Graphics options/capabilities

[Rob]

Hi,
First off, everything you've achieved so far looks incredible! Just pledged on Kickstarter! A couple of questions...

We can see from your videos that you've got some beautiful graphics, fantastic textures, lighting, environments etc, that frankly put the "big-boys" in this genre to shame. However, I thought it would be nice to know some more of the details about the graphics capabilities. Most importantly, will it support anti-aliasing? And anisotropic filtering? Anything else? And if so, will they be native (i.e. controlled in-game) or can they be overridden by global settings (e.g. ATI/Nvidia control panel)?

If anti-aliasing isn't currently supported, please consider it seriously! And ensure it works independent of graphics card manufacturer! Over the last decade, numerous games have been spoiled by lack of, or limited, anti-aliasing. For example, Divinity II: Ego Draconis and Rise of the Argonauts immediately spring to mind.

Also, you've mentioned elsewhere that performance optimisation has formed a key part of the development to date, ensuring that you don't need a beast of a PC to run it. Great. Good idea to allow those with lower-powered kit to be able to play! Also, it's nice to know that you're trying to be an efficient coder. However, just in case you're wondering whether or not to include ultra-ultra-high-res textures, and the latest fancy crazy eye-candy, please do include them as optional!!! Even if there are features that can't possibly run even on today's most powerful overclocked 6-core-CPU 4-GPU rig, please do include such capabilities! This would ensure longevity of the product, and allow you to create exciting expansions in future. By including tomorrow's graphics technologies in the games of today, you can ensure that people will still want to play the game in 5 years time when they have a medium-spec PC that is a monster by today's standards. For example, compare the graphics of games of today vs those from 2007... anyway, enough of my waffle...

Looks fantastic to date; I'll be watching the project closely as it further unfolds! Best of luck!
Rob

 

[Madoc]

Hardware anti aliasing was good enough for my grandmother. Time for something better.

An example of what I do at my day job (be sure to click on it and view it in original size). Honestly, hardware AA is lousy and we prefer to use our own method. That said hardware AA is cheaper and we do support it. Anisotropic filtering is always available unless an engine does something really funky with texturing.

We're all for scaling up as well as down. In terms of visual quality the game already looks exceptional on a decent computer, you really have to see it running to get a sense of this. The 1080p screenshots are what it looks like, now imagine it in fluid motion with perfect anti aliasing.

 

[Tony]

Wow, impressive, Madoc! No jagged edges at all. You are saying Sui Generis will use the same methods as was used to render that image?

 

[Madoc]

Yeah, have you seen our screenshots (in full res)? They're real, not the usual marketing "fakeshots". The game actually looks like that. Unfortunately compressed videos completely butcher the visual quality.

 

[Tony]

Hmm, now that you mention it I'm going to have to take a second look at them. You are turning out to be like the Superman of programming games! Just when I think I can't be further impressed you show something else that is equally amazing. Most large dev teams don't do anything nearly as innovative or as impressive as what you've managed to program by yourself (and in your spare time to boot!)

Edit: So after viewing the screenshots again (and scrutinizing all the curved and round objects) you are correct. It's quite impressive. Circular objects are actually round and smooth instead of being more octagonal like in most other games. And no jagged edges!

 

[MrIdontKnow]

Yeah, have you seen our screenshots (in full res)? They're real, not the usual marketing "fakeshots". The game actually looks like that. Unfortunately compressed videos completely butcher the visual quality.

Well upload a uncompressed video to your site and the same compressed video to youtube.

 

[Rob]

Fantastic! A much better reply than I was hoping for! Your rendered car interior is very impressive!

It's nice to know that you, as the game developer, share our passion for games with hi-tech no-holds-barred graphics, and are prepared to push the boat out to ensure that the game is as high quality as possible! This is something that many developers seem to cut corners on, especially in the isometric RPG genre.

I'd be interested to know what sort of technology you're using to produce such clean images? Are you rendering the images in multiples of the screen resolution, thus achieving homogeneous sub-pixel sampling (which would be expensive)? Or some time-resolved process (which presumably wouldn't work for permanent static images)? Or some sort of dithering (which would reduce quality)? Or is it something to do with the "each frame rendered 8 times" thing that you've previously mentioned?

If it's not hardware AA, and not post-processed fakeshots, then what is it? Is it your own technology, or are you using some standard mechanism? Of course, I understand if you want to keep your lips shut if you've invented and implemented something new and cool that's better than traditional AA!

And are you using any ray-tracing? Presumably you are using ray-tracing when rendering your car interior, but can we expect it to make its way into Sui Generis? (I'm sure it is unfeasibly expensive using today's hardware, but what about in the future, when e.g. everyone's got a powerful x86 coprocessor as well as a graphics card: http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/intel_xeon_phi_coprocessors_to_ship_in_january_2013.html ...wishful thinking!)

 

[Tony]

And are you using any ray-tracing? Presumably you are using ray-tracing when rendering your car interior, but can we expect it to make its way into Sui Generis? (I'm sure it is unfeasibly expensive using today's hardware, but what about in the future, when e.g. everyone's got a powerful x86 coprocessor as well as a graphics card: http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/intel_xeon_phi_coprocessors_to_ship_in_january_2013.html ...wishful thinking!)

Rob, good questions! But I highly doubt the future where "everyone" will be using a coprocessor like the one you linked will be any time soon. Those are developed mostly for scientific/analytic programs, not games. I don't see them becoming the standard in gaming rigs for at least a decade or two (if ever). But it would be awesome to see a game developer spend the resources on making a heavily threaded game which could take advantage of 60 cores. They could do some pretty crazy things with that much processing power!

 

[Rob]

Yes, you are correct - I meant that comment to be taken tongue-in-cheek!

But the general principle applies at a more abstract level. We never know what technologies are around the corner, what's going to be possible in 5 years, for example.

My personal opinion is that PC hardware has improved tremendously over the last decade or two. However, we are now at a stage where producers can churn out games with reasonable graphics, generally pleasing the masses. There is now relatively little incentive for hardware manufacturers to continue making bigger and better hardware, other than to compete with each other, and for professional/scientific applications.

In contrast to the majority of the PC's history, we are now at a stage where software has to catch up with the hardware! If software really pushes the capabilities of modern hardware, then that will be incentive for the development of bigger and better hardware for the PC gaming community. This is what is needed to push the gaming PC market into the future!

 

[Tony]

Yes, you are correct - I meant that comment to be taken tongue-in-cheek!

But the general principle applies at a more abstract level. We never know what technologies are around the corner, what's going to be possible in 5 years, for example.

My personal opinion is that PC hardware has improved tremendously over the last decade or two. However, we are now at a stage where producers can churn out games with reasonable graphics, generally pleasing the masses. There is now relatively little incentive for hardware manufacturers to continue making bigger and better hardware, other than to compete with each other, and for professional/scientific applications.

In contrast to the majority of the PC's history, we are now at a stage where software has to catch up with the hardware! If software really pushes the capabilities of modern hardware, then that will be incentive for the development of bigger and better hardware for the PC gaming community. This is what is needed to push the gaming PC market into the future!

I think it's possible to design software (games) that can push the limit of todays hardware. I think most developers simply choose not to. It's more time-consuming to write a game that is heavily multi-threaded and optimized. Also, developers usually try and make their game accessible to as wide of an audience as possible. If most people have a quad core processor then it makes sense to design a game that utilizes 4 cores. But to design a game that will require 12 cores to run efficiently wouldn't make sense (even though it's quite possible).

On the other hand, powerful CPUs are being released with multiple cores for other software besides gaming. A lot of audio/video/compression software will take advantage of multiple cores. I don't see software ever going in the reverse direction (designed to use less cores instead of more) so I'm thinking hardware will progressively improve to match these demands. Hardware always has to be a step ahead of software since it doesn't make sense to design software that no existing hardware can run

 

[Rob]

For sure, this is the dilemma. Should a software developer invest time implementing something that the vast majority of people wont use, at least at the time the product comes to market. Large corporations interested only in immediate profit margins would probably say no. However, it's great when software developers decide to say "yes". I, for one, fall into the latter category (although I'm primarily a developer of scientific software, not games), and I believe that Bare Mettle are the kind of people that may fall into the latter category also.

The challenge is to create a product that: (1) runs on low-end hardware; (2) works well on mid-range hardware; (3) looks incredible on high-end hardware; and (4) includes high-end future technologies that really push the boundaries of modern computing capabilities, really setting the bar.

 

[Madoc]

Nothing overly fancy going on there, it's just efficient stochastic supersampling. This yelds much
superior results to hardware AA methods (which yeld surprisingly poor results) and it allows us to do
a number of effects beyond anti aliasing. We can get away with it because the engine is very fast to
begin with. I consider image quality to be often more important than fancy effects. Once you try it it's hard to go back.

I don't see ray tracing having a significant role in real time graphics any time soon. Raster
rendering is just so much more efficient and still it's too damn slow. When all the Larrabee hype was
going I kept saying it wasn't going to work, everyone disagreed with me and... it epic failed.

Truth is hardware isn't getting much faster at all and manufacturers are running into physical
limitations they don't know how to overcome. Recent advances are more about parallel processing and
architecture than faster chips. Even GPUs haven't been improving much in terms of pixel fill rate
which is where my engine starts to bottleneck.

The modern trend seems to be mid range graphics hardware that is vastly inferior to the high end and
games substituting realistic graphics for stylised simplified graphics. Yuck.

 

[Tony]

Yes, I agree. The challenge is making software that scales well. Taking what Madoc has already accomplished into consideration, I believe he will do a good job in this regard. They've said the game runs smoothly on older hardware (I believe the example they gave was a 4-year-old store bought PC) and so it'll be interesting to see what the game can do on high-end hardware. Hopefully it will be able to actually utilize it

 

[MrIdontKnow]

The simple answer is that releasing a game on all consoles means £££, regardless of what developers say, "the fun of making games is being with good people", well that sure helps, but don't get payed and we'll see how much fun it is. "There's nothing better than living your dream". Take away the £££ and the dream will change. These aren't real quotes from devs, but everyone works for £££, sure being with mates and pursuing your dream will make it less job like and more home like, but if people aren't getting £££, then there's no point. I'm not slashing people for this, you need money regardless, or your homeless. That's why devs branch out to console and PC rather than developing just an amazing graphical game for the PC, PC Xbox and PS3 means x3 money.

 

[Tony]

The simple answer is that releasing a game on all consoles means £££, regardless of what developers say, "the fun of making games is being with good people", well that sure helps, but don't get payed and we'll see how much fun it is. "There's nothing better than living your dream". Take away the £££ and the dream will change. These aren't real quotes from devs, but everyone works for £££, sure being with mates and pursuing your dream will make it less job like and more home like, but if people aren't getting £££, then there's no point. I'm not slashing people for this, you need money regardless, or your homeless. That's why devs branch out to console and PC rather than developing just an amazing graphical game for the PC, PC Xbox and PS3 means x3 money.

I understand that all devs obviously need to make money in order to keep making games. But I'm curious to see how crowdfunding will influence the PC gaming market. Games like Star Citizen are being made for PC only, which Chris Roberts admits wouldn't have been a viable option for him without crowdfunding (since he refused to make changes to his game that publishers demanded). I'm thinking it's going to help revive the PC gaming market and not make developers feel it's necessary to design a game based upon a consoles limitations (if they can successfully fund a project by crowfunding it proves that there is a demand for their product in the first place).

 

[MrIdontKnow]

To be fair, if crysis 3 had been PC only, I'd have backed them straight away, Pre ordered and the lot, but remember crysis 2? Not much of a 2, but a 1.1 from crysis one on PC, I would be curious though if Sui Generis would be playable on consoles without changing anything?

@Madoc?

 

[Sensational]

We got many years until the eta: 2014.
AA will be propaby supported however.

 

[Madoc]

We're PC gamers and we hate what consoles have done to games. We want more from games than something you play on a sofa with friends while eating pizza and having a conversation, we want something that requires more than 1% of your attention. I'd rather watch a film than play games like that.

 

[Tony]

We're PC gamers and we hate what consoles have done to games. We want more from games than something you play on a sofa with friends while eating pizza and having a conversation, we want something that requires more than 1% of your attention. I'd rather watch a film than play games like that.

Refreshing to hear such a statement from a game developer I've been longing for PC gaming to once again be about new, creative and innovative ideas instead of the stale "copy what sells well" routine we've seen of late.

 

[MrIdontKnow]

We're PC gamers and we hate what consoles have done to games. We want more from games than something you play on a sofa with friends while eating pizza and having a conversation, we want something that requires more than 1% of your attention. I'd rather watch a film than play games like that.

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOD! You have our undivided attention.

Oh and in your 'pitch' video I can't stop laughing at 9:22.

"I'm going to get up now"
"NO puny human!"