Forzatech Engine Talk

[Xplainin]

With the Zenimax buyout, Microsoft has a number of really high tech proprietary game engines within their various game studios. Slipspace, Forzatech and idtech amoungst others.

I thought it would be interesting to talk about the various strengths and weaknesses of some of those engines, and which ones we expect to do amazing things in the future with.

So first up I thought about Forzatech. It is currently being updated by Turn 10 to take advantage of the new Direct X12 Ultimate extensions such as Mesh Shaders, VRS, SFS and Ray Tracing amoungst others. It’s a next gen focused engine, and will only release on the Series consoles and PC. Games that currently use this engine are Forza Motorsport, Forza Horizon, Fable and apparently Flight Sim. There was some dispute about if Flight Sim used Forzatech or Asobos in house engine, but I fail to see why MS would have one of their games built using a smaller studios proprietary engine that MS doesn’t own.

From what I understand the first game to use the new and upgraded FT engine will be the upcoming Forza Motorsport. Forza Horizon 5 uses the older engine, and I would assume that Fable will also use the new engine due to its release date.

Forzatech excels in a number of areas, one being that it Is equally good in open games and also traditional games. Its a beast at optimisation of frame rate. It’s like idtech in that regard. It’s got that CPU workload down pat.

In my opinion, I think that the new Forza Motor Sport is going to be a level above what we have seen with Forza H 5. It’s expected to use RT in game, and also those DX12U extensions that will add to efficiencies such as Mesh Shaders, VRS and Sample Feedback Streaming.

One of the most amazing things about this engine is that it was created from the ground up by Turn 10, who arnt a big studio employee wise. As we have seen.with Slipspace, it’s not that easy to create a top tier game engine that can compete with the likes of UE. I would assume that Playground Games could have used any engine available to them, including UE if they wanted for Fable, and for them to stay with FT tells me the engine is going to make Fable look amazing.

Does anyone have any technical specifics they know about the engine, how it was created, and any interviews about it? Would love to learn more about it if possible.

[Staffy]

I have no doubts that Fable will look amazing, but I do really, really hope they use a different anti aliasing tech. That’s the one thing I do not like about the visuals, aside from that it’s awesome.

[Stefrah]

@Staffy

I have no doubts that Fable will look amazing, but I do really, really hope they use a different anti aliasing tech. That’s the one thing I do not like about the visuals, aside from that it’s awesome.

Flight Sim is said to have been built in an adapted version of the ForzaTech engine and features a very nicely implemented TAA solution, so it’s obviously possible with the engine.

I expect the TAA-aversion when it comes to Forza games is down to the slight softening of the image that comes with it, while one of their goal with Forza is for every minute micro detail on the cars to ‘pop’.

I don’t see why they would feel the same way about an action RPG game, and expect they would go the TAA route.

[Ruthwik_Rao]

@Stefrah

Flight Sim is said to have been built in an adapted version of the ForzaTech engine and features a very nicely implemented TAA solution,

that was a translation error I think. Flight Sim runs on Asobo’s proprietary engine.

[DARK-PARADISE]

I don’t know anything beyond the fact that it’s an impressive technical achievement of an engine, how they make those big and graphically impressive open worlds and stream world data at +300 KM/h speeds on XB1 hardware, is crazy. Now imagine what will it be able to do with the SSDs, compute power and expanded / efficient memory of the new hardware… Fable will have a crazy open world for sure.

[Ruthwik_Rao]

what I really hope is the character pipeline get the same extent of fidelity and quality as the environments do in the Fable fork of the engine. Characters in FH5 can honestly look worse than some AA games at times, but it’s understandable cuz that’s not the focus of the game. It’s well established that Fable’s open world will look phenomenal to say the least, now it’s gonna be about how well they pull off the other side.

[Staffy]

@Ruthwik_Rao

that was a translation error I think. Flight Sim runs on Asobo’s proprietary engine.

Hmm I see. Well I hope they can use TAA with the ForzaTech engine, I want that game to look as clean as it can be. I mean even games like Witcher 3 have aliasing but it’s mostly in Novigrad while foliage overall is clean. Even old as hell games like Skyrim are very clean, for sure Fable can and should be too in 2023 or 2024.

Apparently TAA can give a soft picture, but are games with TAA really soft looking?

@Ruthwik_Rao

what I really hope is the character pipeline get the same extent of fidelity and quality as the environments do in the Fable fork of the engine. Characters in FH5 can honestly look worse than some AA games at times, but it’s understandable cuz that’s not the focus of the game. It’s well established that Fable’s open world will look phenomenal to say the least, now it’s gonna be about how well they pull off the other side.

This!!! The characters look bad, just bad and emotionless in FH5 but it’s as you say, not the focus. The focus for a action RPG should be way different, I expect awesome looking character models.

[nrXic]

This is a must watch for this topic:

Art Direct for 100 MPH: Balancing Visuals with Performance for Forza Motorsport

It doesn’t get into a lot of details on engine stuff (it speaks more to the production pipeline) but leaves a lot of hints as to what the next generation of FT w6ell be like. The seemingly full adoption of photogrammetry, for example.

The other big thing is that they are looking to focus at the art and making it look more realistic. They go over some of the specifics but it’s the same things that people were pointing out that games like Gran Turismo and Drive Club did better.

I’m most excited by prospect of DX12U’s geometric shaders (I don’t think they explicitly mentioned that the new engine would use DX12U but it’s a safe assumption) and whether they can allow for something similar to what the Nanite feature in Unreal Engine offers. Being that Nanite is a platform agnostic software solution, there’s an opportunity for something more impressive here.

As impressive as Forza Horizon 5 looks you can still see some LOD swaps when you’re looking for them, most especially in performance mode. While I’m racing it’s not very noticeable so I’m not complaining, don’t get me wrong!

I’m just pointing out that the new engine could make tessalation a thing of the past.

In combination with photogrammetry things could look really, really good. The only question would be storage and memory usage. And the cool thing is that sampler feedback addresses the memory usage bit to some extent. Geometric shaders could also be used to compress geometry.

The other interesting part is that with both the Series S and X you have a capable CPU that is well beyond the previous ones that FT was built on. Taking full advantage of that seems prudent.

[Xplainin]

@Ruthwik_Rao

that was a translation error I think. Flight Sim runs on Asobo’s proprietary engine.

I haven’t seen it confirmed that it uses Asobos engine at all. I can’t see MS having one of their games based on an obscure, how be it nice, engine of a relatively small developer. I think there was talk about Forzatech for a reason. I could well be wrong, but that’s how I see it.

[Xplainin]

Am I right in assuming that Playground just uses car models that Turn 10 made? If so, I can understand why they are able to release games as quickly as they do. They just have to concentrate on the environments really.

[BRiT]

@Xplainin

Am I right in assuming that Playground just uses car models that Turn 10 made? If so, I can understand why they are able to release games as quickly as they do. They just have to concentrate on the environments really.

Even if that’s the situation, between Turn 10 and Playground they release more racing series more frequently than others. Its nearly 1 a year. Here’s the timeline from Wikipedia:

[ThereAreFourNaan]

@Xplainin

I haven’t seen it confirmed that it uses Asobos engine at all. I can’t see MS having one of their games based on an obscure, how be it nice, engine of a relatively small developer. I think there was talk about Forzatech for a reason. I could well be wrong, but that’s how I see it.

Asobo’s in-house engine was known to be used for Plague Tale: Innocence, which is a gorgeous game. It was also used in a variety of car racing games over the years that Asobo made (FUEL, The Crew etc). Their job postings never called for UE4 experience.

It’s completely unknown how MadInfinite got the text about Turn 10 and the FTech engine being involved. Here is their english language reporting:

"It is not easy to answer this question. I would say that the first difficulty was to successfully deport 99.9% of the game data to the cloud with Microsoft Azure technology, which allows us to model the entire planet at a high level detailing. "

"Then, we had the great support of Turn 10 during all the years of development of the simulator to learn all the physics, photo-realism, density and base structure of the FTech Engine, which in the version we used, was slightly modified to support the large load of data. "

“In short, the visual rendering is calculated on the player’s Windows 10, but all the 3D Textures and Data used come from the FTech Engine in a mix with Azure.”

Here is the French interview text, from the original source:

Pas évident de répondre à cette question ! Je dirais que la première difficulté a été de réussir à déporter 99,9 % des données du jeu dans le cloud avec la technologie de Microsoft Azure ce qui nous permet de modéliser la planète entière avec un très haut niveau de détails. En clair : le rendu visuel est calculé sur l’ordinateur du joueur mais toutes les textures et les données 3D qui sont utilisées proviennent du cloud.

Run through translator:

Not easy to answer this question! I would say that the first difficulty was to successfully deport 99.9% of the game’s data to the cloud with Microsoft Azure technology, which allows us to model the entire planet with a very high level of detail. In short: the visual rendering is calculated on the player’s computer but all the textures and 3D data that are used come from the cloud.

I’ve had a look at the entire French article and says diddly squat, not one mention of Turn 10 or their engine, or in fact any game engine at all.

Every single subsequent report quotes the MadInfinite article. There is no other corroboration - and we can’t seem to follow their source to find the information anywhere. Considering the extremely strong technical focus of the studio, it’s track record, I’m happy to call this one myth busted until further evidence or comments are found.

[Xplainin]

One area that I think could be improved upon by the game is the incar details when driving like the dashboard and the drivers arms and hands. It’s got a little bit to go before it is realistic. They seem to have nice shaders for the cars, but their shaders for people isn’t on the same level. While I understand it’s a car racing game, it’s just an obvious area for improvement in future games.