Square Enix Witch Chapter Real-Time CG DX12 Demo Impresses At Microsoft BUILD

MojoKid writes: Computer generated graphics have come a long way in the past several years and are starting to blur the line between animation and real actors. One of the more difficult tasks for CG artists is to recreate human emotions, especially crying, though you wouldn't know it after watching a tech demo that Square Enix showed off at the Microsoft BUILD Developer Conference. The real-time tech demo is called Witch Chapter 0 [cry] and is part of a research project that studies various next generation technologies. For this particular demo, Square Enix put a lot of research into real-time CG technology utilizing DirectX 12 in collaboration with Microsoft and NVIDIA, the company said. It's an ongoing project that will help form Square Enix's Luminous Studio engine for future games. The short demo shows some pretty impressive graphics, with an amazing level of detail. As the camera zooms in, you can clearly see imperfections in the skin, along with glistening effects from areas where the face is wet with either tears or water

Comments

So amazing..

[Anonymous Coward]

..what 4x SLI Titan X can do.

Re:So amazing..

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't even think it's very impressive. There are games now that look about as good.

Also, Square-Enix needs to get some real artists. Their character models always look so cartoony. If they're going for realism, it might be an idea to have characters with realistic proportions.

I must be old

[BitZtream]

Because this sort of thing doesn't impress me anymore. It looks pretty much the same as every other demo I've seen for the last several years. Sure, it IS more detailed but those details do pretty much nothing to enhance realism and in fact as the demo shows, the artists go out of their way to show off these features (like 3d movies) and ruin it in the process.

I don't need to be blinded by your overpowering puddle of water, thats not impressive, I don't even need thousands of dollars of GPUs to do that.

Instead of showing me tears that look fake as shit and being proud of it, or a dirty face, why don't you work on things that make the whole scene clearly a rendering instead of reality.

Worse still, you can STILL see that the shadows are not actually calculated real time and not only lag but are jerky in their transitions.

So 10 our of 10 for heating up your GPUs and frying eggs, but 0 for actually impressing me with an advancement in rendering that I can about.

Re:I must be old

[marcello_dl]

Well grandpa, do you remember the HiFi craze? we wanted to completely simulate an orchestra, or whatever sound. Turns out that you can get easily to 95% of fidelity while the other 5% still makes the difference and can't be overcome, unless you spend insane amounts of efforts.

Look at this demo. Impressive, yes. Real, no way. At this stage I think we could convincingly fake a super8 movie, sure. So what? what for?

Re:I must be old

[antiperimetaparalogo]

Because this sort of thing doesn't impress me anymore.

Yes, you must be old, like i am (i was impressed with Amiga - and i already had an, quite impressive, Amstrad CPC 6128).

It looks pretty much the same as every other demo I've seen for the last several years. Sure, it IS more detailed but those details do pretty much nothing to enhance realism and in fact as the demo shows, the artists go out of their way to show off these features (like 3d movies) and ruin it in the process.

I don't need to be blinded by your overpowering puddle of water, thats not impressive, I don't even need thousands of dollars of GPUs to do that.

Instead of showing me tears that look fake as shit and being proud of it, or a dirty face, why don't you work on things that make the whole scene clearly a rendering instead of reality.

Worse still, you can STILL see that the shadows are not actually calculated real time and not only lag but are jerky in their transitions.

So 10 our of 10 for heating up your GPUs and frying eggs, but 0 for actually impressing me with an advancement in rendering that I can about.

I haven't played games from the time my Amstrad stoped working, but i think you need glasses for your presbyopia old man - i would agreed with you if you just wrote what most of us old men, as wiser now, think ("extremely realistic graphics may ruin game's fun"), but to believe that they just "frying eggs in their GPU's" is just a sign of alzheimer old man.

Re:I must be old

[Khyber]

Sorry, we've had graphics like this well before now in the Demoscene. At least since the 8*** series of nVidia GPUs - NINE GENERATIONS AGO.

Re:I must be old

[antiperimetaparalogo]

Sorry, we've had graphics like this well before now in the Demoscene. At least since the 8*** series of nVidia GPUs - NINE GENERATIONS AGO.

O.K., i guess i deserved to get modded down!

I am just an easily impressed old guy who does not play games anymore, so when i watched the demo i was very impressed by what exists today and i immediately got in to the usual "who would ever need more than that" old guy's mode...

Re:I must be old

[X0563511]

Even with 4 GPUs, this level of detail with realtime rendering is impressive. If you were bitching about non-realtime, I'd be on your side, but this is realtime.

Re:I must be old

[UnknownSoldier]

I concur. Visually it is mildly interesting but it ignores the elephant in the room:

* Modern game design spends more time focusing on form then function

Grind-Grind-Grind! /glares at Warframe, Path of Exile, Diablo, etc.

When your refer to your customers as whales attempting to suck as much money out of them as possible, the industry of shovelware is fucked

Re:I must be old

[Dutch Gun]

When you see a tech demo like this, you can generally assume that this is what the next generation of fighting games will at least approach in terms of fidelity and realism. Demos are a tricky thing, because unlike games, you can get away with rendering only the small environment you're currently looking at, and moreover, you can optimize the environment for viewing it only from that limited perspective, making it appear hyper realistic. This is why fighting games tend to look better than just about anything else out there - they're the closest a videogame will ever come to these tech demos in terms of being able to "cheat" like this.

Which games are at the other end of that spectrum? I'd probably have to say MMOs. By necessity, they end up looking a generation behind the latest state-of-the-art for two important reasons: First, naturally, they tend to set the minimum system requirements a bit lower to be more inclusive and attract a bigger customer base. Second, and more importantly, MMOs spend a ridiculous amount of their rendering budget on drawing the large numbers of unique characters on screen at any one time, as well as all the effects that can be fired off by them, and of course, any NPCs in the area, and finally, a typically spawling, open terrain to explore. As such, you can't expect an MMO to look like a AAA single-player game, because the rendering budget is spent in significantly different ways. So, I guess you can expect MMOs to look this good perhaps in another two to three generations.

As a game developer, was I impressed? Well, yeah, as much as I'm impressed by all our modern technology. Nowadays, it's actually pretty easy to sink your entire rendering budget into a single character (or small numbers of characters) and make her look quite impressive - she still looked good though. I was less impressed with the outdoor shots. Short of simple interiors, bare, rocky terrain is the cheapest and easiest type of terrain to build and render with the best looking relative results.

I'd call this a decent, incremental step forward, and I'd say that's a good thing. Radical leaps means everyone has to re-invent their entire production pipelines, and that takes a lot of focus away from where in needs to be, which is first and foremost in creating a fun game. In terms of creating game assets though, the major steps forward that need to be taken are how to build more high-fidelity assets for less - which right now is insanely expensive because it's nearly all hand crafted, and so far have always needed to be re-created entirely from generation to generation.

Re:I must be old

[_xeno_]

Which games are at the other end of that spectrum? I'd probably have to say MMOs.

Yeah, but this is Square Enix we're talking about. They don't let minor details like that prevent them from making the most detailed flower pots MMOs have ever seen.

Not to mention Square Enix has a tradition of making the world's crappiest PC ports. Final Fantasy XIII launched on the PC supporting 1280x720 - and nothing else. Pressing Escape while the game was running instantly quit you out of the game without confirmation. The reason for this became obvious when they tried to add a confirmation dialog - the confirmation dialog wasn't done in-engine, meaning that pressing Escape appeared to lock up your game until you Alt-Tabbed to another app and could see the dialog box.

Square Enix can create some impressive graphics, and they can create games that run well on consoles, but their PC track-record is absolutely abysmal. (Keep in mind I'm only talking about games Square Enix themselves made for PC, not games other studios made that they published.) No matter how pretty their tech demos look, you can be sure that whatever they finally create will be unplayable on the PC.

Re:I must be old

[Anonymous Coward]

The specular shaders are overdone and the lighting is still like in a studio. Also the faces are often still static, "perfect" or proportioned in the wrong way. This time it's the area round the nose, although they did do good work in the mouth area.

Re: I must be old

[Samantha Wright]

What does that really matter? Almost by definition, a demoscene prod involves clever choices in what to make and display on screen in order to achieve an effect. I'm pretty confident the winners of the competitions for the last few years (a) don't have the same flexibility for artists working with their demo engines as Square-Enix does and (b) would never be able to assemble enough assets and people to do the facial expression stuff with anywhere near the same quality (an area in which, AFAIK, Nvidia has been almost entirely pioneering.) The achievement of this video isn't diminished by the achievements of the scene, nor vice-versa.

Re:I must be old

[aaaaaaargh!]

I think it's a nice scene, the hair is great, for example. The problem for me is that it is as blurry, unsharp and overloaded with artificial contrast than any other current video game graphics. I'd like it to be more realistic but apparently my apprehension of reality is different than that of the Square Enix developers.

Show me some dense dark woods with thousands of trees that move in the wind and every tree with as many leaves as a real tree, and how the sun shines through the roofs of the trees like in real life and without any artifical effects like 'rays of god' etc. And all of this as sharp as possible, please. That would impress me more.

Re: I must be old

[Khyber]

"I'm pretty confident the winners of the competitions for the last few years (a) don't have the same flexibility for artists working with their demo engines as Square-Enix does and (b) would never be able to assemble enough assets and people to do the facial expression stuff with anywhere near the same quality (an area in which, AFAIK, Nvidia has been almost entirely pioneering.)"

Actually, they've had the assets and more for a LONG time. Procedural generation eliminates the need for a LOT of work, can be done with a HUGE degree of detail, takes up ungodly tiny amounts of space, and yes, we've had facial emotional animation in demoscene projects well matching up with stuff like LA Noire.

Re:I must be old

[Anonymous Coward]

What does that have to do with rendering graphics?

Nothing, that's what. They are completely different fields.

Re:I must be old

[Anonymous Coward]

7 digit user claims to be "old".

LOL, just LOL.

Re:I must be old

[Anonymous Coward]

The 30-something chink thinks he's old.

Re: I must be old

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to Remedy Entertainment (Death Rally, Max Payne, Max Payne 2, Alan Wake), Starbreeze Studios (Enclave, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Syndicate 2012) and MachineGames (Wolfenstein: The New Order, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood), all of which were formed by demoscene groups.

Re:I must be old

[Anonymous Coward]

Only to a noob.

I've seen far more impressive realtime stuff done on far less hardware.

Re:I must be old

[Anonymous Coward]

You're talking only about MMOs, which is a tiny fraction of a fraction of the games out there.

Re:I must be old

[Anonymous Coward]

I will go one further and say not only did this not impress me, but I think it looks like shit.

Crysis 3 on max looks better.

Re:I must be old

[X0563511]

I'm sure you have. Care to share some examples?

Re: I must be old

[Samantha Wright]

Yes, I'm very aware that demoscene groups form (often very excellent) game companies, but I don't think any of those endeavours have resulted in products with anything like the quality shown in the video.

Re: I must be old

[Samantha Wright]

I'd really love to see some examples—I've been watching demo competitions for years and I can't recall any efforts that really focused on authentic portrayal of humans.

Re: I must be old

[Anonymous Coward]

Alan Wake, The Chronicles of Riddick games, Syndicate and the Wolfenstein games all look at least as good as that crap Squeenix demo.

Re:I must be old

[Anonymous Coward]

Crysis 3.

Actually just about any modern PC game look as good or better.

First Post for Donkey Kong!

[Anonymous Coward]

FTW!

-cyborg_monkey

Very impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

And with only $2000 worth of SLI graphics adapters, the average joe can expect this level of real-time performance in about 8 years time, maybe 12 when we all switch to VR and need to start rendering 2 x 4k viewports at 120fps

Re:Very impressive

[ledow]

If PC gaming has taught me anything, it's "never be on the cutting edge". It's expensive, very expensive, and very fleeting.

A $2000 four-card SLI setup will be two-card setup next year. And a one-card setup the year after. And mainstream the year after.

It's going to TAKE you three years to produce any game of value with this level of model quality anyway.

It's not wasted in that sense. But it is a bit pointless. Stop focussing on the graphics, because I don't want a $100m animation of any level of detail. I played through GTA V and skipped EVERY cutscene. I literally did not care about the pre-rendered or even engine-rendered bits over which I had no control, I just wanted to play the damn game.

Hopefully we'll reach a point where the level of detail is the same wherever you go, and all that differs is the actual gameplay. The AI in GTA V, for example, is still absolute crap. Want to evade the cops? Turn corners lot, get yourself into a point they can't sneak up on you. Pretty much you can last out from a 5-star wanted level until you run out of ammo.

Now go online. Even a couple of people actively hunting you is certain death in a short time unless you are kitted out to the absolute hilt.

We need to stop focusing on graphics, fuck even my old laptop ran GTA V at enough speed that I could complete the game without going blind, and focus on all those other areas of gaming that we're still just completely ignoring.

Re: Very impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think that a 4x SLI will be a single card in two years you are delusional.

Also, the fact that you don't know how to enjoy games is not the developers fault. The AI sure can chase you forever through every fucking corner in the game but what's the point in that? You're supposed to be able to drop the cops off your back, that is the point of running away.

All these graphics... will be lost in time

[Anonymous Coward]

like tears in rain. Time to get a life.

Odd subject choice

[Anonymous Coward]

The middle aged bald guy in polo was the closest to reality, but why bother modelling that?

Uncanny valley

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't impress me.

Shadows still not solved

[phantomus]

One of the things that struck me in this video is that shadows still are very problematic. When the shadow is adjusted manually, flickering faces on the rock appear, and on the face, they don't move smoothly either. Quality of reflections / refraction is hard to judge in this scene. All in alll this is just another high-detail demo that emphasizes the fact that we're stuck in terms of rendering quality; engine complexity goes through the roof, but returns are diminishing. Looking forward to the era of path tracing.

Re:Shadows still not solved

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, I don't expect a major change in this sort of lighting until realtime raytracing is possible.
And since the market seems to be stuck at core-count, more or less, for the past 5-10 years, I don't see it any time soon.

3D processors might make way for more cores, new heatsink research is going well too.
So that might make some room for advances, but it will likely be very incremental at best.
I still expect there will be a time sometime soon where liquid cooling will be an absolute need if you are in to high graphics fidelity, even at the consumer-level. (at least until graphene or similar fabrication methods are available, which offer far superior, well, everything)

Still saddens me that one company that made a raytracer accelerator chip just sort of vanished.
Ever since GPGPU became the thing, nothing happened, company becomes a ghost, still no advancement in the area.

When raytracing finally becomes useful for any major chunk of a scene, things will be so much nicer.
It is such simpler math, just sadly computationally more expensive math. So many graphical hacks will not be needed any more.
Then we can finally get good VR. Time to visit some e-hookers.

Re:Shadows still not solved

[Khyber]

"Still saddens me that one company that made a raytracer accelerator chip just sort of vanished."

That was Intel's Knights Landing coprocessor. I don't think Intel vanished. :)

Re:Shadows still not solved

[X0563511]

The focus appears to be on the shader pipeline and raw polycount. Shadow sample sizes may not be their focus.

Re:Shadows still not solved

[Anonymous Coward]

Something else I noticed is when they show the face close up, there is a lot of jitter. Almost like the way PS1 textures would shake due to not having perspective correction.

we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the skin"

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh. "So realistic you can see their pores!"

Who the hell cares. We want good gameplay, not graphics so massively realistic you can see their nose hairs twitch. Too many games worry far too much about graphics and not nearly enough about making an actual good game. gameplay mechanics people. That's what matters. If I wanted to watch a movie, I'd just go watch a movie.

Also, DX12 = the fail. News flash: there are more platforms now than Windows. Locking yourself into that ecosystem is pretty 20th century.

Huh what??

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried reading this word salad headline four or five times before deciding that today was the day an artery ruptured in my brain.

Re:Huh what??

[camperdave]

Yeah, it is a convoluted title, all right, and the lack of punctuation really scrambles it. But here's the breakdown, near as I can make out:

A Chapter of "Witch", Square Enix's Demo of Real-time CG system DX-12, Impresses at Microsoft Build

They're trying to cram too much into the title.

Re:Huh what??

[Anonymous Coward]

I only came to the comments just to see if anyone said "WTF" in their head as loudly as me

Re:Huh what??

[Anonymous Coward]

I read it as:

"Square-Enix Witch: Chapter, Real-Time CG DX12. Demo Impresses At Microsoft. BUILD!"

OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

Substitute DirectX 12 with OpenGL in TFS and this forum would be jerking off all over this

Re: OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

Bukkake-style?

Re:OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

Substitute DirectX 12 with OpenGL in TFS and this forum would be jerking off all over this

Those with AMD hardware would just get jerky frame rates.

What's with the cynicism?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's amazing that when we witness boundries being pushed, almost everyone here is *extremely* cynical and negative.

On a tech site of all places????
   

Re:What's with the cynicism?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can render anything in realtime if you throw enough FLOPs at it, running a pretty raster-based kludge on $3000 worth of hardware isn't ground breaking, just pretty but impractical. I don't think anyone here doubts graphics will get better with time.

Re:What's with the cynicism?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Slashdot...its Microsoft tech, so it will he crapped on regardless of merit. If this were an open source Linux driver it would be praised.

Re:What's with the cynicism?

[X0563511]

You say this like it wasn't a perfectly valid reason to shit on it...

Do they look good in 720p?

[MPBoulton]

You know, so the games running this engine can be made for the XBox One/PS4?

Bigger scenes were impressive IMO

[MrL0G1C]

Whilst the character was solidly in the uncanny valley, I though the real impressive stuff was the big outdoor scenes. Of course youtube decimated the quality, a torrent link would be better.

But this took thousands of dollars of graphics card, I'd hate to see the framerate for 1 sensibly price card.

Re:Bigger scenes were impressive IMO

[Anonymous Coward]

But this took thousands of dollars of graphics card,

It took 4x Titan X (~$1000 each). Of course there are probably tons of optimizations they still do & not like this is coming out tomorrow, so mid-range cards performance is also going to increase.

Re:Bigger scenes were impressive IMO

[jeffb (2.718)]

I don't know -- I'd say the character is well up the slope on the "realism" side of the valley.

As for the cost of hardware, well, an ATI video card that I installed about ten years ago came with some canned demos. It casually mentioned that one of the demos implemented a technique that was first displayed at SIGGRAPH in, I believe, 1995 or so -- some ten years earlier -- at which time each frame took several minutes to render on a large server farm. In the space of ten years, hardware advances took us from the render farm to real-time rendering on a sub-$1K card.

Now, maybe we're too close to the far end of the S-curve to see that kind of improvement over the next ten years. But I'm not convinced.

Cool

[ArcadeMan]

Any chance they'll update Final Fantasy XIV with this new engine?

Better-looking catgirls? Yeah! ^_^

Re:Cool

[Megane]

Considering that FFXIV began as a project to put a new graphics engine on FFXI, the answer won't just be no, but "they'll start to do it, but end just up making FFXVI with it instead".

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[LostMonk]

Those are NOT the people to rant about!
When you see a movie you thought was boring do you rant about the camera manufacturer?
These guys are developing a very cool technology, it’s awesome. What game designers are doing with their games’ story-telling and plot lines is a very different discussion.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[ArcadeMan]

Also, DX12 = the fail. News flash: there are more platforms now than Windows. Locking yourself into that ecosystem is pretty 20th century.

What the hell are you talking about? DX12 is available on both Windows 10 and Xbox One!

What next?

[koan]

Empathy for pixels.

Re:What next?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember a review of the Final Fantasy movie (that was really long ago, now). I believe it said the movie was somewhat dull, flawed but (semi-humorously) among that the kiss between two 3D rendered persons was more lifelike or emotional that in most movies.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, DX12 = the fail. News flash: there are more platforms now than Windows. Locking yourself into that ecosystem is pretty 20th century.

What the hell are you talking about? DX12 is available on both Windows 10 and Xbox One!

The Xbox One is also running a version of Windows, actually. In any case, for developers targeting consoles and PCs, DirectX is sadly more "portable" than the alternatives like OpenGL and (yet to be released) Vulkan, as the Microsoft console is a significantly larger market than the non-Windows PC operating systems combined. The other consoles use their own proprietary APIs which are incompatible with either. Mobile platforms like Android do use OpenGL, but they are a market for different kinds of games than the PC and consoles. Thus, when the choice is between Windows+Xbox (Direct3D) and Windows+Mac OS X+Linux (OpenGL), the former is a larger market overall. This probably also played a role in OpenGL largely disappearing from PC games in the 2000s (after the first Xbox was released), in addition to the bad driver support from certain vendors.

One question

[PopeRatzo]

Is there multiplayer?

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Megane]

You are talking about a company that made two MMOs for aging console platforms on their way out: FFXI on PS2+hard drive and later X360, then FFXIV on PS3, though that time they wisely did it for PC first. Locking themselves into ecosystems is a way of life. Also, someone over there has a hard-on for flashy graphics as a priority over gameplay. All the graphics in the world didn't save them from having to literally re-make FFXIV after it flopped hard.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Anonymous Coward]

DirectX is sadly more "portable" than the alternatives like OpenGL and (yet to be released) Vulkan

It's nowhere close. Talking just about native support, not things like wine:

DX = Windows, XBOX.
OpenGL = Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, BB, PS4, and something OpenGL based but not quite GL (PSGL) on the PS3. Also Wii API is more similar to GL than to DX.

OpenGL gets you a massively larger market. It's not quite a strict superset due the xbone, but it's more than worth it to drop xbone and pick up everything else. Unless you're gonna do both DX and GL anyway of course, but if you have to pick one, you want to be picking GL these days. Lots of major game engines are moving to GL for that reason.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[X0563511]

Also, DX12 = the fail. News flash: there are more platforms now than Windows. Locking yourself into that ecosystem is pretty 20th century.

No argument there, but progress needs to happen somewhere. We'll all benefit from it in the long run.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell cares. We want good gameplay, not graphics so massively realistic you can see their nose hairs twitch. Too many games worry far too much about graphics and not nearly enough about making an actual good game. gameplay mechanics people. That's what matters. If I wanted to watch a movie, I'd just go watch a movie.

This is Square Enix. They don't do good gameplay.

Remember FFXIV? That was the MMO where they dedicated as many polygons to rendering background objects as they did to the player character, because they looked nicer. Unfortunately they completely neglected the gameplay aspect of the game, leading to one of the largest MMO flops of all time. They since released a version where rather than fix the gameplay they just stole WoW's gameplay. If you can't do something yourself, you might as well steal from the best, I guess.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[ledow]

Is it just me that worries more that they are releasing a sequel to something so sequel-ed already that you have to resort to Roman numerals?

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[BitZtream]

In general, if your game engine is tied to DX or OpenGL, you suck at making game engines or aren't trying to be cross platform anyway.

Rending backend abstraction is ultra trivial when it comes to game engines.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Anonymous Coward]

You're well over a decade too late for that. Final Fantasy X-2 was a thing.

People make fun on Nintendo for over-reliance on Mario, they've got NOTHING on Square Enix. Square Enix is up to something on the order of 60 Final Fantasy games when you count them all up.

So, yes, not only are the up to 15 "games" in the main series, they've already released sequels-of-sequels generating things like "Crisis Core - Final Fantasy VII" (that's actually a prequel to the sequel, you see) and "Final Fantasy X-2" (which is a sequel to a sequel).

But yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

The skin still looks like rubber and they move like puppets.

Old Man Murray

[Guppy]

The short demo shows some pretty impressive graphics, with an amazing level of detail. As the camera zooms in, you can clearly see imperfections in the skin, along with glistening effects from areas where the face is wet with either tears or water

The style of the article reminds me of an Old Man Murray new article, featuring a glowing description of the rendering power of the (then not yet released) PS2 (article at bottom of page): Playstation 2 To Usher In New Era Of Underage Girlfriend Simulation

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Blaskowicz]

Now use OpenGL 4.3 or 4.4, and you find yourself tied to Windows again, perhaps Mac, and a tiny portion of linux users with recent AMD or nvidia hardware, recent distro and proprietary driver installed.

Time to get a life?

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the loser posting anon on a news site...

Re:Time to get a life?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hit a nerve, eh? I think your mommy is calling you up for your din-din.

WOOT make your own porn

[Anonymous Coward]

no more need a actors or actresses or paying large sums no need a copyrights and all that crap.....even regular movies should all go this route

its like copyright has turned into the union of the car industry as they introduced the robots there and slowly we get rid of people....

in time all this money will be freed up for....other stuff...

how long

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone want to predict how long before computer generated human images in movies are indistinguishable from live actors?

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Anonymous Coward]

Like any company, game companies are made up of multiple departments. What this means is that it doesn't matter how much time the graphics guys spend making games look good, because it's not taking time away from the gameplay, story, audio, etc people. The graphics artists are doing their jobs.

OpenGL isn't even up to DX10 level quality yet, so that's completely out. So what open sores, cross platform API would you use?

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, I'm sick of Final Fantasy. I stopped halfway through FF8 and never played another.

What I would like is for the Enix side to make another game in the Soul Blazer/Illusion of Gaia/Terranigma series.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Anonymous Coward]

DirectX is sadly more "portable" than the alternatives like OpenGL and (yet to be released) Vulkan

It's nowhere close. Talking just about native support, not things like wine:

DX = Windows, XBOX.
OpenGL = Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, BB, PS4, and something OpenGL based but not quite GL (PSGL) on the PS3. Also Wii API is more similar to GL than to DX.

OpenGL gets you a massively larger market. It's not quite a strict superset due the xbone, but it's more than worth it to drop xbone and pick up everything else. Unless you're gonna do both DX and GL anyway of course, but if you have to pick one, you want to be picking GL these days. Lots of major game engines are moving to GL for that reason.

PS4 games use Sony's proprietary API, rather than OpenGL. Even if OpenGL compatibility is also available, it would be an inferior option for the developers if performance is a serious priority.

Games developed for consoles and Windows do not necessarily also target mobile platforms. There are less demanding indie titles that run on all, but for large high budget "AAA" games like GTA V compatibility with cell phones is not important.

That leaves Mac and Linux, which have less than 5% gaming market share combined on PC hardware (source: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey). Compatibiliy with them is nice to have, but hardly essential. On the other hand, the Xbox One is a more comparable market to Windows PCs. Therefore, in terms of potential sales (which is what ultimately matters to the publisher) for an AAA game, Direct3D is worth more than OpenGL. Not to mention that even though in theory both are supported on Windows, Direct3D offers better performance and driver compatibility (especially on non-Nvidia hardware) than OpenGL, in addition to better development tools. That is why almost all major games use Direct3D on Windows, and Linux and Mac ports are at best implemented later as an afterthought.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Anonymous Coward]

Now use OpenGL 4.3 or 4.4, and you find yourself tied to Windows again, perhaps Mac, and a tiny portion of linux users with recent AMD or nvidia hardware, recent distro and proprietary driver installed.

OpenGL support is not really better on Windows (other than maybe for Intel GPUs) than on Linux, and Mac OS X is actually inferior to Linux, based on Phoronix benchmarks. That is perhaps one of the reasons why there are some games that support Windows and Linux, but not Mac, which seemingly does not make much sense based on the market shares of the platforms. Nvidia and AMD proprietary OpenGL drivers are 90+% the same on Windows and Linux, and on the latter they just use some kind of wrapper layer to run the same binary blob. The Nvidia drivers are even slightly faster on Linux than Windows the majority of time.

The simple reason why you do not see many people complaining about OpenGL on Windows (giving the illusion that there are less problems with the drivers) is that the overwhelming majority of AAA games on Windows just do not use OpenGL in the first place.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Anonymous Coward]

In general, if your game engine is tied to DX or OpenGL, you suck at making game engines or aren't trying to be cross platform anyway.

Rending backend abstraction is ultra trivial when it comes to game engines.

That might be the case in an ideal world, but in reality developers have finite resources and have to meet the deadlines set by the publisher. In the fairly common case when the target platforms are PC + XB1 + PS4, OpenGL support only brings an extra 4-5% market (Linux and Mac OS X) from the PC sales, and it is also generally regarded as being harder to work with than Direct3D. So, it is no wonder it gets sacrificed so often. Also, even when the developers use a third party engine that supports OpenGL and minority PC operating systems, those still tend to end up being dropped for a number of reasons, especially when extensive modifications are made to the engine.

Crying woman

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of all the infinite combination of characters and settings, what we choose to showcase some new 3D technology is a grieving woman.

GG developers!

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Talderas]

The only roman numeral game in the Final Fantasy series that can be construed as a sequel is Final Fantasy XV and even that is an exceedingly tough sell since it only uses a similar mythology to Final Fantasy XIII, based on information known so far, but it was also initially developed as Versus XIII rather than XV. Each of the rest have their own narratives that are isolated.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Anonymous Coward]

If they aren't sequels, they shouldn't use the same name.

Same Name + 1 == Sequel.

Even then, what you're saying is that it's the JRPG equivalent of Madden, where they release the same game but with updated characters and "story" and hope people don't notice.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Talderas]

Sequels are a function of narrative. Series is a function of brand.

Harry Potter, for instance, is a series of seven books which six are sequels. Each book in the series builds on the narrative of the series as a whole.

Goosebumps is a series of 180 books where each book, with a few exceptions, is it own narrative. Goosebumps #2 "Stay Out of the Basement" is not a sequel to Goosebumps #1 "Welcome to Dead House".

Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII continue the plot from the previous game (XIII-2 continuing the plot of XIII and LR continuing the plot presented by XIII and XIII-2). Thus these two games function as sequels to Final Fantasy XIII. Final Fantasy VIII has no relation to the plot or narrative of any preceding Final Fantasy game so it's not a sequel.