eyeball_kid
Member
Personally I don't think the difference between PC and PS4 is going to be as dramatic some people are suggesting. The art style isn't something realism-focused like Uncharted 4 or even Dark Souls where a beefier GPU would make it look a magnitude better because these are stylized art assets.
Innes (neé Hazel) answered that in that nucl.ai talk:
"At the moment we do all the PCG calculations on the CPU [...] If we had to move something onto GPU it would be polygonization because that's quite general code, rather than something we edit a lot like generation code. The generator has to be something the team can look at and work with and make sense of..."
Basically they could, but they've kept the proc gen code on the CPU because they wanted to keep it in a language that the team can understand and edit easily.
p.s. while looking for that talk I stumbled on a different Hazel proc gen talk from 2014 which I hadn't seen before. It's very developer-focused, but it's pretty interesting. She does talk about NMS some, but more about concepts and techniques they use in their generation. (warning, audio is a bit shit and gets *really* loud for a few secs about 1:40 in) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJRXNesI9f4
I do wonder if they can run their terrain generators on the GPU though - that would help a lot compared to being stuck with the jaguar cores.
Innes (neé Hazel) answered that in that nucl.ai talk:
"At the moment we do all the PCG calculations on the CPU [...] If we had to move something onto GPU it would be polygonization because that's quite general code, rather than something we edit a lot like generation code. The generator has to be something the team can look at and work with and make sense of..."
Basically they could, but they've kept the proc gen code on the CPU because they wanted to keep it in a language that the team can understand and edit easily.
p.s. while looking for that talk I stumbled on a different Hazel proc gen talk from 2014 which I hadn't seen before. It's very developer-focused, but it's pretty interesting. She does talk about NMS some, but more about concepts and techniques they use in their generation. (warning, audio is a bit shit and gets *really* loud for a few secs about 1:40 in) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJRXNesI9f4