immortal-joe
Member
I HATE the procedurally generated trend. I don't see how that can ever replace proper level design.
Instantly halved my hype for Galak Z.
Instantly halved my hype for Galak Z.
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Witcher 3 world building (GDC slides)
- Thread starter ScepticMatt
- Start date
Sentenza
Member
Just to be clear, let's not mix different things.
They aren't talking about a procedurally generated world like, say, Minecraft.
They are talking about using procedural generation to create a big but detailed landscape with a certain degree of approximation, and then working on that foundation to create an hand-crafted experience.
I don't think that's universally true.
To give a good sense of journey and travel (without it being a cutscene) you need a large enough space.
I still remember how odd it felt in GUN, when they mentioned the town in Mexico as being something very far story-wise, and yet you could reach it on horse in about 30 seconds, in game.
Fine Ham Abounds
Member
Yeah, I think a lot of people are taking this to mean they are letting an algorithm do their world design for them. Unless I'm totally misunderstanding, this is basically developing a set of tools which streamlines certain problematic or time-consuming detail items, and also gave them a terrain copy/paste function. The only thing that sounds actually procedurally placed by these tools is vegetation.
Vulcano's assistant
Banned
C'mon guys, how can you have great level design if you have your artists wasting a day placing bushes every time the level designer wants to experiment with parts of the map?
cheezcake
Member
I only have a basic understanding of graphics but pretty much everything.
Increased CPU, GPU load because more items need to be clipped and there are more vertices to perform transforms on. Memory bandwidth to stream in more/higher quality assets, memory size to fit all those assets etc.
Out of those I imagine the GPU strain on having to transform a crap-ton more vertices, and the memory size are the biggest bottlenecks.
Prophet Steve
Member
It is much easier to start off with a procedural edited world and change it to what you want than starting from scratch.
You don't want to pay attention to where you place every mountain, hill, valley, tree, bush, flower etc since it does not matter a whole lot where you place those. After you have those things done automatically you have something to work with.
You remove, add, raise or lower anything you want until you are satisfied with it.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Seems more like procedural tools than a procedural world as we've come to know the latter term. When people think procedural they think Minecraft and Diablo. Going by the pdfs CDPR are more talking about procedural tools and elements of the engine that allow them to work faster and build hand crafted content around and within procedurally generated templates.
An example of the former would be their automatic LOD scaling. LOD scaling is in every half decently optimised game, and for The Witcher 2 they (it would seem) hand made the lower polygon variants for their models. This method is extremely time consuming and laborious. If a tool can efficiently downscale poly complexity similar if not identical to what the artist would do by hand, then the artist suddenly has a bunch of time free to work on more hand crafted unique stuff.
An example of the latter would be hand crafting mountains using tools, hand crafting various texture layers, but letting algorithms procedural generate the placement of those layers on the mountain mesh, based on heights and what not. If the algorithms are good then you wont notice the difference between procedural work and hand crafted work, because on your end it's fundamentally the same thing: it looks the way it looks. But on the developer end it speeds up the world building process by allowing believable templates to be generated and then hand crafted content built around them.
You could argue foliage tools are already very much like this. For a lot of games generating foliage requires creating a brush, size of the bunch, density of the brush, and so on, and then selecting various foliage meshes to be including in that brush. "Painting" the environment with this brush generates your selected mesh tweaked with whatever parameters you chose. It still allows for finer details, but is a faster way of painting foliage than hand placing literally every single blade of grass.
You need tools like this to be efficient, and this seems to be the goal: expand on these tools, and cull a lot of the grind work done by developers that could procedurally generated with just as impressive quality as hand made.
An example of the former would be their automatic LOD scaling. LOD scaling is in every half decently optimised game, and for The Witcher 2 they (it would seem) hand made the lower polygon variants for their models. This method is extremely time consuming and laborious. If a tool can efficiently downscale poly complexity similar if not identical to what the artist would do by hand, then the artist suddenly has a bunch of time free to work on more hand crafted unique stuff.
An example of the latter would be hand crafting mountains using tools, hand crafting various texture layers, but letting algorithms procedural generate the placement of those layers on the mountain mesh, based on heights and what not. If the algorithms are good then you wont notice the difference between procedural work and hand crafted work, because on your end it's fundamentally the same thing: it looks the way it looks. But on the developer end it speeds up the world building process by allowing believable templates to be generated and then hand crafted content built around them.
You could argue foliage tools are already very much like this. For a lot of games generating foliage requires creating a brush, size of the bunch, density of the brush, and so on, and then selecting various foliage meshes to be including in that brush. "Painting" the environment with this brush generates your selected mesh tweaked with whatever parameters you chose. It still allows for finer details, but is a faster way of painting foliage than hand placing literally every single blade of grass.
You need tools like this to be efficient, and this seems to be the goal: expand on these tools, and cull a lot of the grind work done by developers that could procedurally generated with just as impressive quality as hand made.
. I'm still holding out on starting Witcher 2 (have it on steam) because i want to play it with good gfx.Dualshockers has written a nice piece about this. With this technique they can discard ~ 98% of objects around the player in the zone he is in.
Dredd97
Member
Core Theme: Procedural generation as much as possible, removing months of extra work.
Terrain
Generated with World Machine
46x46 tiles, 512x512 each (23552^2), 63MB
0.37cm between vertices, ~74 km^2 total (35 times Witcher 2)
adaptive software tessellation (no "wasted triangles")
3 texture layers: Background (e.g rock), Foreground (e.g. snow), Control map (e.g slope)
Terrain shadows
Vegetation:
Custom vegetation generator
pigment map for better blend with ground color
Photoshop-like stamp/brush-Tool for fine tuning
Other:
16 people working on Engine.
Automatic occlusion culling + streaming with Umbra.
Automatic LOD generation with Simplogon. Artist created in Witcher 2, and "they hated it".
Links:
Terrain and vegetation: http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/GDC2014/Presentations/Gollent_Marcin_Landscape_Creation_and.pdf
Simplogon LOD generator: http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/GDC2014/Presentations/Balazs_Torok_Speed_Up_Your.pdf
Umbra 3 culling + Streaming: http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/GDC2014/Presentations/Bushnaief_Jasin_Solving_Visibility_In.pdf
Correct me if wrong, tessellate if old.
Well according to dual shockers it's even bigger than that...
http://www.dualshockers.com/2014/04...s-by-themselves-3-5-times-larger-than-skyrim/
flyinpiranha
Member
Gorgeous. Holy shit this is like the game I always wanted (before this, Skyrim fit that bill).
It's really crazy to see how these things are designed with the 'visibility' of what the player can see and filling that in and such. When he zooms out and you see the parts that "disappear" it's just kind of mind-blowing to somebody like me who doesn't know developing at all.
Yeah exactly, all this talk of massive areas has me very worried.
With that said, CDPR has a great track record so I hope they nail it.
dragonbane
Member
Simplogon seems really useful. Number of notable devs started using it and it seems to produce good results while saving a lot of time.
For that game? For a game you slowly plod through, I can understand. When your focus is primarily on you and the missiles coming towards you, I figure procedurally generated would be just fine.
If this game is as big as they say, it would take forever to hand craft genuinely interesting things everywhere.
The short answer is that there are several things but they all have been solved in the past few years by planetary engines a la Outerra or Anteworld. It's mostly a matter of developers and designers catching up, much in the same way that games are only now widely adopting water tech that's existed for years.
this is a misconception stemming from unclear comprehension of what procedural tools are really able of doing. Procedural generation doesn't have to replace level generation, instead it's able to augment it (ie fill in details and blanks). Think of how zbrush is making detailed hi poly models possible at all while before that poly-by-poly modeling workflows basically meant one would take years to make.
Ciastek3214
Junior Member
Night Hunter
Banned
At first I thought what a fucking asshole so the end really got me.
ScepticMatt
Member
Well as others have said, that area only was Novigrad.
really interesting how it only renders what the camera can see. Makes me wonder if we will run into LOD rendering issues or texture pop in like we had with RAGE. I don't want to spin the camera in witcher 3 around and just see nothing because it didn't stream in the world correctly or fast enough.
rendering and streaming are separate issues (outside of megatextures specifically). because streaming is slow compared to camera rotation streaming is always done for elements all around the player instead of just the direction he's looking. Not drawing them is culling, unrelated to streaming, and we've always usually culled everything that's out of FOV. The new thing in recent years is culling what's occluded by objects on screen.
EDIT: ooops, never mind, reading the slides they're actually using occlusion to drive streaming too. Color me intrigued 'cause that seems kinda risky.
Thanks for all the fascinating info!
I think this would make more sense if you wrote:
When I read your sentance I thought they hated automatic LOD creation in Witcher 2.
I think this would make more sense if you wrote:
When I read your sentance I thought they hated automatic LOD creation in Witcher 2.
Culling happens in almost all 3d games.
SolVanderlyn
Thanos acquires the fully powered Infinity Gauntlet in The Avengers: Infinity War, but loses when all the superheroes team up together to stop him.
If nothing else, I now have a new desktop wallpaper from these slides.
I really hope they can divorce the concept of "big, huge, giant world" with "vacant, lifeless space and tedious travel" and remarry it to "immersive, engaging, and purposeful". Even in Skyrim, I felt like a lot of the world was there just to be there. It was beautiful, sure, but...
I really hope they can divorce the concept of "big, huge, giant world" with "vacant, lifeless space and tedious travel" and remarry it to "immersive, engaging, and purposeful". Even in Skyrim, I felt like a lot of the world was there just to be there. It was beautiful, sure, but...
Culling for what to render happens. The presentation here talks about culling for what to stream in, which is a notably trickier proposition.
Try harder.
BouncyFrag
Member
Just as long as they include a decent map system with the game.
*looks sternly and shakes finger at Vergen*
*looks sternly and shakes finger at Vergen*
That's not the problem though. If the occlusion is also determining which assets to load, then it becomes dependent on IO to have the assets ready and like all just-in-time models in means pop-in. That's why asset loading is usually based on prediction rather than what's visible. If you go by the slides the only answer they give is LoD which would mean Rage-like behavior (ie higher levels of detail popping in as you turn the camera).
However, one of the drawings shows a circle around the camera position, which means the occlusion query is probably not based on FOV but camera position, ie for data streaming purposes you "see" in all directions at the same time, it's only for rendering that you cull based on the FOV.
Fried Food
Banned
prog gen open worlds are almost never very fun to be in
theSlacker
Member
I agree. Why I still prefer the tiny worlds of Gothic 1 and 2 over most of anything else. Also, no, I'm not only thinking of fully randomized game worlds like minecraft either.
Pretty much, World Machine is a tool that's been around for a little while. You can load in height maps, or sculpt terrain yourself in zbrush and then let the tool simulate things like erosion, or diffrent layers of soil and how wind air and rain effects them over time, giving a much more natural feel to the landscape. The cool thing is you can let the program render out maps for things like tints for foilage, so like this image
have a look on this guys youtube channel for some tutorials https://www.youtube.com/user/wenda111287/videos
World machine is like zbrush a tool to get better results. it does not replace the level artists, it gives them tools to create more realistic environment, and its bloody fast!
Ever since they started saying how TW3 was 3 times bigger than Skyrim I've been a bit iffy about it. I can't be the only one who just wants to see where the story goes, and that it doesn't need an oversized world map for that. I have no doubt it's gonna rock TW2 overall, but I'm still afraid it won't even feel like the second game.
Then again, the first game is also vastly different, so it could be that The Witcher is one of those game-trilogies that evolve with every game, like Jak & Daxter or Arkham.
Then again, the first game is also vastly different, so it could be that The Witcher is one of those game-trilogies that evolve with every game, like Jak & Daxter or Arkham.
What surprises me isn't that more devs are starting to use automatic LOD generation, it's how late they are about it. Good mesh simplification algorithms have existed for quite some time, and it seems like such a huge time saver.
I think that assets are loaded in memory, but this occlusion algorithm is there to allow GPU to be focused only on objects that are visible.
You're not the only one. From what I've seen so far, I would still prefer a smaller in scale, but more detailed game like TW2. I felt maps in TW2 were perfect, not too big for sure, but detailed and full of life. Chasing after Skyrim seems weird, to me it was always a classic case of "quantity over quality", the exact opposite of TW2 design.
I have a lot of trust in CDPR and I'm gonna get TW3 day 1 no matter what, but the more I read about it, the more I realize the things they're hyping are not what I'm looking for at all. Sigh.
The slides are specifically about how to load assets based on occlusion.
I like large worlds. But one thing that'll be new for the team is making a huge world that's fun to explore. They've shown quite good village/city design in the past. But a lot of the larger areas in TW1 and TW2 were some of the worst parts of the game, level design-wise. Things like the swamp in TW1 or the ruins at the end of TW2 . Might be nice to look at, but felt unnecessarily confusing and frustrating to traverse.
Perhaps having a proper large, more free-roam area to work with will mean we don't have all the boundaries and 'faux openness' that we've seen before.
Oh, and the dungeons from the first two games are absolutely awful. They'll need to step that up as well, assuming they'll be a bigger part of the 'exploration' in TW3.
Interesting rumor here: http://www.dsogaming.com/news/rumor...ne-gtx780-ti-pushes-35-45fps-at-max-settings/
I am jr member, so I can't create new thread. Take a look, is it worths new thread?
I am jr member, so I can't create new thread. Take a look, is it worths new thread?
This is totally unconfirmed... and that part about consoles having "low setting" is really unreasonable.
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/scree...Review_Benchmark_Battlefield_4_1080p-pcgh.png
Average BF4 framerate:
780Ti ~60 fps
7870 ~30 fps
PS4 GPU is little slower than 7870, but still... game can be more optimized for consoles, its APIs and fixed hardware. Sudden drop to lowest visual setting is totally uncalled for.
And besides.... game is coming out 10 months. I dont think they have even started optimizing the game for final retail performance.
if it looks like witcher 2 high settings that would be amazing.
yeah..This extra time might actually be really precious so that the game performs well.
The Albatross
Member
LOOK!!
they've done away with textures for better tessellation
downgrade am us!!
i laughed
dragonbane
Member
Metroid-Squadron
Banned
Procedural doesn't mean random. You can create the terrain layout by hand and then feed it into World Machine to add procedurally all the realistic details such as erosion.
Here's a tutorial that shows the process:
http://www.bitsalive.com/how-to-create-awesome-terrains-in-unity/