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Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

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Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#231

Post by z3phyr »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #221
dharma1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, there are still bugs, but Cyberpunk is actually great now, and the new expansion Phantom Liberty is chef's kiss.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#232

Post by drstewart »

h4ch1 wrote: post #176
drstewart wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the product marketed here a video game or a video game engine? Why do you expect every video game player to understand graphics programming?

I don't see a harm in learning at least minor terminology to better bridge the communication gap between developers and consumers.

Consumers don't care about the details of how a game is developed. So what's the BENEFIT of doing this?

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#233

Post by z3phyr »

throwaway879423 wrote: post #42

Am I the only who have no interest in graphics fidelity, but would like to see more physics engines created to play with? Like a fully destructible world would be fun.

Physics engines are the real holy grail of graphics. Full interactivity is compute intensive and requires (Carmack, Ryg, Abrash) levels of genius.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#234

Post by Retric »

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.

People take ~150 ms to react and press a key, the ~400ms in running/walking is because you need to first shift your feet into a new orientation and let gravity change your momentum. The physical distance signals need to travel down the length of your spine, and the need to move your feet is larger distance before any change can occur etc.

Watch a sprinting football player dodge. Their feet go in the opposite direction as they want to move the same way you move an inverted pendulum. If you want the top of an inverted pendulum to move left you move your hand to the right. It still looks very fast because you don’t see the initial ~200ms delay between deciding to doge and the point when their feet start to respond.

Most martial arts will teach their own type of footwork optimized for the style, but it’s common to use a shuffling motion which keeps people’s feet close to the ground. It allows for a more rapid change in direction but is slower and less effective than normal walking if you actually want to get somewhere. Fencing and Kendo want more mobility where wrestling and Judo wants more stability etc.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#235

Post by qiine »

pixelpoet wrote: post #224
qiine wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Nice so they did both hardware and software works, incredible.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#236

Post by LarsDu88 »

mcbrit wrote: post #229
LarsDu88 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Having written Unity, Godot, Unity DOTs, Bevy, an obscure ECS engine called kivent, and even rolled a java engine from scratch at one point I somewhat disagree with this statement.

When people think of overhead, they might be thinking of the jankiness of Unity DOTs and it's lacklustre ECS integration with a preexisting editor designed for Unity's Gameobjects world.

The truth is, an engine built with ECS from the outset has ergonomics that go beyond merely writing better multithreaded code. It truly enforces composition over inheritance when done right. Overwatch is an example of a game written using ECS that generally doesn't have hundreds of thousands of entities bouncing around

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#237

Post by doikor »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #217

I meeeeeean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5KOQkZOusE Following on from the old https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTqVhcrilrE Seems Alan Wake still has a bit of foot sliding. I wonder if they're still essentially playing an animation while moving the character "object" in a direction. Surely someone's already come up with a system where the character object isn't directly moved but instead moved in relation to an an…

Something like that could work well with NPCs but would most likely introduce delay into the controls on the player character.

Basically gameplay beats the animation in this case. On top of this a lot of the time you don't see your characters feet or if you do you are not really focusing on that during gameplay and won't notice them sliding.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#238

Post by thomastjeffery »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #219
thomastjeffery wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To elaborate on this, there is a third aspect being glossed over: the correctness of the animation itself. They could alter the animation such that feet don't slide across the ground and keep responsive movement. The result would be a worse quality animation, because the movement of the legs would not appear to be pushing the rest of the body around. Instead, it would look more like the feet are following the rest of…

As mentioned in other comments, I think a big thing is the difference between the older way of doing it ie you have a character object that you move along a vector and the animation is supplementary to this to make it look like they're walking, vs animating the walk and then having the animation/movement of the character itself actually move the character through the world (which almost nobody seems to do).

The third option is inverse kinematics: you move the world across the character, and the character reacts by moving its feet to positions that make sense.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#239

Post by jebarker »

lukasb wrote: post #177
jebarker wrote: post #154

I always think glimpses of the custom tools used in game dev are really cool. I work in large scale ML systems and I wish there was similar effort put into tools for observability and debugging of neural networks. I'd be tempted to work on game dev tooling one day if there were more remote work opportunities.

Isn't that https://wandb.ai/ ?

I like wandb but really it's just an aggregated metrics platform and it's cloud based design limits what's possible due to bandwidth constraints.

I like this tool from Nvidia [1] for exploring CNN feature maps. That's more in line with what I'm talking about but it's is an offline tool. I am imagining tools that provide this granularity of information about networks in real-time during training.

Disclosure: I work for nvidia

[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-fme

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#240

Post by mcbrit »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #236
mcbrit wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Having written Unity, Godot, Unity DOTs, Bevy, an obscure ECS engine called kivent, and even rolled a java engine from scratch at one point I somewhat disagree with this statement. When people think of overhead, they might be thinking of the jankiness of Unity DOTs and it's lacklustre ECS integration with a preexisting editor designed for Unity's Gameobjects world. The truth is, an engine built with ECS from the outs…

Overwatch has networked gunplay and uses ECS to deal with that hard problem.

Cool. I get why ECS is used there. Hard problem, meet the formalism that I will use to think about you.

A case board is not a hard problem. Using composition or a functional style instead of OOP is not a hard problem, or at least not a hard problem that ECS solves.

I'm not sure that we're talking past each other now, but I did want to at least respond to your point about Overwatch and note that ECS is used to solve an actual, hard problem there.

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