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Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

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Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#251

Post by rip_netrunner »

henriquecm8 wrote: post #227
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.

It's a huge resource sink to develop and manage your own engine (Cryengine in this case). No one wants to buy it because proper documentation, support, and updates for the engine would cost CDPR even more to produce. Making your own engine is only really feasible if you have a unique use-case that the existing engines don't provide (this is what led Bethesda to create the Gamebryo engine back in the day).

Ultimately, it's more efficient from a cost and productivity system 98% of the time to use something off-the-shelf.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#252

Post by rip_netrunner »

paavohtl wrote: post #205
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, even Valve have (maybe surprisingly) chosen not to license the Source 2 engine.

That's technically not true – they've licensed it out to Facepunch to create a sequel to Garry's Mod (which was one of the most popular Source 1 games): https://sbox.facepunch.com/about/ . It is the only one we are aware of though.

Probably because it's still incredibly buggy? That's my impression watching some of the videos posted to the counterstrike subreddit.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#253

Post by cptcobalt »

rip_netrunner wrote: post #251
henriquecm8 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a huge resource sink to develop and manage your own engine (Cryengine in this case). No one wants to buy it because proper documentation, support, and updates for the engine would cost CDPR even more to produce. Making your own engine is only really feasible if you have a unique use-case that the existing engines don't provide (this is what led Bethesda to create the Gamebryo engine back in the day). Ultimately,…

CDPR makes Red Engine for their games, but has been using Unity and UE for other titles.

Bethesda didn't create Gamebryo. Gamebryo was an extremely prolific game engine back in the day made by a now-defunct company, Numerical Design Limited thogh the rights live on. Gamebryo was used by Rockstar, Firaxis, Ubisoft, and others, including some current Korean MMOs. Bethesda did indeed use it as the basis of their Creation engine.

Generally, you should pick tools for the purpose you need. An off the shelf engine may not help tell the story you want to tell—which Remedy has clearly decided with Northlight.

The death of in-house engines is one we should be sad about, because it creates a monoculture of game vision—more games will be more similar then they are different—it's easiest to use defaults when you have other decisions to make.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#254

Post by tonsor »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #22
squidsoup wrote: post #10

Technical achievements aside, this game is delightful, particularly if you're a fan of Twin Peaks or scandi noir. Highly recommended if you have a penchant for the weird or macabre. A milestone in interactive storytelling.

I think it deserves a lot of praise, but also some criticism: * While it may keep their creative vision "pure", the lack of lower graphical settings makes it run pretty terribly on an RTX 3080, which is very frustrating. You can brute-force this problem away with DLSS, but I like native resolution and I'm sick of DLSS being used as a crutch. * The difficulty is all over the place. "Story" mode is likely too easy, whi…

To your gameplay points, you're pretty heavily incentivized to aim for the head. I played on nightmare difficulty and most normal enemies went down in 3-5 headshots. I think being unable to tell if the shadows in the dark place are hostile or not is very deliberate, to create a sense of unease.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#255

Post by jjj123 »

dixie_land wrote: post #167
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)

When I got my 3090 back when it was first released, I was excited to finally play Control with ray tracing on, no luck. Now with Alan Wake 2 it barely runs High with ray tracing off. It's a visually stunning engine but it's just too demanding IMO.

I was playing on a 3080 and i second this. It was way too demanding for my card, at least with any ray tracing on.

I just upgraded to a 4080 and it runs flawlessly though, I guess they were targeting 40-series cards for anything raytraced.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#256

Post by fennecfoxy »

z3phyr wrote: post #231
fennecfoxy wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmmm, maybe I'll have to give it another try sometime then!

Although I'm starting to prefer retro games, great modern releases are so few, now.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#257

Post by fennecfoxy »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #238
fennecfoxy wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh yeah for sure, but I'm thinking more for the realism of the simulation, we don't move like that irl so it would make sense to simulate roughly how we do when it comes to games.

I guess it's all trade offs at the end of the day, dev effort vs game style vs priorities.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#258

Post by fennecfoxy »

doikor wrote: post #237
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.

I suppose that's true. I just find it jarring that they've made their decisions for that based on reactivity whereas the entire visual style/physics etc are all "realistic".

Once we figure out how to render games in true photorealism, it's gonna be so interesting to see how often studios make these sorts of stylistic/practical choices with animation.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#259

Post by WorldMaker »

cptcobalt wrote: post #253
rip_netrunner wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a huge resource sink to develop and manage your own engine (Cryengine in this case). No one wants to buy it because proper documentation, support, and updates for the engine would cost CDPR even more to produce. Making your own engine is only really feasible if you have a unique use-case that the existing engines don't provide (this is what led Bethesda to create the Gamebryo engine back in the day). Ultimately,…

CDPR makes Red Engine for their games, but has been using Unity and UE for other titles. Bethesda didn't create Gamebryo. Gamebryo was an extremely prolific game engine back in the day made by a now-defunct company, Numerical Design Limited thogh the rights live on. Gamebryo was used by Rockstar, Firaxis, Ubisoft, and others, including some current Korean MMOs. Bethesda did indeed use it as the basis of their Creatio…

> The death of in-house engines is one we should be sad about, because it creates a monoculture of game vision—more games will be more similar then they are different—it's easiest to use defaults when you have other decisions to make.

I'm not so sure about that. We've seen incredible innovation on top of Unity and Unreal (and Gamebryo still). There are some tell-tale signs a game might be running on one engine versus the other, but among games on the same engine there is an incredible variety in everything creative done on top of the engines from art styles to gameplay to even indie business models. Unity has plenty of flaws but we've seen so much more diversity in games since Unity has provided a base platform that better lets especially small developers focus on their unique creative visions rather than reinventing low level primitives yet again. A rising tide lifts boats, right?

The sad thing about the death of in-house engines is that the tide doesn't rise more each time one dies. Game companies should open source more of their in-house engines as they retire them. (CDPR should open Red Engine now that they are moving off of it.) Game companies should externalize (if not open source, then open/easy licensing with source access) more of their in-house engines while those engines are still living. I don't expect more engines to be properly productized like Unity or Unreal, but it would still be interesting to see more engines shared in more interesting ways outside of single developer/single publisher silos.

We know Remedy can do very interesting things with Northlight and it seems to have some tricks other engines can't do, so it would be nice to see if developers that aren't Remedy can also do interesting things with it. If Remedy ever retires Northlight it would be nice to see how it did some of its tricks in a way other engines can learn from.

Re: Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2

#260

Post by [deleted] »

midnightclubbed wrote: post #155
ajdoingnothing wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GTA IV's tech was quite ahead of its time (2008), with the integration of Euphoria (which had to be integrated in-house by NaturalMotion engineers inside Rockstar's studio @ Edinburgh). The other comment correctly pointed out that NaturalMotion was acquired by Zynga, who in turn got acquired by Take-Two (parent of Rockstar Games).. So who knows, perhaps we'll still see an updated version in the sixth major instalment…

Euphoria was used for a subset of animations, for the most part traditional mocapped animations (and a lot of them) were used to drive character movements. I don’t know if motion matching was used on GTA4 but it was on other Rockstar games at the time and subsequently. Characters blended to the hand written, custom, euphoria behaviors in certain situations… it handled falls, stumbles, deaths, etc. Generally it replac…

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