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Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

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Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#221

Post by fennecfoxy »

dharma1 wrote: post #5
kg wrote: post #3

Considering their size (a few hundred people for the whole studio AFAIK), Remedy consistently punches above their weight when it comes to graphics. Off the top of my head only Remedy and CD Projekt Red are able to compete with the big dogs (Unreal, Unity, EA Frostbite) when it comes to image fidelity and performance. Their GDC/siggraph/etc presentations are fantastic for anyone interested in computer graphics or tech…

Some extremely good GPU devs in Finland, demoscene prob has a lot to do with it. Remedy rocks. Isn’t CD Projekt Red moving to UE5 for future titles? Shame, Cyberpunk was gorgeous - would have loved a multiplayer game with that engine.

Do people still trust CDPR? I bought 2020 when it came out and was incredibly disappointed at the unoptimised buggy shitshow that it was. I'd waited for it since it was first announced, and am even into the genre enough to feel a little angry buzz in the back of my head at how much that franchise (obviously including the RP game) rips off Stephenson/Gibson etc.

Have they pulled a No Man's Sky, since, or something?

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#222

Post by djmips »

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)

I feel like calling it nanite-like is going to far. They have adopted the meshlet pipeline but that's mainstream for bleeding edge rendering. I haven't seen any mention of using compute shaders to actually render small triangles like nanite does but maybe I missed something?

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#223

Post by formerly_proven »

ux-app wrote: post #106
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 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.

> It's always a tradeoff between responsive movement and realistic movement. RDR2 has very realistic animations, with the tradeoff being slightly "floaty" controls.

In GTA V characters have two different animation modes, the realistic one based on Euphoria when using the third-person camera and the "do what the darned keys are saying right now" when using first-person. Always seemed like a sensible compromise to me, though first-person movement is particularly snappy and direct, more so than pretty much any other FPS, which typically still have some inertia.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#224

Post by pixelpoet »

qiine wrote: post #215
pixelpoet wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention crucial middleware like Umbra visibility, the development of Nvidia's RTX, an AI revolution or two, ... As I've commented before on HN, honestly I could write a small book about these Finnish demoscene gods.

> development of Nvidia's RTX like convincing Nvidia that dedicating silicon to RT calc was worth it, or writing part of the acceleration structures they use now ?

Some key publications, already quite old:

https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2009-08...

https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2012-06...

https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2013-07...

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#225

Post by augustl »

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.

And apparently the effect is much more jarring in VR - which is why Valve solved it for Half Life: Alyx

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_MuWmYKGIc

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#226

Post by henriquecm8 »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #218
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 don't see how that enables foot sliding unless it's a lazy solution tho? A no foot-sliding solution can be snappy, you just have to increase animation speed so the character is "ready" to execute the players input faster. I think the real issue is the difference between moving the entire character as an object, with the walking animation being supplementary to that vs the walking animation being central to the char…

If you look at npc locomotion, there's no foot slide, and for a character there is, but the character feet are out of screen most of the time when walking. I've played the whole game and never noticed this.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#227

Post by henriquecm8 »

holoduke wrote: post #8

Its refreshing to see something different than another unreal engine based game. It must be extremely challenging to have your own inhouse engine. The engine is one thing. The tooling to build levels, animations etc is maybe even harder. I guess it also gives some advantages. More control over low level architecture gives you more opportunities to optimize. Harder with a all purpose engine like Unreal. Cant wait to p…

This is why sad to see Cyberpunk moving to Unreal, it's a solid engine, it takes advantage of all CPU cores, unlike unreal. I'll never understand why have stuttering issues because of shader compilation, and most other in-house engines don't have that problem. And why it hasn't been improved yet, and even if they release an update to improve this tomorrow, it will take years to see games take advantage of it.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#229

Post by mcbrit »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #164
mcbrit wrote: post #115

From the first few sentences of the article: "ECS meant that iteration was quick because adding new or modifying existing systems or game objects was easy, and performance gains were clear when saving and loading the Case Board." and there's an accompanying screenshot with perhaps 20 objects on a case board. I scanned through the rest of the article with one question in mind: what the hell? ECS is not a solution to p…

ECS isn't just useful for performance. It's a better way to architect games and other sorts of software in a more data-oriented (rather than OOP oriented) way.

In much the same way that your run of the mill AbstractFactoryGeneratingFactoryGeneratorSingleton involves writing a bunch of not so useful code, and then someone comes along and "improves" it by changing that final Singleton to Dependency Injection:

ECS also has a lot of overhead. You almost certainly don't need ECS, and whatever you're writing would almost certainly be much simpler without ECS. Use ECS because it solves a serious problem that you have.

Edit: And my seriously downvoted point was putting objects on a "Case Board" does NOT justify an ECS; it's a problem with a /lot/ of good and good enough solutions. Were there any problems that needed an ECS, or did the article just want to say ECS (and voxel) because it's hip?

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#230

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

fulafel wrote: post #183
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why doesn't the same apply to a joystick though?
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