Happy New Year

The January 2008 SDK release is well on track. I think we'll have to settle for a bimonthly release cycle in the future. While the main chunk of work has gone into the Wii-port (which isn't part of the public SDK release of course) there are still two nice new features for the Win32 version:

• our modular character system (direct port from Nebula2), so the next testgame.exe application will have proper characters instead of a placeholder geometry
  
• PSSM shadow support for global light sources

I feel that PSSM (Parallel-Split-Shadow-Maps) combined with VSM (Variance Shadow Mapping) currently gives the best bang-for-the-buck in terms of quality vs. performance.

Assassin's Creed Wrap Up

I finally reserved a few hours to finish up on Assassin's Creed. Yawn... all this cheap pseudo-science crap was really getting on my nerves towards the end. It seems that every stupid conspiracy theory ever invented has been stuffed into AC's "story".

The game itself was actually quite a chore during the last few hours, because nothing really unexpected or new happened (yes, the game tries to have some sort of a surprise ending, but one can see this coming from a mile away). For the little variety the game-play offers, the game just feels too long IMHO. Everything is just too stretched-out. Overall it's a pretty good game, but now that it's over I feel somewhat ... unsatisfied. The fact that the game doesn't seem to have a real ending doesn't help either. Yes, I discovered the credits ... but what the hell now?

Mass Effect

Holy shit, Mass Effect is f*cking E-P-I-C. The "acting" and story-telling is better then in any Star Wars movie, game-play is (surprisingly) very Deus Ex'ish. The last 2 or 3 hours are simply breathtaking (I clocked in at about 36 hours with most of the side quests). Mass Effect is simply one of the best games ever made. There are some technical glitches (most notable and annoying is the extreme texture popup, especially after loading a saved game and at the beginning of some cutscenes... only low-detail textures are displayed while the high-detail textures are streamed in, sometimes it takes several seconds until everything looks right). There's also some stuttering during game play (most likely also loading related). The graphics quality is a mixed bag, some of the less important NPCs look very bad compared to the extremely detailed and convincing main characters, most of the environment graphics looks last-gen, interestingly one of them (Ilos) looks extremely good, almost like it has been done by a different team, or the designers had a lot more time reserved for this one location. But all in all these are just very tiny flaws and don't stop the game from being an absolute masterpiece.

AC's Political Correctness BS

Assassins Creed displays something along the lines of "this product is a work of fiction and has been produced by a multiethnical team of various religious beliefs" when it starts up. This is the most hilarious/concerning quote I have ever seen in a video game. They should have written instead "we are a scared bunch of spineless pussies who are afraid that our studios are blown up by christian and/or muslim fundamentalists". What's coming next, a disclaimer in a World War 2 game, that members of various - uh - political beliefs have worked on the team just to appease the nazis and communists? The end is near I say.

The game is much more controversial where it probably didn't intend to be: game-design and game-play. There are many things I absolutely love, and one or two things I absolutely hate. I haven't played through yet, so I'm not qualified to write a "proper review", but I think I can already say that it is definitely a must-have game. It does many things different then the mainstream, and that's already enough reason to buy the game, even if it tries sometimes to be too innovative and too avant-garde which may put off some players. We'll have to see how it does commercially. I hope it does well to demonstrate to publishers that innovation may actually pay off. As a gamer I'm usually more conservative though, a game should do at most one or two completely new things, and use established mechanics and even clichés for all the other elements in the game, otherwise I'm not really feeling comfy and at home, especially in the beginning of a game. On the other hand, some games have to be the forerunners and crash-test-dummies for new game-play mechanics. Otherwise we'd still be stuck with Pong.

Nebula3 November SDK

Alright, here's the new Nebula3 SDK: http://www.radonlabs.de/internal/n3sdk_nov2007.exe

Some notable new features:

• first version of the Application Layer plus a small sample app
• now also works on ATI cards which support shader model 3.0 (X-above-1000)
  
• a new global light source type
• resources now loaded from zip archive
  
• many bugfixes
  

There are a quite few known issues in this release:

• some (new) VSM-related visual artefacts in the shadow system (light leaking and shadow grain near some shadow casters), this must be fixed by tuning some VSM parameters which I didn't quite have the time to do right
• new Application Layer sample app has clumsy controls and camera
  
• shadows are not rendered when shadow caster is not visible which leads to shadow pop-up in the App Layer sample application
  
• re-building assets requires the Nebula2 Toolkit For Maya
• some new Doxygen docs pages are messy
• ODE, OPCODE and GIMPACT not credited yet in the docs
  

So this release is a bit rough, I hope the next one will be more polished. But I really wanted to push it out the door instead of spending even more time to fix stuff.

Here are a few screenshots:

This is the testviewer.exe with one global light (cannot cast shadows yet, I'm planning to implement Parallel-Split Shadow Maps for global light sources), plus 2 spot lights which cast VSM shadows.

The next one is a screenshot of the new testgame.exe sample application, with a player-controllable avatar and some physics boxes to play around with:

Enjoy!
-Floh.

COD4

Call Of Duty 4 rocks in every aspect. No point in babbling about it here, you really have to see for yourself. If you only play one FPS this year, make it COD4. If the game would have a R6-Vegas-style cover system, it would reach critical mass and collapse into a singularity of pure gaming perfection, thus destroying earth and human civilization. Maybe that's why they left it out.

Shadow Fixes

Phew, I think I have fixed most of the pressing problems in the VSM code. I didn't manage to get the number of executed instructions in the pixel shader down to a reasonable number with dynamic branching as I was hoping. So I went the shader-library way and added shader variations for 1 local light, 2 local lights, etc... up to 8 local lights, so that performance with a low number of dynamic lights has become dramatically better especially on graphics cards with low fillrate (shader optimizations aren't a big priority yet however). Shader model 3.0 still has some annoying restrictions when trying to do a single-pass/multiple-light shader, so the übershader approach isn't very practical in the end. Hmpfh. I'm almost starting to consider deferred lighting... at least as a second option. Shadow quality has been improved a little bit because some bugs in the 2x2 downsample and gaussian blur filters have been fixed, finally I'm now emulating bilinear filtering when sampling the shadow buffer in the pixel shader so that shadow borders should now be properly smoothed also on cards which don't support bilinear filtering of G16R16F texture formats (like ATI's).

I'll try to get a new SDK out of the door next week, it's a little more complicated to coordinate a release now that 3 people are actively working on N3.