I'm with you that the "2 games at once" is a hinky way to describe it (and if that's really how Bloober is doing it, I'd be curious why?), but you're talking about the final output; you still need to get through all the game processes before you render those 4k of pixels. To do that, like you said, they need to have the scene built twice, but just because it's half the pixels doesn't mean it's perfectly half the work. You still need pretty much all of the geometry (you could cut it back but then you'd need full-detail on any frame that you cut to full-scene,) you'd need the textures, and you'd need to make all the passes of the elements you'd do at full-screen (again, at some measure of quality if you can get by when squinting at a split-screen doesn't show the fine details, but I would imagine the quality would still need to be high because compromises would probably stand out.) And your second screen has a lot of differences even though the geometry is very similar, so you don't have the advantage that a full-frame does of having one scene to work with; if you're doing the work twice, every surface that informs how another surface behaves has to do that work twice even though it's the same set of surfaces in both scenes.
If the work of doing a split-screen effect were perfectly half, we'd still have split-screen in our racing games and co-op action games, but it's not 1/2, it's something more like an exponential difference (or fraction of exponential) in how much it takes to do a complex scene twice in a frame, even though the final output will be a set resolution.
Really liked what I played the first hour, great looking game for such a small team, looks great on series X, next gen looking ! Pixels don’t matter right , it’s quality of the pixels that matters.
That's not what I'm suggesting. You don't have to swap any asset from the environment.Split-screen is one thing (and usually with split-screen you have roughly similar assets/geometry, as usually split-screen is for multiplayer and so you're on the same track or level; this is unusual in that the geometry is mostly the same but they're totally textured and lit differently for each use of the scene.) However, there are parts of the game that literally "blink" in and out of the two worlds, at full frame, in fractions of a second. I'm not a game developer, but I've seen game designers turn on/off graphical elements, and it's not that fast. Turn on/off a grass shader or pop a big tree prop in and out and you'll see the tool take a beat to load the thing, then you'll see it show on screen but maybe with not exactly the right mipmaps needed for that viewpoint and the shadows not fully coming out right on even the baked elements already present, then another beat as the game catches up to the differences in the scene, and then everything's smooth after those first few rough passes tell the system that everything's good to go. Once it's on screen, you can dial up and down the sliders and play with the object/effect and the engine keeps going smoothly, but until the system knows what it's going to be doing with what's in the scene, it has to take a few passes to get everything in sync and in the groove.
Yes it’s very similar to the effect they use in rachet
Ha, that's funny, you beat me to the Shesez post!That's not what I'm suggesting. You don't have to swap any asset from the environment.
What you do is create TWO separate game maps from the very start, each has their own character and camera...
It's not exactly the same thing I'm describing (there are not two character models, but just because they didn't need them), but you can get the general gist of the idea from here:
Well done. But did you miss the links where this game runs badly on new nvidia 3000 gpus?
So what is it: XsX and all PC configurations are bad or an optimisation problem?
...Incidentally, talking about The Medium and realm-switching tricks makes me sad all over again that Soul Reaver: Dead Sun was canceled.
...So then, what tricks is Insomniac using for its game?
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, as we know it from the trailer/gameplay demo, appears to have two different types of portals: an Orange Rift and a Purple Rift.
The Orange Rift pulls you through space while inside the same level map. So, that's pretty easy, in that the "two worlds" are the same world. Prey (2006) did this all the time, as did Portal (with some visibility tricks to show you the "other side" of the portal, which I'm surprised the Rift Apart rifts don't?)
We will see how complicated rift-tethering gets (maybe there are a bunch of colors?,) but if the developers wanted to for instance add time instead of just space to the equation, they could use some of the same methods of The Medium or Titanfall, so they'd either do the same color-shifting/light-changing/transparency-substitution to show you the world affected by each side of the Rift, or they'd have a parallel chunk of the world somewhere else in the game map and transport you to that area to give the effect of pulling into a Rift.
Ah, but that's not so crazy; it's the Purple Rifts where things get really crazy. These rifts go from world to world to world, seemingly totally different every time you fall through a different rift. And, from all analysis so far, this game really is loading whole worlds at a time (or at least whole new world chunks, but I'll get to that later.) One second you're chasing Dr. Nefarious through a brightly-lit city after a long battle through the town, the next second you're falling through a purple void, then suddenly you're grinding a rail at night and avoiding trains, then back into the purple space and wham, you're sliding down the side of a building over the edge, then another purple and you're riding a tetradactyl through a desert ravine, then the tetradactyl flies into the purple and you're suddenly swooping over a Fifth Element-type city, and one more purple trip sends you onto a pirate ship for a big battle.
Each area has totally different geometry, lighting, textures, even gameplay, and although a few warped-to sections are barely mini-games as far as play the city level you start at and the pirate level you end up at are full-fledged R&C encounters. (I'm assuming the game not let you at a whim jump off the tetradactyl and play the Fifth Element stage as a complete level, even if a different part of that Fifth Element stage ultimately might be an area you can return to when not in a rift-trip?), I suppose it's possible that the rift-tripping sequences have some tricks to them and there's more of those areas stored in memory than we thing, but for all indications, these are levels streamed from the SSD to the game, one after another.
One of the big tricks, however, is the purple void. You may be in a completely "new world" each time you trip from city to trainyard to canyon to skyway to pirate ship, but that stage needs to dump out while a new stage is coming in. Levels are stitched together with that purple void, which may look like shards of all the levels you could possibly fall into, but are most likely just still/animated graphics of the areas textured onto some floating polygons. Add some purple haze and glow effects and it's a pretty enough space for Ratchet to cartwheel through in the time it takes to dump the old area and load a new area. And given that the gameplay doesn't need an instantaneous or even seamless transition to maintain the play flow, Ratchet can be in that void for as long as the game developers can stand it (it's basically an "in-game loading screen"... this game could conceivably be ported down to PS4 if it were okay for players to be stuck in a 60-second-loadtime void constantly, but that would suck,) so you don't need to perfectly time when one area is in memory or not. So while The Medium can be instantaneous, it can only be the two areas (or however many can fit in memory at appropriate detail) and those things absolutely need to transition smoothly in order to maintain the play flow, whereas Rift Apart can load area after area if it wanted to, as fast as the game can stream them in (or generate them conceivably if it were a procedural game) with a downside being that it takes a second or two or three in say a bland purple void to clear one and load the next one.
I'm not into arguments over whether Rift Apart is "more advanced" than The Medium, so hopefully breaking it down shows why there are different approaches and that there's isn't "one right choice." (If a dummy like me can understand it even slightly, I'm positive almost the techniques used in either game is recognized full well by the other team when they take a look at the other's work, and that they're familiar with if not experienced in testing that method in their office.) I see what's amazing about both... although personally, those streaming Ratchet levels do knock me out each and every time I see it.
Ha, that's funny, you beat me to the Shesez post!
XSX is weak, XSS weaker and PC version has an optimization problem.
...Incidentally, talking about The Medium and realm-switching tricks makes me sad all over again that Soul Reaver: Dead Sun was canceled.
How do you think that this would run on the PS5 ?XSX is weak, XSS weaker and PC version has an optimization problem.
This is definitely not a next-gen game to show of your XSX, it's a potato, enjoy this quick review
How do you think that this would run on the PS5 ?
This is the kind of achievement that seems to be really hard to grasp for some people.For such a small team delivering Close to Quantum Break visuals is boding well, very well ! Imagine a AAA studios visuals like Microsoft or Capcom, Naughty Dog.
Very impressed.
Funnily enough, the game is enjoyable.
Potato is delivering.
Quantum Break visuals is boding well,
AwesomeGiven the fixed camera I just maxed everything and locked to 30. Haven't had any frametime issues that way, but there's enough juice in the GPU tank to try again if it is something to be patched. Not quite a showcase title, but it does look pretty good on occasion
Because I have both ... that’s why. They clearly are in reach .. and for such a small company it is a great achievement. I never said the surpassed QB, they even do RT.This game never, ever reaches Quantum Break levels of graphical fidelity. How on earth you can compare both is beyond me.
Because I have both ... that’s why. They clearly are in reach .. and for such a small company it is a great achievement. I never said the surpassed QB, they even do RT.