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Game Tech: How BioShock Infinite's Lighting Works
An anonymous reader writes "The Principal Graphics Programmer for BioShock Infinite has put up a post about how the game's lighting was developed. We don't usually get this kind of look into the creation of AAA game releases, but the studio shut down recently, so ex-employees are more willing to explain. The game uses a hybrid lighting system: direct lighting is dynamic, indirect uses lightmaps, shadows are a mix. 'Dynamic lighting was handled primarily with a deferred lighting/light-pre pass renderer. This met our goals of high contrast/high saturation — direct lighting baked into lightmaps tends to be flat, mostly because the specular approximations available were fairly limited.' It's interesting how much detail goes into something you don't really think about when you're playing through the game. 'We came up with a system that supported baked shadows but put a fixed upper bound on the storage required for baked shadows. The key observation was that if two lights do not overlap in 3D space, they will never overlap in texture space. We made a graph of lights and their overlaps. Lights were the vertices in the graph and the edges were present if two lights' falloff shapes overlapped in 3D space. We could then use this graph to do a vertex coloring to assign one of four shadow channels (R,G,B,A) to each light. Overlapping lights would be placed in different channels, but lights which did not overlap could reuse the same channel. This allowed us to pack a theoretically infinite number of lights in a single baked shadow texture as long as the graph was 4-colorable.'"
like every other UnrealEngine3 game ever?
How very REALly UNfascinating...
Get your computer science out of here! :)
It's the Unreal engine. Irrational just bought the license and modded it a bit to suit their needs, but the heavy work in designing and developing the engine came from Epic games, not these guys, and it's Epic who should get the credit for the technical know-how of the engine.
That and the game itself was really strange. The environment and story was quite interesting... then they had to go to a fairly generic FPS style of gameplay with a lot of violence that seemed quite out of place (and wasn't particularly fun anyway, especially on harder skill levels where the AI just became annoying bullet sponges rather than anything of an interesting combatant).
There's always someone out there that's smarter than you.
yeah some lovely graphics. gameplay wise, one of the worst on rails boredom ever. wow fps shoot in face, have somebody talk to you for a bit, resume shooting in face etc etc ad nausem.
as soon as the time travel shit was introduced I had an inner groan... so time travel... the get out of jail free card for bad writers. from that point on the plot to me went blah blah blah blah... couldnt care less. in a world with 'time travel' everything could be complete bollocks only to be explained away at a whim. too bored to finish it.
Yawn?
and a small further note you can use the same technique to cull the geometry fed into the shadow pass as well - if its not in the pvs from the light's perspective then it can't cast a shadow you will ever see from that light. :)
Clever hack developed for underpowered hardware based on one of the most generic game engines out there. Colour me moderately unimpressed.
I was going to make a snarky comment about moving beyond OpenGL and Direct X into the land of realtime ray tracers that run on a GPGPU, but then I realized that would probably slaughter the franchise market. If such a game engine did exist, the visual quality attainable in realtime would likely only be limited by the amount of computational power available (which would restrict how many GI bounces you could do, or the ray depth for reflections and shadows, or if you can support things like AO, soft caustics, subsurface scattering, etc). Which would mean that old games would look considerably better on newer hardware simply because of the increased amount of simulation you could perform in-between a single frame. So all your franchise cookie cutter COD games would effectively look the same, and the fanbois would lose half of their justification for running out and buying the latest greatest yearly release.
I'm only a few hours into the game but the artwork and graphics are stupendous! My system is mid-range with a Intel Core 930 clocked to 3.3Ghz, 12 Gig DDR3, and a GTX 660 and the game is beautiful!. I got it for $7 at GMG and it is a bargain. Just buy it and no whining... Games on a per $/hr basis are the best value in entertainment the world has ever seen. I sincerely thank the people who produce them!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
The lighting in the game is horribly static.
Games since 2004 have had 30 or so lights in a single scene, and all dynamic.
Take FEAR for instance. This game had many dynamic shadowed lights, and even did volumetric effects on top of that!
http://s3.postimg.org/5vs21dgvl/1388210042512.gif
You just don't get this kind of amazing lighting in today's games. They are too focused on Lens flare and god rays rather than making fully dynamic lights and shadows. They might have one or two shadowed lights in one scene, but the rest is just statically baked or unshadowed lighting.
I prefer my shadows like my muffins - baked with no fixed upper bound.
Because, like Hollywood, or any kind of photography, making things more realistic does not get you any more people going "wow".
We've reached a point now where we can make photorealistic scenes. The problem is that photorealistic scenes have to be of something fantastical for you to be able to see what's going on, what's an enemy and what's prop furniture. Like the old Holywood adage - it has to be light enough to see the dark by.
Otherwise you get complaints like those that surrounded Doom 3 upon its release.
As such, all the shadows in the world will not make people go "Wow" any more. And the trick of "this is your enemy approaching, look, you can see by his shadow" can only really be used once per game (if that, nowadays). So, as you say, they can have all this fancy technology and capabilities but how do you use them in what is basically a *game* without them being ignored for the most part while people are running from the enemy?
This is the problem that many old-school gamers moan about in terms of games nowadays. I have seen any number of games that are beautiful. But I don't play them. The ones I do, they can be beautiful or not - it barely matters.
And if you're going to get people who whine that their computer can't run the game because it's so slow because you're doing all this fancy stuff, then it's better to dial it down and make more of a game, than dial it up and have nobody play it.
Like Hollywood, photography, and lots of similar art-forms - there's only so much you can do and keep people interested. Notice that movies are full of lens-flare too (despite the fact that it could be avoided). Photographers and movie producer adjust the lighting by flooding the scene with artificial light and reflectors to make it look "more natural", and removing natural shadows. When was the last time you played a game that fell into "night" and yet went dark except for a realistic arrangement of external lights? Possibly Doom 3 that everyone whined about?
You can have things look realistic, or be functional inside an interactive environment. The middle ground is exceedingly hard to manage and co-ordinate to make a good game.
That's because most recent games were made for PS3 or 360 and they were too weak to handle dynamic lighting.
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