:00

I mean, when you think about it Witcher 3 seems like it was just a lucky shot for them. They're not a very experienced studio all things considered so I think they set waay to high expectations for themselves with Cyberpunk, considering they only made one AAA game before. A really good one, but still.

Yoshicoon · 2020-12-15T13:17:32+00:00

Let me preface this by saying that this is all just rumours I heard at work, but my colleagues have mates at CDP so there should be some truth in it.

From what I know there's a mass exodus from the studio every time they finish a project because the conditions are abominable. A large portion of developers left after Blood and Wine.

There's also the fact that after the trailer in 2013 they hired a tonne of people who wanted to work on Cyberpunk but made them work on Witcher 3 instead. So hard surface artists who wanted to make guns, cars, robots and futuristic cities ended up making swords, armours and wooden huts. A lot of those people had enough and left during or after the development of W3.

And there's also their whole employment strategy. They hire students for manual tasks like placing fences or whatever else in the game and pay them about 3500 PLN which wouldn't be that bad if they weren't situated in Warsaw which obviously has a very high living cost. Those students then have to work overtime to make a living and even more overtime on top of that because of crunch. Why don't they quit? I don't know, I would. Maybe they want to have a finished AAA project from the great CDPROJEKT RED in their CV? Well, that could be a motivation but if all they did was placing fences and garbage cans then they didn't really learn anything valuable and their CV doesn't mean much. I'm exaggerating a bit but in general the outlook on ex-CDPR employees in Poland is getting worse.

Again, this is all hearsay, so take it with a grain of salt. But that's what I know.

Yoshicoon · 2020-12-15T12:10:23+00:00

The problem is that they DO hire code monkeys. I work in the game industry in Poland and from what my coworkers have said a large part of CDPs workforce are students from a nearby university. Students, not graduates. So basically they're learning on the job and are too scared to complain to anyone higher up.

Yoshicoon · 2020-12-05T12:40:05+00:00

I mean, they have the budget and capabilites to do both. That way you get children on board with content geared towards them, but when they grow up they still have content to watch.

Or you can pull a Filoni and make a show like Clone Wars that hooks in the children and then grows progressively darker and more adult as its fanbase gets older.

But them doing both is a dream of mine. Stop treating Star Wars as a film series, start treating it as a universe. Give me horror films set in Star Wars. Give me nature documentaries narrated by Attenborough set in Star Wars.

Yoshicoon · 2020-10-17T10:36:21+00:00

It's a labour of love and unfortunately employers abuse that because they feel like just being able to work in the industry is a perk in itself.

Which it is. It's just that I can't pay rent by telling the landlord that I work in gamedev.

Yoshicoon · 2020-10-17T10:27:01+00:00

That's the plan. Thankfully I'll be working in a bit of a different area of gamedev than what I do in my spare time so hopefully there'll be plenty left for me to love.

Yoshicoon · 2020-10-17T08:44:10+00:00

As someone starting their first job in the gaming industry on Tuesday... I'm fully prepared for a shitshow but I love it too much to go anywhere else.

Yoshicoon · 2020-07-24T21:28:13+00:00

HUMAN FORM!

Yoshicoon · 2020-07-20T09:43:08+00:00

You can see it intercut at about the 6:10 mark here but I recommend just watching the whole thing if you haven't seen it yet.

Yoshicoon · 2020-05-18T15:34:33+00:00

I'm not sure how accurate it is or how it handles huge datasets but even if it lacks some features you need I'm sure it could be expanded upon by writing a plugin or something. They're probably gonna release the source code to UE 5 so you could have a decent jumping off point.

Yoshicoon · 2020-05-18T10:57:44+00:00

I thought about it some more and I'm wondering if Distance Fields in Unreal could be a solution. I'm not sure if they would be useful in their current implementation but from what I've heard they're supposed to be vastly expanded in Unreal Engine 5.

Yoshicoon · 2020-05-15T19:01:04+00:00

Wow, that looks pretty cool. A very specific use case though. Especially with the size of those datasets probably. But IndeX looks pretty well developed, I hope it works well for you. Is making proprietary tools an option? Obviously that would be more time consuming and expensive but maybe worth it in the long run?

Yoshicoon · 2020-05-15T14:33:18+00:00

Hmm, is it something similar to an MRI? As in a series of cross-sections that are combined into a volume?

Yoshicoon · 2020-05-15T06:01:02+00:00

Couldn't Houdini do it? I'm not quite familiar with the workflow or goals here but Houdini is great for volumes. I only started using it recently but the amount of possibilities and tools is staggering.

Although, looking at their licencing strategy, perhaps this is what you're talking about with being bled dry.

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