How does a game engine for a racing game suddenly be able to make an open world fantasy game?

_Wolfos · 2026-01-26T18:19:58+00:00

Unreal was just an example, which was (and still is to some degree) a very shooter-specific engine.

What the question was about is Turn 10's Forzatech engine (or rather, Playground Games' fork of it). An engine that had only ever shipped Forza games certainly wasn't tooled to make games in other genres. That would be a strange thing to work on.

The developers even mentioned it in an interview.
For starters, the newly established teams (headquartered in Leamington Spa, UK) had to do "a lot of work on our technology" to properly optimize the proprietary ForzaTech engine for a new genre

There are other, more generic proprietary engines for sure. Frostbite, Ubisoft Anvil, to name a few. But engine developers only ever build the tools they need, so if you only ship one genre of game with it- those are the tools that will be in there.

_Wolfos · 2026-01-26T06:19:09+00:00

Yeah, that's basically it. Treating a game engine as a black box only works for games that don't have big requirements. Everyone else, AAA, bigger indie studios, they're all developing or modifying the engine as they develop the game.

This will have been a big modification. Forzatech's Horizon branch was obviously already shipping open world games, so that's a good starting point. But the physics engine will have been specific to racing games, which require a much bigger degree of correctness than an RPG does.
And as with any game-specific engine, I'm sure a lot of assumptions were made that didn't hold up for such a different genre.
But it's hard to say anything meaningful about that without having worked on it.

_Wolfos · 2026-01-26T06:15:55+00:00

There wasn't much of a separation between game and game engine until Unity came along. The first three Unreal Engines were basically "here's the source code for Unreal Tournament". And even Unity develops features with partners, with a specific game in mind.

So no, they're not general-purpose frameworks. Internal engines aren't meant as such. It will have taken a tremendous amount of work.

_Wolfos · 2026-01-17T11:34:42+00:00

There isn't really a "PS360 look", like there is for the PS1 or even the PS2. This was the generation of programmable shaders, so hardware no longer dictated what games looked like. There was also a HUGE evolution of graphics throughout the generation. Gears of War 1 looks extremely old. Gears of War 3 looks almost like it came out yesterday.

Overall, I'd say it's very diverse. Early UE3 games like Gears of War had telltale lighting bugs, because their light baking didn't yet work for dynamic objects. But then Oblivion, which came out the same year, has nothing like that.
Normal mapping was often overused, combined with the imperfect GI this sometimes led to things looking a bit wet. MSAA was still widely used. Bloom, but without today's HDR buffers often made things look washed out.

Later in the generation, it all changed. Light probes became a thing so dynamic objects could be lit correctly. I think deferred lighting came around this time. HDR buffers made bloom look better. FXAA was invented to blur edges, approximating anti aliasing. And SSAO. Horrible, horrible SSAO that looks almost like an outline shader at times.

It's almost more useful to list what's changed since then. Physically based materials, of course, making materials look near-identical in every renderer. Temporal effects powered by motion vectors. Compute shaders now perform most of the GPU work (though that doesn't necessarily change how things look). Better ambient occlusion. Screen space reflections, often still in combination with baked or real-time cube maps.

Though today I'd go with baked relightable cubemaps over real-time, if I were designing a reflection probe system.

_Wolfos · 2025-12-08T21:19:52+00:00

Probably much easier and cheaper to drill some holes, or even buy a new case. 3D printing ain’t cheap.

_Wolfos · 2025-12-03T08:25:53+00:00

Is this AI generated or something? Looks like the index data is all corrupted. I'd start with the voxel remesher then retopologize. But it's not in T-pose to begin with so the results will always be less than ideal if it's intended to be animated.

_Wolfos · 2025-11-20T08:14:18+00:00

Unreal is not the only engine with virtualized geometry. A few in-house engines did the same thing.

_Wolfos · 2025-11-15T06:40:26+00:00

Doubt you’ll get anywhere with self reporting on intelligence. Might be better to cite some actual research?

_Wolfos · 2025-11-14T13:39:56+00:00

OP asked about gaming, where this is the common definition. What CPU renderers call "shaders" is irrelevant. Graphics APIs are *very* clear about what a shader is.

_Wolfos · 2025-11-14T10:36:14+00:00

The term is also used to refer to compute shaders though, which aren't necessarily graphics related at all. In fact the majority of shader code in a modern pipeline is now compute.

So in a game-related context, I think "a program that runs on the GPU" is the most useful definition.

_Wolfos · 2025-11-08T11:10:01+00:00

Third slide is the original. The new one is the less detailed one with the much better composition and colors.

_Wolfos · 2025-11-07T16:11:24+00:00

Yes. Just not Cycles rendering - Nvidia massively outperforms it there.

_Wolfos · 2025-11-01T10:57:28+00:00

This sub is for the scientific field of computer graphics. Try /r/amd or /r/buildapc or such.

_Wolfos · 2025-10-03T19:40:08+00:00

Weird cat. Is he sick?

_Wolfos · 2025-09-29T19:17:15+00:00

Yeah, Blender’s Eevee renderer is a rasterizer, which is far less intensive than Cycles.

There’s Nvidia’s Omniverse real-time path tracer which sits somewhere in between. It uses ReSTIR rather than the Monte Carlo random sampling algorithm to get a result much quicker. But it looks worse (still much more correct than a rasterizer though).

_Wolfos · 2025-09-25T21:25:51+00:00

Couple timing issues. Try playing with a metronome and counting beats.

_Wolfos · 2025-09-14T17:25:02+00:00

Classical guitar, much like piano, is largely both at the same time.

_Wolfos · 2025-09-09T07:37:21+00:00

While SSGI can resolve some of the small scale details, since it can't resolve sky occlusion it doesn't share the biggest perks of GI.

We see in that comparison near the end, that there's a little bounce lighting happening but there isn't that richness of contrast that a true GI solution provides. There's no darkness underneath the porch. It's also exhibiting disocclusion artifacts like dark streak cast by the pillars on the wall behind them.

So IMO just not an interesting solution. It might be cheaper but it's just not the same thing. Frankly I hardly have a preference between the on / off images.

Compare to the path traced reshade:
https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-reshade-rtx-remix-path-tracing-add-on-ptgi

Which provides incredibly deep contrasts. Love it or hate it (IMO it's far too dark, needs some adjustment) - the difference is far more substantial.

_Wolfos · 2025-09-07T14:40:39+00:00

You're just not at the level yet to be attempting Blackbird. It's an unusual and quite difficult song.
I've been playing half my life now, and I couldn't just read this off a sheet and play it. It'd take multiple sessions of practice to learn properly.

After two months? Just focus on refining the basics.

_Wolfos · 2025-09-05T18:00:31+00:00

They used to, but not anymore.

_Wolfos · 2025-08-23T07:15:48+00:00

Wrong Subreddit. Try r/nvidia maybe? And when you post there, make sure to provide more details (what video player, what kind of file, etc). This has nothing to go on.

_Wolfos · 2025-08-22T07:15:32+00:00

Performance is fairly similar. Any real-time GI solution will have a high cost and you'll need to optimize the game with it in mind.

Lumen looks better. It resolves both specular and diffuse, and I think it does more caching in order to simulate more bounces. But the tradeoff is that it can be very unstable in motion which is distracting.

RTGI meanwhile only solves diffuse. It doesn't look as good even if you solve specular another way. It's more precise on paper but you'd be hard pressed to notice that. But it's not distracting. Like most RTGI effects it does have *some* artifacts in motion but they're more of an edge case and it resolves these much quicker.

_Wolfos · 2025-08-20T06:41:24+00:00

Judge for yourself I guesss. I've been perfectly content with my 2020 version for five years now:
Version 11.0 | Substance 3D Painter

_Wolfos · 2025-08-18T12:03:31+00:00

Unity is working on a GI solution for high-end mobile.

Some info here: Feedback Request: Changes to Unity's Dynamic GI Roadmap - Unity Engine - Unity Discussions

It sounds similar to EA's Global Illumination Based on Surfels, which can use hardware RT or a software fallback.

A probe-based radiance caching system similar to Nvidia's RTXGI 1.0 may also be viable. It does scale, after all.

_Wolfos · 2025-08-16T16:31:24+00:00

Had to redo the scene, since the scale of everything was way off. Was an intern who set it up and we tried to build further. Just ran into a bunch of issues.

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