Interesting stuff about Halo’s lighting, lighting in the MP maps looks awesome for sure. Curious to see how the campaign will compare.
Also some stuff that I earlier saw about Alan Wake Remastered in the official site:
Xbox One X (Performance Mode) – 1080p / 1080p / 60fps
Xbox One X (Quality Mode) – 1440p / 2160p (4K) / 30fps / 4 x MSAA
They have a performance mode for the One X and Series S that is 1080/60fps but they also specify in the quality mode of the One X (and the Series X) that 4xMSAA is present, do you guys think that they will have a PPAA solution for the 60hz modes? wasn’t 4xMSAA really important for the game’s transparencies/alpha effects or am I misremembering?
Yeah, IIRC they used a technique for alpha blending that was more expensive but resolvable by MSAA, to the point they decided to lower the resolution but increase from MSAA2X to 4X on 360, because without it there would be aliasing in the vegetation, volumetric lighting and the darkness aura.
Though with the remaster they could have changed it to something that still looks good even without it.
I know, I even mentioned night in the campaign in my post. The context of the conversation is about MP and due to that mode targeting higher frame rates, the team may have opted for more baked in methods since that would be computationally cheaper.
Lighting in the PC screenshots both outside but especially inside looked really nice. Whatever the case will be, it will for sure be worlds apart from last year, haha.
I’m 99% certain it’s baked in for the multiplayer.
You had shadow maps missing in the Xbox One consoles in the first build that were added in for the second and this wouldn’t happen with dynamic lighting would it? Or would it? A question rather than a statement; I’m not expert.
Could be a combination I guess (static inside, dynamic outdoors) but a lot of it looks like baked in both environments.
Pretty sure it’s a mixture of both. Shadow maps can be baked in the environment, but you can also see real time shadows when your character runs in front of a headlight of a vehicle.
When it comes to the difference between dynamic or static/baked, they have to make sure the assets look good in different lighting conditions in a dynamic TOD environment. I wonder how much repeated assets are used between the MP and campaign, as that may not be that much of an issue if there is a lot of repeated use like we’ve seen in many other games.
The biggest issue would be performance IMO. Baking in GI can look better while being less taxing. However it also takes time to bake those things into the environment, so that impacts content creation and iteration times.
You could be right and I think it makes a ton of sense to bake them for performance reasons.
I suppose I should get into detail as to why I think they aren’t so the flaws in my reasoning could be pointed out:
With pre-baked lightmaps, you do get detail like GI and ambient occlusion baked into them. Usually.
But in many shadowed areas in Infinite, you see a reliance on realtime techniques for both the GI and AO.
In Bazaar, there is a dark room in the middle (side) of the map with a rat running around. The corners would trap light and should be darker, a detail a lightmap would apply to the whole corner area, but here you see realtime AO being used on the edges instead.
In Behemoth you can go up to rocks in the shadows that benefit from GI bounced lighting from the sand, but as you move your camera, this bounce lighting disappears and it hints at GI being a screen space effect.
If the flighting is still up I’ll try to capture video of each.
I could be incorrectly interpreting what I’m seeing here. So I’m open to being wrong about this.
One goal of the Slipspace engine was to knock down the time to create modifications to levels and make additions to them, and I see realtime lighting (in every respect) going hand in hand with that. So that makes sense. But with multiplayer, performance is king so pre-baked lightmaps make sense. But on the other hand, fully real-time lighting gives their designers and artists a chance to tweak MP levels to perfection without having to recalculate each and every time. Most importantly, it could result in the best looking Forge maps when lighting is completely realtime and consistent with campaign.
I got some meetings but later tonight I hope I’m able to jump in training mode and take some vids.
Aw man I can’t log in… It’s all officially over. [insert Incredible Hulk theme here]
Nvidia burnt it’s bridges with both MS and Sony, the contracts Nvidia had with both of them caused some issues, MS with the OG Xbox and Sony with the PS3.
I talked to someone about this over the weekend too. Being able to have day/night/golden hour versions of each map could be really, really neat.
I would also note some of the shadow map seemed low res on Bazaar, which is something that seems odd to have if they’re backed into super high detail texture maps beforehand.
Very interesting. I was wondering if you could share some tips to spot whether the GI was baked or real time but didn’t want to bother you with my ignorance You make some very interesting observations and if they are using the same real time implementation as the campaign, that could have some exciting implications. I now wonder if the rumor of the large map count for MP might be due to having some maps lit at different times of day now. This could also be an encouraging sign that new maps may not take as long to release as we may have suspected because this would help increase the speed of development for those MP maps.
I wasn’t going to make an analysis video on the flight, so I just played it while not taking the time to just walk around in the training mode, but this discussion makes me wish I did.
Played some AWR yesterday on One X and encountered the out of sync/frame drops problem in one of the first cut-scenes (everything after it was OK though), there was also some tearing and a lower LOD setting in the performance mode (it was really noticeable in the trees) plus what I assume a different AA method because I saw some lighting bleeding through some foliage which I checked and it was totally fine in quality mode.
IQ is pretty good in performance mode and playing at 60fps is a big upgrade over the 360 version plus the game still looks really really good, also the facial animations in the cut-scenes are greatly improved (especially for Alan Wake).
I honestly find these issues just…sigh. I guess a game without bugs at launch nowadays is too much to ask, even remasters now. Also 1440p on XSX? Unless I’m missing something I find this very low.
I do wish companies wouldn’t do this and just be honest. Native is not the same as upscale/CB or anything of the sort. That said, 1440p is what I want next gen games to be, not remasters.
Honestly the only thing that bothered me was the out of sync cut-scene, game looks and runs awesome on performance mode even on the One X (on the SX is gonna be even better) plus the sound quality is improved and the facial animations are much much better. Definitely worth the 30 euros if you want to replay a much more competent technically version than the vanilla 360 one.
About the resolution/IQ the upscale 1440p → 4K method (there is also 4xMSAA so it helps a lot too) that they are using is pretty awesome because it looks really clean and I didn’t notice any artifacts, even at 1080p the IQ is pretty nice. I’d say that it looks better than Control IQ-wise on my One X.
[insert Incredible Hulk theme here]
You make some very interesting observations and if they are using the same real time implementation as the campaign, that could have some exciting implications. I now wonder if the rumor of the large map count for MP might be due to having some maps lit at different times of day now. This could also be an encouraging sign that new maps may not take as long to release as we may have suspected because this would help increase the speed of development for those MP maps.
