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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.'"
it seems to me like the interest is in the minutia, specifically how they achieved a more film-like quality to their renders without wasting overhead on expensive and unnecessary raytracing. Is it worth a story on slashdot? probably not. Is this response a gross oversimplification? sure!
See, this is something actually nerdy but nobody gives a shit. /. is dead.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I felt that way about all of the Bioshock games. What I'd like to see is a System Shock 3 that lives up to its predecessors.
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. :)
yeah I dunno why even write an article about it.
and bioshock infinite.. ..isn't that infinite at all. the lighting didn't really add anything to it.
like, how is the lighting different from bioshock1?? if i is calculated differently it sure as fuck doesn't change anything gameplay wise nor even graphically...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Speaking of realtime raytracing... (Say hello to your new god.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The best part is that most of the people complaining about it or making idiotic comments without reading the article are the same people who will, tomorrow, be bitching about "slashvertisements" and "important world news isn't news for nerds!", etc. They act like they want slashdot to be a recondite technical news and discussion site, but when they are actually given that, the comments sections languish and are filled with people who know little or nothing about the subject matter deriding it to feel better about themselves.
Beta is a drop in the bucket next to how shitty and anti-intellectual the community has become.
From the readme:
windows 7 / directx 11 required
high end directx 11 gpu required
ati 7970 or nvidia 680 recommended
due to the intense pixel work, max 720p resolution recommended
It's early yet. Believe it or not, many Slashdot readers do other things during the evening hours like go out (of the house, not just the basement) and socialize (with real people in the flesh)... Sometimes pick up the kids, swing by a grocery store (believe it or not, many Slashdot readers do not live on Cheetos, Dew, and the occasional Ramen noodles anymore).
Had this story been posted during working hours, there would be twice as many comments by now, since most Slashdot readers surf the site at work...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Ignoring the obvious performance issues you can't make any substantial changes to the behavior of the engine. Take a look at most games shipped with Unreal and you'll see they use different middleware (audio, pathfinding + others) to what is in the shipped engine. This is not something which can be practicably done via UnrealScript. Even if you could manage to make it work the performance will be appalling. Transitions between UnrealScript and native code are expensive.
I prefer my shadows like my muffins - baked with no fixed upper bound.
The only thing that amazed me about Infinite was...how lame it was.
I'm sorry but as a die hard Bioshock fan (I even bought the Minerva DLC on release day even though frankly Bioshock II wasn't as good story wise as 1 and the protagonist of 2 was the definition of irritating) I could not believe how bad they fucked up the core combat, it was terrible! The guns not only had the lame Halo 2 gun rule but honestly they were not only not fun to use but the muscle bound "hero" could carry less bullets than my out of shape behind! But the plasmids...err vigors, OMFG WTF were they thinking? Not only was the range so underwhelming that you might as well just shoot the bad guy but they just weren't fun to use. I ended up sticking to just two (seduction and electric) because the rest just weren't fun. And the gears were just a waste and it made it even more painfully obvious that ALL the designers wanted you to do was use the fucking hook, I mean something like 70%+ of the gears revolved around the damned hook! I could hear Jeff Goldblum doing an Ian Malcom "Uhh there is going to be shooting in your first person shooter...yes?" the whole time because it felt like the designers fell in love with the hook (that was fun for a little bit but quickly became annoying) and the forgot to do anything else. Don't get me wrong, the story was decent (with the exception of a super lame face heel turn, you know the one) but a story without a decent game to back it up just isn't very good.
So while Bioshock I and II (along with the excellent Minerva, better story than II had IMHO) will always have a place on my drive as soon as I play Burial At Sea II I'll be uninstalling Infinite, most likely never to play again. Its not as broken as F3AR was but it really wasn't enjoyable, I ended up just slogging through to get to the next story bit, strictly a 1 and done for me and considering the low sales and studio closing I can only hope the next game under new management will wrap a decent story with enjoyable gameplay again.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
There are occasional gems in the comments, enough to make older visitors browse them, but you are quite correct, most of us have moved on to better sources of news.
Quit complaining, it doesn't help. I suggest visiting reddit and finding some topics you enjoy, perhaps /r/programming or /r/technology, and also move along to sources like IEEE and ACM discussion groups.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Other game mechanics are also pretty whiffy - the expository voxophones lying conveniently around are such a lazy gaming trope (other games might use email terminals, voice mails, dictaphones etc.) that they should have been put down years ago.
No, it's an excellent technical write up for those in the know about 3D lighting but I'm still at a loss for anything to actually discuss about it. I think even the old guard are 99.9% out of their depth trying to discuss whether any of the techniques used were appropriate or optimal. It's not even remotely trying to make it accessible to the general nerd as it's throwing references, acronyms and low level implementation details at you at a blazing pace with little to no explanation. The only summary I got away with was "smart man, if I ever need anyone to do something like that you're the kind of guy I'd hire" which I suppose might be the point, but it's not my little phd-class niche of expertize so I'm not going to argue with him. So what exactly would you like to discuss?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I actually found this story quite useful as the references it gave showed that some of the problems they solved are very similar to a research problem that I am working on in electron microscopy. That being said, the article was very technical and outside of my understanding in some of the more video game related areas. I'm happy to see this on slashdot.
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.
Oh stop it. You're overreacting.
So what if the article does not have a huge conversation tacked on. You expect 500 comments about video game lighting? While the article is in fact very nerdy and jives with the whole "news for nerds" thing. It's one of those articles that caters to a limited number of people, namely video game developers. For most people its overly technical and beyond their understanding. There are plenty of other technical articles that don't get a large number of posts either.
To me it showed just how fucking BROKEN the current review system is, as reviewers rushed to trip over themselves giving perfect 10 scores when if you were to truly look at it as a GAME, and not just the story? it was honestly maybe a 5, I personally would have given it a 4. It just wasn't fun, it was all scripted, all linear, and it was painfully obvious the entire game was designed for you to use the hook and the hook alone, as they made sure damned near every guy rushed you...yawn.
Bioshock I,II, and Minerva had good stories but they were presented in what felt like a living breathing WORLD, whereas Infinite felt like set pieces. And I agree with others once you start throwing in time travel you can give it up as you can hand wave any plot holes away with paradoxes...so even the story frankly wasn't that good. I would even argue to jam in their "twist" they had to throw out the entire arc and make more than half of what you learned (such as the fact Booker wasn't racist and felt guilty over Wounded Knee) to make their lame M. Night twist fit!
So I still say it was average at best, again not completely broken like F3AR but strictly a 1 and done.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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