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Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

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Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#181

Post by [deleted] »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #74
rstat1 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reason for refusing to give the Epic store money is pretty simple: Paid exclusives are bullshit. Especially when they're used as fodder to promote "competition", when such things are anything but.

That’s fair. I view it as just business. It certainly doesn’t affect me or any consumer. It only affects Valve, which I don’t care about. Maybe valve should pay developers more. Epic takes far less than steam does from developers, so I definitely understand the appeal to developers.

[deleted]

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#182

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

jordanthoms wrote: post #107
ux-app wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always a tradeoff between responsive movement and realistic movement. RDR2 has very realistic animations, with the tradeoff being slightly "floaty" controls. Personally I prefer snappy movement i.e. when I press left the screen character moves left immediately. A more realistic looking animation system introduces a delay while you wait for the feet animation to "catch up" to player input.

I guess the problem there is pretty fundamental - in reality you'd be tensing muscles and shifting your weight etc before the snappy movement, but the game only knows that you want to move when you move the stick or push a button - so it either has to show that realistic motion after your button press and introduce latency, or sacrifice the realism in the animations.

This is also why 2D jump platformers like Megaman have triangular jump trajectories instead of parabolic trajectories. For snappy controls you leave the ground at the instant of the downpress and peak when you let go of the button. As the game can't know how high you intended to jump at the time the jump begins, the trajectory can't be parabolic. (At least, not on the way up.)

You could instead have the button downpress "charge up" energy and then begin the jump when the button press ends, which would allow for more realism, but also introduce a delay.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#183

Post by fulafel »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #78
SirMaster wrote: post #26

In the first example it's still really jarring how much their feet slide around on the ground, or sliding in place as they walk into an object without moving. I wonder when this will ever be solved. Don't get me wrong, the engine is incredible and the visuals and systems are some of the best we have seen.

I'm surprised it's still a problem. Years ago a basketball game franchise bragged that the PS3 allowed them to do foot planting with inverse kinematics. Years before that, Shadow of the Colossus shipped on PS2... with IK foot planting.

Conflicting requirements stemming from the psychological illusion of movement spontaniety.

People don't want the realistic, slow response. Normally people aren't aware of how early their body starts a movement, the conscious brain has the illusion of just having decided it but it's actually started much earlier.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#184

Post by fulafel »

beefsack wrote: post #160

ECS architectures are used in a number of young open source game engines, such as Bevy[1]. I haven't done game development for a long time, but hearing about an architecture that does away with the heavy and complex OOP you often see in games makes me want to dip my toes in again and check it out. [1]: https://bevyengine.org/

There's also a history in applying ECS in older things, it started taking off in early 2000's, it's been bread and butter (though not universal) for long now, also in some open source engines. See eg https://github.com/Adelost/entity-component-systems-study#re...

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#185

Post by dagmx »

SirMaster wrote: post #26

In the first example it's still really jarring how much their feet slide around on the ground, or sliding in place as they walk into an object without moving. I wonder when this will ever be solved. Don't get me wrong, the engine is incredible and the visuals and systems are some of the best we have seen.

It’s a solved problem already. Various IK systems will tackle it properly and some games will have your feet IK follow the terrain and hands IK push up against surfaces.

However it’s a trade off of performance (the constant ray casting and IK solves aren’t free) but also responsiveness.

Many games opt for faster locomotion and responsiveness instead.

At the end of the day, it’s a technically solved issue and has been for years, but as with every single thing in game design, it’s a choice and trade off.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#186

Post by a2128 »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #163

Wait, so they have an ECS game engine with a AAA renderer and nanite-like tech along with a lua based scripting engine and Hollywood level facial animation? They should release the engine. It's a solid competitor to Unreal (more scalable due to ECS, easier to write with Luau)

Epic Games funded the development of Alan Wake 2 and the game is also an Epic Games Store exclusive (which I painfully found out wanting to buy the game but being on Linux), so I assume competing with Unreal would burn some bridges there

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#188

Post by katbyte »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #20
katbyte wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shame I won’t be able to play it as it’s only on the epic game store, which I refuse to use

why?

Same reason I don’t want to have a half dozen streaming providers. I don’t want to have a bunch of different stores and launchers with different games on each.

Plus it’s a terrible store front from all I’ve heard and I do not wish to support it

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#189

Post by 59nadir »

Asooka wrote: post #113

Man, all these graphical enhancements and they still can't design a proper camera. Off-centre camera systems, aka "over the shoulder" cameras make me motion sick. I need the player to be in the centre of the screen or everything feels lopsided. By all means, do the RE4 zoom thing when the player aims a gun or similar, but while moving the camera should be horizontally centred. Halo tried something similar with giving…

> Man, all these graphical enhancements and they still can't design a proper camera.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the camera, it's just not to your taste. They've made zero risky or offensive choices with the camera.

> Off-centre camera systems, aka "over the shoulder" cameras make me motion sick. I need the player to be in the centre of the screen or everything feels lopsided.

This is a you problem, though, and an extremely rare problem overall (rare enough for me to literally never hear about it in 25+ years of gaming). I don't think it's reasonable for you to expect the world of game development to cater to your very niche, specific issue.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#190

Post by hoseja »

Aeolun wrote: post #165
itishappy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Considering you walk around and don’t have a problem with it... I think humans are worse than this than you might think. Give it a try! Walk around and try to change directions on the fly, maybe have a friend shout suggestions to you. I can make maybe 2 or 3 adjustments per second, which gives about 400ms response time. That's about where RDR2 sits, and players criticized it for being unresponsive.

But if you take 400ms to respond, and the game takes 400ms to respond after that, the actual response delay is 800ms, which is quite a lot.

Likely not solvable until we have a BCI working.
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