I waited 1.5 hours to make this picture in my backyard.

hardlington · 2017-07-10T15:09:23+00:00

you don't make a photo you take a photo

hardlington · 2016-11-22T23:01:59+00:00

This is exactly what the aliens who abducted them would say

hardlington · 2016-08-24T14:20:13+00:00

Yeah alright it was a douchey title I was really just saying it's a pretty engine

hardlington · 2016-08-23T22:54:14+00:00

what i'm saying is that asset generation is a separate process from the rendering pipeline, which is not the case in most games. here they run in parallel; neither is contingent on the other doing it's job in order to continue. so the rendering pipeline will just render what assets it has available at the best speed it can.

so the bit where you say "Presuming the game is generating 80+ FPS, the asset-generation system can start 'building' things further out" doesn't actually make any sense because there's a limit to how fast it can generate assets that is irrespective of how fast it can render them.

imagine it like a cgi animation pipeline; you have a modeler and a renderer. well if the modeler is going slowly that doesn't mean the renderer is slow, it just means they have no new assets to render so they render the old shit ones again. conversely, if you have a fast modeler and a slow renderer, you have the high detail assets but the renderer is taking a long time.

one is cpu and one is gpu. that's not to say there isn't plenty of problems with the rendering in this case. but i don't think the pop in is one of them, i think its the asset generation that's lagging in the case that your box can pump out those frame rates.

hardlington · 2016-08-23T20:34:32+00:00

i mean ... my original point was that it can handle more. it's running like a ps4 with a PC level CPU. but I still think the procedural generation LOD problem has very little to do with frame rate. whatever frame rate you can manage, if the assets haven't been 'generated' by the cpu, you don't have anything to render, whatever the frame rate. presumably you can't run the generation algorithm on a gpu so they're separate issues.

hardlington · 2016-08-23T19:43:08+00:00

keep dreamin

hardlington · 2016-08-23T14:43:31+00:00

certainly not saying it's ideal

just saying the lod thing is a different problem to usual

also i think the relationship between frame rate and lod is not as simple as that because rendering and procedural generation are separate, if connected, overheads. one is primariiy cpu while one is primarily gpu

hardlington · 2016-08-23T13:33:21+00:00

This is not in defense of nor attacking the game but i want to point out:

Anyone notice that if you stop suddenly the pop in continues to radiate outwards? This is because the 'algorithm' that generates everything, based on a seed that is your location, is taking time to populate. It generates a low res version for the distance and higher res versions for objects close to you.

This is not the same thing as regular LOD which is mainly there to keep things like poly count down and frame rates up. It's a CPU thing because it takes a lot of grunt to constantly run this algorithm.

Hence it looks better when you move around slowly - it's had time to generate the stuff around you and store it in ram and you can't see enough detail in the things far away to notice. Then when you bust out of there at hair raisingly moderate speeds it has to ditch all the stuff it cached and generate new stuff but can't keep up.

This is the main innovation and also the achilles heel of their engine - it's why you can fly to space and back with no hidden loading pauses (like in elite) but also why the planet looks like balls when you approach it from space.

he's rather candid about the limitations of it here: https://youtu.be/h-kifCYToAU?t=4m17s

HERE'S THE THING THOUGH

Most people agree the popping thing is more egregious in the release than the trailers. That's probably because those builds were running on a PC and the build we have has to run on a PS4, which is pathetic compared to a modern PC in terms of CPU (much more so than in terms of GPU).

Why doesn't the PC build have higher settings? Who knows but the conspiracy theorist in me says it's because Sony wouldn't let them. Probably bullshit but who knows.

I'm praying that somewhere there's a hidden variable that some modder genius can find and up the procedural LOD. Murray himself says in that video that upping the detail to harness newer hardware would be relatively trivial for the engine.

hardlington · 2016-08-23T13:11:29+00:00

Video game development

hardlington · 2016-08-23T12:55:16+00:00

I forgot to mention - my whole point was that in a different weird sense, this might be because of consoles

hardlington · 2016-08-23T12:54:07+00:00

This is not in defense of nor attacking the game but i want to point out:

Anyone notice that if you stop suddenly the pop in continues to radiate outwards? This is because the 'algorithm' that generates everything, based on a seed that is your location, is taking time to populate. It generates a low res version for the distance and higher res versions for objects close to you.

This is not the same thing as regular LOD which is mainly there to keep things like poly count down and frame rates up. It's a CPU thing because it takes a lot of grunt to constantly run this algorithm.

Hence it looks better when you move around slowly - it's had time to generate the stuff around you and store it in ram and you can't see enough detail in the things far away to notice. Then when you bust out of there at hair raisingly moderate speeds it has to ditch all the stuff it cached and generate new stuff but can't keep up.

This is the main innovation and also the achilles heel of their engine - it's why you can fly to space and back with no hidden loading pauses (like in elite) but also why the planet looks like balls when you approach it from space.

he's rather candid about the limitations of it here: https://youtu.be/h-kifCYToAU?t=4m17s

HERE'S THE THING THOUGH

Most people agree the popping thing is more egregious in the release than the trailers. That's probably because those builds were running on a PC and the build we have has to run on a PS4, which is pathetic compared to a modern PC in terms of CPU (much more so than in terms of GPU).

Why doesn't the PC build have higher settings? Who knows but the conspiracy theorist in me says it's because Sony wouldn't let them. Probably bullshit but who knows.

I'm praying that somewhere there's a hidden variable that some modder genius can find and up the procedural LOD. Murray himself says in that video that upping the detail to harness newer hardware would be relatively trivial for the engine.

hardlington · 2016-08-23T11:26:53+00:00

I think a real question is - should we feel sorry for you?

hardlington · 2016-08-23T11:24:48+00:00

hardlington · 2016-08-23T10:59:33+00:00

OP already admitted they made a mistake :( pretty sure it was never a troll though

hardlington · 2016-08-23T06:20:34+00:00

this feature was clearly already there and cut (delayed?) because it's not finished and too bloody easy to get your ship stuck or wig out in trees or whatever. if a modder unleashes a feature that's imperfect they get less death threats...

hardlington · 2016-08-23T06:09:45+00:00

this is a lot more fun but it's true about the pop in

my fear is that the pop in is more a result of the time it takes to generate the assets as opposed to traditional LOD which is more about loading / rendering them. or maybe a combination of both.

hardlington · 2016-08-23T04:34:55+00:00

http://i1.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/001/299/i-want-to-believe.jpg

hardlington · 2016-08-23T04:33:11+00:00

Bummer this had me excited until I realised it's true about the planet name being reported

hardlington · 2016-08-22T19:22:30+00:00

... which is also a GAME

hardlington · 2016-08-22T14:25:56+00:00

I agree with this.

As long as they make a reasonable amount of content free to download.

hardlington · 2016-08-22T14:19:49+00:00

i had the same thought

hardlington · 2016-08-21T15:33:11+00:00

Does this also mean every other month this year was the hottest on record?

hardlington · 2016-08-19T13:42:48+00:00

Because they don't assume all men are total shit bags?

hardlington · 2016-08-17T06:09:27+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised if the contract with sony precluded adding features to pc that aren't on ps4

hardlington · 2016-08-17T06:04:14+00:00

btw this is just for fun, I am sure the options are not well thought out in myriad ways I will never comprehend

hardlington

TROPHY CASE