Looks like something from Jacob's Ladder.
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Final Fantasy XV Lumnious Engine Animation Tech
- Thread starter The Goat
- Start date
Looks like something from Jacob's Ladder.
artsi
Member
I think it was more of a support issue than about the engine tech. The engine team (who would give that support) is tied to FFXV at the moment, as they're developing the engine alongside the game.
But when FFXV is done Luminous should be more mature, so who knows what will happen.
Relaxed Muscle
Member
The more your tools aren't up to the standard quality, the more support you need. The engine is so bad is being made tailored to a single game, which means it's a poor choice for every other team at SE that dosn't want to make a game exactly as FFXV.
Once XV is finished, the engine will need even more time to be really an all-purpose engine.
AmethystEnd
Member
The problem here is that assertion as if it were fact. This is only a supposition.
Let's hope the game doesn't end the same way.
I'll drink to that.
I expect amazing, more linear sceneries and some great looking towns. Even FFXIII-2 and Lightning Returns kinda got this. The open world still looks like you have to walk minutes until you finally see something that sticks out. Maybe it tries to be too realistic and GTA-ish. That's the impression the latest stuff (chobobo gameplay, driving gameplay, the demo) create. If you can really watch this stuff on Youtube and say "samey is the last thing i'd call this game", I have no idea what "samey" in conjunction with video games could mean for you.
Whompa02
Member
You don't "drop" an engine...do people not understand what a game engine is? "Engine" itself is a buzzword. All games utilize an engine to function, yes, but the engine itself is all bits and pieces of tech that works within the framework of the games design. Hell, Luminous engine doesn't have the right framework for proper car handling yet, therefor the XV team is reaching out to the Just Cause team for that code.
Feel like this is videogames 101.
Feel like this is videogames 101.
It's half true. We can't entirely judge how good or bad the engine is, but we do know only one game at SE is being developed with it, and that a game that originally used it dropped it. Those are generally indicators of a problematic engine.
I think the engine is not as bad as some think, but it's also not as good as some engines that already exist. The main issues that keep the engine from being better are probably company changes, lack of personnel, and the switch in focus to simultaneous development with FF15.
In my case, it's a little more than assertion or supposition. ;p
Not that that's ever stopped Relaxed Muscle from quoting my posts and countering with his own assertions and suppositions, though!
Oh don't get me wrong, i get what you're saying and it makes sense, but really there's still too little material to judge overworld's variety: you quote the chocobo and driving videos plus the demo, but they all look to be set close from each other or in the same region at least (hence the similar look), so we still don't know how much will various region vary in artistic/graphic style.
Plus, in those videos they literally run in circle or drive for a very short time, so even if there were POIs they made sure we could not see them
Same goes for the demo, it's a WIP made to showcase combat, so i'm sure the real meat in terms of elements that sticks out were removed.
Then again what you say it's true, there will be "emptier" spaces between POIs and that's part of the game's philosophy (and i'm fine with it because honestly i'm sick with Ubisoft's way of filling every inch of the map), but the artistic direction seems solid enough to me that they'll make these in-between areas all but boring and samey.
But really, wheter its mine or yours point of view, there's still not enough material to validate our views, we'd need something like a footage longer than 3min. of going from Town A to Town B.
Dictator93
Member
Witcher 3 is really nice looking out in the open environments, but the interiors for all buildings aren't as impressive. The most impressive thing from SE is their GI approximation in an open wiorld scale the really cements the look of the interiors to the outside world. From their JP site it appears they're also still experimenting for a quicker and more accurate solution.
I wonder what GI it is using. Looks pretty awesome here.
artsi
Member
It's their own solution, here's a paper about it.
http://jp.square-enix.com/info/library/pdf/Fast Global Illumination Baking via Ray-Bundles.pdf
Wherever Luminous ends up, they do have some really competent staff working on the R&D side.
Okay that collision detection part was just boss.
Hey Square, you remember this game you made once upon a time?
Please use this tech for another 3D fighting game. I'll become a huge fan.
Would really prefer another one of these two...
Have they given a release date for XV yet?
I have played episode duscae 2.0 and Enjoyed what I played, there was some impressive stuff there but I do hope that they have enough time to give it all a bit of a polish before launch.
Go_Ly_Dow
Member
July/August would be amazing, but perhaps too soon.
artsi
Member
This is complete speculation but I imagine that Tabata was given a deadline that the game must ship for the 2016 holidays.
It would be stupid not to take all the time he has (as the schedule is already tight, and there's a lot of work to do), so I would imagine the release date to be in November or December.
It would be stupid not to take all the time he has (as the schedule is already tight, and there's a lot of work to do), so I would imagine the release date to be in November or December.
I recall you are a sound guy (engineer?) contracted by SE for sound-related stuff, and aren't a SE Japan employee nor any particular person working on the engine. You're actually not an SE employee, period.
I wouldn't trust you on the engine either, because you're just not that involved in the technical development of it. Trying to wield your position in being a contractor for the company as an authority on the matter reeks a bit.
NoctisVsStar
Member
I said damn.. Did falk kick your dog? Lol
Without going into anything that's strictly NDA or unrevealed both on my company's side and SE's side, I've worked on both the Kingdom Hearts series and Episode Duscae. I talk to quite a few people working on both projects, and get general impressions. That's it. I don't profess to be Hashimoto's right hand man or the leading expert on Square Enix's business decisions or anything like, yet I've been able to get at least second hand opinions on the matter from people on both projects. (Hence, I mean what I said by "a little more" quite literally in that respect)
Which is a lot more than can be said for opinion or speculation based on forum posts.
Furthermore, if you've seen my posting habits on GAF, I've been 1) rather irreverent in general 2) not particularly biased towards any of the games I've worked on, be it anything from Lightning Returns to Zestiria. There are some aspects I like, and some aspects I will criticize simply based on my own preference of games. Or business practices.
Again, coming back to FFXV (and by inclusion Episode Duscae), things aren't perfect, and it's too early to tell how the final product will come out, and I've never been one to say "Oh everything's gonna be KOSHER GUARANTEED@#$@" (heck, even Tabata is careful with his answers) but speculation on things like "Kingdom Hearts dropped Luminous because it's bad" is simply factually incorrect. Let me give an example. If you (not 'you', in general I mean, see some posts in this thread) wanted to criticize how FFXV's being marketed, by all means have at it at the Dawn trailer, since that's part of the marketing plan. Calling this tech demo, aimed at CEDEC on the other hand, a waste of resources, again is incorrect simply based on its intention. A similar distinction can be made about engine usage, engine switches, what Square Enix sees in itself as a tech company, etc.
I might add that if you wanted to insist I have a bias towards projects I work on, I'd like to remind you again that I also get contracted for Kingdom Hearts stuff. I'm credited in games using everything from proprietary engines, Crystal Tools, UE3, UE4, Unity, heck even MMF2.
And in closing, apologies if I'm coming off as a know-it-all. Not my deliberate intention.
edit: CEDEC, not CDEC. Too much esports for Falk!
Kralamoonard
Member
*drops mic*
Seriously though, I don't think there's any need to apologise, you've done a good job already at explaining yourself.
I really, really hope it's Sept/Oct, so that I might have 1-2 weeks completely free after the exams and before the fall semester for several days of all-nighters as usual when a new FF is released :>
Thanks. I suppose winter is a good time for a game like this so they have almost a year oi tidy things up which is pretty good.
Feeling really positive about SquareEnix this generation, they've shown a few things that I'm interested in already and I wouldn't be too surprised to see some currently unnanounced FF X/X-2 style remasters hitting the PS4 at some point.
I don't know anything about the engine but I believe Falk did a great job in the sound department. :3
Head says November, heart says Sept 18th.
I don't know how much Oct/Nov/Dec would be a good period. Aside from the usual yearly titles that takes away the spotlight from many other games, XV heavily risks to go head-to-head with both Horizon and Mass Effect Andromeda, which would not be a good thing for each one of the three (even if i expect one of those to be delayed to 2017).
GoldandBlue
Member
This gameeeeeeee can't wait!!
I mean, it really is impractical to run through forests and fight against massive creatures wearing outfits like if you were about to perform in an emo band in 2005 but I think they look really cool and have personality.
I mean, it really is impractical to run through forests and fight against massive creatures wearing outfits like if you were about to perform in an emo band in 2005 but I think they look really cool and have personality.
Stuff like this is so impressive and exciting to me. Realistic physics are absolutely what defines "next gen" in my opinion. I always think of Red Dead Redemption's horse muscle physics when I see tech like this; it was a great early example of how immersive physics can be.
I look forward to seeing this become a widely used feature. An awesome usage scenario for this is in wrestling games. One of the things that has always looked so ridiculous is when you have characters whose muscles appear to be permanently flexed - such as a wrestler's bicep appearing flexed and the same size even when their arm is completely straight. Once you see visuals where anatomy animates accurately, looking at graphics without it will look crazily dated!
I look forward to seeing this become a widely used feature. An awesome usage scenario for this is in wrestling games. One of the things that has always looked so ridiculous is when you have characters whose muscles appear to be permanently flexed - such as a wrestler's bicep appearing flexed and the same size even when their arm is completely straight. Once you see visuals where anatomy animates accurately, looking at graphics without it will look crazily dated!
Japanmanx3
Member
copelandmaster
Member
Makes sense. I heard about a (tv? talkshow?) interview where that guy was all jokes about the game not being done, and it was about 2003/4/5 around that time. Daikatana definitely counts though.
Anyway, another thing to consider: UE4 seems to be a very taxing engine for open worlds right now. Loads of people have complained about ARK: Survival Evolved's performance problems. Comparing unfinished game to unfinished game (a terrible comparison, honestly), FFXV runs a lot better on lesser hardware. From personal experience, Epic's open world Kite Demo is wonderfully optimized (they delayed the release for that reason), but is brutal on hardware. The scene with the kid runs wonderfully on my 970, but the free-roam portions run very very rough.
charlequin
Banned
It's almost impossible for it to actually benefit on net from such a thing, though, that's the entire point. Nothing this game is attempting is unusual or outside the bounds of what existing third-party engines can do; nothing demonstrated so far in the Luminous engine is unique or notable compared to tools that already exist on the market. In the time it takes a team to develop an engine like this, you could have the same number of engineers work just on learning Unreal Engine 4 at a deep and fundamental level (which you can do because you'd have access to the source code) and still come out ahead -- and then unlike your in-house engine, UE4 is just going to keep getting updated with new functionality even if you don't put any more resources on it.
In-house engines spent a long time being wise investments because most development used a short pipeline of standardized tools already, and licensed engines didn't help much with building advanced features or developing cross-platform; the staffing necessary to build an engine in-house was relatively small, and could serve as a dramatic improvement to the productivity of your artists and engineers. Today, the number of specific tools needed to build a $50m+ AAAA game is far greater and the toolchain provided by a licensee like Epic is polished and easy to use.
More specifically, if you have a team that's talented in wringing out performance or impressive effects out of part of the rendering process, it's generally going to be much more efficient to do so on top of an external core engine. Luminous' lighting engine is much more advanced than the default one in UE4, and on par with high-end third-party modules; it would be much more efficient to develop that in-house but use a third-party engine as a base.
I don't think it's bad the way that, say, Crystal Tools was bad (where it appears to have been a major factor in endless development cycles for games that ran like shit) and I don't think it'll be a huge factor in FFXV's quality. I do think it's self-evidently not good enough to use for anything else once XV is out the door.
I have heard of FFXIV:RR, a game which is not built on the Luminous Engine, yes. They took the lighting engine (which is far and away the most impressive part of Luminous) and used that, but didn't use any of the other rendering stack or the toolchain.
copelandmaster
Member
Luminous was in development since 2010 or so. FFXV rebooted in July 2012. UE4 wasn't released to developers en masse until March 2014. Do you think they should have postponed the project reboot for close to 2 years for something like UE4, including possibly having to throw out over a years work of work when the game was cross gen, assets that they were probably able to recover in the Ebony to Luminous transition? Do you think that the ease of UE4 (including the ease of rebuilding scrapped functions/assets) would have made up for the losses? KH3 recovered, but not without losing time and scrapping some work, work that FFvsXIII had lots more of by comparison.
Go_Ly_Dow
Member
Also, by the time they would finally have their hands on UE4 they would need to transition over all the unique elements to the engine adding even more time.
Dreadx_Jecht
Banned
Would be really cool if us normal hobbyists could have the opportunity to play with engines like this.
NipplesAndToes23
Member
Yeah, these animations are slick.
copelandmaster
Member
Oh, yeah. Ebony to UE4. That sounds like a nightmare, plus add a year for the process.Three years. I'm not surprised that SE said, "fuck that shit, get this bitch out on the tech we already have, A-S-A-P." Plus, in 2012, new gen consoles weren't announced, AND SE was just about to unveil Agni. Why go UE4?
Can you imagine? By 2012 everyone had given up, XIII trilogy left fans upset and cynical, FFvsXIII was a joke to loads of people.
Take a look at the mood right before the TGS 2014 refresh, following a year of radio silence after the E3 2013 re-reveal:
Square Enix reveals TGS 2014 booth map
What Does Final Fantasy XV Need To Be Satisfying?
Where the fuck is Final Fantasy XV?
I think I'd like to congratulate Tabata and his team on how considerably well things have gone, and SE as a whole for keeping the money flowing in from other departments, in spite of the semi-cluster that place has been since the merger. Such an undertaking would have sunk most other organizations.
BishopLamont
Banned
this is impressive? lmao
delusional
delusional
Well, I'll be really frank. In my personal opinion (and I've said as much on GAF quite a few times in the past few years), what Japan really lacked the entirety of the PS360 gen was en-masse adoption of available engine and middleware solutions. While a sweeping generalization, It's a big reason that Western studios pulled ahead when AAA costs ballooned the way they did, while Japan by and large were stuck with proprietary stuff due to precedent, pride, stubbornness, cultural and linguistic barriers, what-have-you.
So I totally agree with where you're coming from, on a very general level. I see KH3 evaluating and then moving over to UE4 as nothing but a good thing for that very reason, since it would have been without the benefit direct support, communication and tailored R&D for Luminous the way FFXV did/does. I think that's a huge step for the Japanese industry because it sets a precedent for the Japanese industry in general when a franchise as important as Kingdom Hearts goes with a licensed engine, cutting out the need to reinvent the wheel in many, many ways. (And Lord knows we've seen an explosion of adoption of UE4 and Unity by Japanese projects across the entire board)
That being said, going back to engine dev, I believe my points about training and pushing the envelope still stands. In this case, it's not so much reinventing the wheel as it is wanting to understand everything that goes into wheel design and construction, so that knowledge can be utilized in future, for wheelmaking or otherwise. It's the difference between being given a fish, knowing how to fish, and going a step further, knowing everything from why fishing rods work, how to build a fishing rod, and fish psychology in general to more efficiently catch fish. (Okay, that was a terrible analogy)
It's a similar reason the Witch Chapter 0 tech demo exists. The average consumer (Alex_Mexico lol) might not understand why even bother with it, since it doesn't result in a game, but in the end it's about getting very familiar with the capabilities of DirectX 12. A mix of forward-thinking, experimentation and training, if you will.
Also, I'm gonna just go out on a limb and half-agree with you w.r.t Crystal Tools.
The entire debacle early on was simply that it was trying to do too many things at once supporting multiple projects, resulting in a shit ton of delays as specifications kept changing, or were at odds with each other. THAT is the exact problem that's being avoided by folding the entire Luminous team into FFXV.
After all that was said and done, it ran FFXIII 'well enough'. Unfortunately, it also got pressed into service for an MMO, and then later on two sequels, the latter of which was designed in such a way that played to very little of its strengths and exposed its biggest weaknesses (Vast open areas, poor mem management and streaming capability, etc)
Regardless what happens with Luminous post-FFXV, I don't think it's going to have anywhere close to the same problems as Crystal Tools.
(Also I should stick a disclaimer here that, as dramatis pointed out, I'm neither SQEX JP staff, nor any form of official spokesperson. Opinions are my own, formed with a little bit more insight than the average person, yadda yadda)
charlequin
Banned
I think they should finish up FFXV on the stack it's already being developed on, write off the development effort put into making "Luminous" a general-purpose engine, and go with existing engines for new projects being started now, which... seems to be exactly what they are doing?
You're not fooling me, nope.
charlequin
Banned
It's certainly true there's a certain amount of value in this; the question is where you stop. Do you have your teams reimplement basic physics effects in every game just so they know how they work? Do you have them build basic graphical features like, say, anisotropic filtering, from scratch just to prove they can? Do you make devs skip abstraction layers and work directly with low-level APIs for every part of a game, just to make absolutely sure there's no inefficiency anywhere? You wind up going down a rabbit hole on this kind of thing.
When you get down to it, I think game teams are going to tend to have some core competencies. High-level rendering tech is something AAA teams can often bring some real expertise to bear on, since they hire specifically for people who are skilled in that area and there's a big competitive advantage to making your game look awesome and distinct. On the other hand, the vast majority of game dev teams know absolutely jack shit about building a good scripting environment, or making efficient asset-management tools, or doing distributed aggregated analytics, or creating efficient automated build environments. Companies like Epic and Unity staff up with people who are specialized in those fields and spend a ton of money and man-hours building high-end systems to accomplish those things; SE (or whoever) isn't all that likely to compete.
This is why I think it's such a good idea for most teams to move towards external engines as a base now -- it's really hard to get the quality of toolchain and support tech without licensing it, and these days both UE and Unity are modular enough that you can swap in your own code for the pieces that you really have the specific talent to develop efficiently to spec.
copelandmaster
Member
Fair enough, pretty reasonable assumption.
Since it's been a marque showcase of their in-house tech since 2012, if whatever Agni turns out to be is not on Luminous or its successor, it's fair to say that the software has been retired.
The reason I think winter is a good time is simply because it's next year but they still have plenty of time to work on the game.
;(
The whole FFXIV fiasco is especially heartbreaking, at least based on my understanding that Crystal Tools had a huge impact of the development cycle for the original game.
I was looking forward to XIV as the definitive job-based Final Fantasy game, the one to right all of FFXI's wrongs in a next-gen package. Then images of the in-game maps leaked, Square Enix clarified that the already-terrible "charge" battle system was "just a placeholder" for a game releasing in 6 months, the fatigue system was introduced, and so on...
Square Enix has no reason to do this, but I hope they someday release an in-depth post-mortem on FFXIV 1.0. It would be interesting to see the original vision and how it was marred by Crystal Tools
and probably Tanaka
But hey, maybe it was for the best:
Anyway, the team animations/combo attacks look awesome, but I still have low expectations for XV.
charlequin
Banned
They did these for XII and XIII in Game Developer magazine, both of which do a pretty good job of blaming Square-Enix's disastrous internal development culture for the games' issues. Both identify pretty much the same issues, so you could probably just read those and get the sense of the XIV postmortem (and a couple years from now, the XV postmortem.)
Also UE4 wasn't large world capable until GDC this year. I imagine its open world pipeline still needs some more bits and pieces until it is a turnkey solution (as much as things could be in gamedev).