but have they mentioned when SQ42 or the first episode is supposed to be released?
If they did would you believe it?
I'm estimating 2019 though.
No, but it gives me pleasure when they announce dates and then don't finish in time
But seriously though, while I couldn't care less what happens to the multiplayer part of the game, I WANT SQ42 to be everything Roberts promised and more. I want a great narrative driven space opera with fun space combat.
I want it to be as good or better than Freespace, Freelancer, original Elite, X-Wing vs Tie Fighter.
As long as he delivers, he can sell spaceship concepts one pixel at a time for all I care
SQ42: 2020 at the earliest. I don't think they've done that much work on it (beyond the actor thingy and cut scenes) until recently to be honest. Roberts have put all efforts into his "life in space as a citizen"-dream, putting SQ42 on a back burner until now since the demands of supporters, backers and probably everyone on this planet interested in it.
As far as I know SQ42 is in the hands of brother Erin Roberts and is developed in the UK (unless that changed).
What held it back... is Chris changing the PU all the time. Not talking out of my arse that was the state when I was still watching their vids 2 years ago or so.
So I don't expect SQ42 released before the PU unless 'fans' will finally get outraged for the time it takes... judging by the forums: that won't happen ever.
All the new footage I saw looks cool, but they are in 7th year of development! By the time release day comes all their fancy graphics will be outdated. And it was the main reason CryEngine was picked in the first place, since Roberts was all butthurt how his previous games were criticized for their graphics at the time.
Honestly it reminds me of how 3D Realms handled DNF's development. They constantly changed focus on new cool shit Broussard and Miller liked at the time, so they can 'wow' the public and prove the critics wrong.
All the new footage I saw looks cool, but they are in 7th year of development! By the time release day comes all their fancy graphics will be outdated. And it was the main reason CryEngine was picked in the first place, since Roberts was all butthurt how his previous games were criticized for their graphics at the time.
Honestly it reminds me of how 3D Realms handled DNF's development. They constantly changed focus on new cool shit Broussard and Miller liked at the time, so they can 'wow' the public and prove the critics wrong.
I think you are stuck in the past.
Engine technology and video game graphics progress so slowly these days that even at 10 years its not going to be a problem.
Don't forget that Crysis came out November 13, 2007
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Everything being added right now is designed for streamers to show off, and in no way benefits actual backers. It's just another way of marketing the game with minimal effort.
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Don't forget that Crysis came out November 13, 2007
And it still looks good.
It really hasn't aged well, actually, as hasn't even Crysis 3. The crude lighting, the low resolution textures, the low poly geometry. Even with tessellation, the lack of detail is very evident.
Take a look:
Spoiler:
The difference with Ryse, for example, is quite stark:
I think you have a much more discerning view on graphics than I have. I think Crysis, for what it is and for it's age is still looking really nice, especially compared to other games made in 2007. Sure, 2017/2018-games have new technologies for lighting.
ps. I haven't even played Crysis 3 so I can't say much about that. I don't care about 4K either since I'm stuck on my old Radeon 7950 with 3GB of VRAM.
2012 / 2013 started showing a gradual shift to physically accurate lighting and render techniques even if simplified or altered for use in gaming.
It's not quite ray tracing but I'd say that and D3D11's gradual rise as the dominant API and finally leaving behind the aging D3D9 is creating a pretty nice shift in video game visuals from this period and the one before it.
Though even with PBR a consistent art style is still important and nothing is going to save the game if the tech is a mess whether on PC or on console or both.
But yeah Crysis 3 started moving things a bit but it's Ryse where Crytek properly unveiled PBR for the new version of Cry Engine. (3.6.0 I believe?) not too sure which game was first with a physical based rendering workflow though, Call of Duty Black Ops 1 is often cited as one of the first with Treyarch confirming this as one of the changes they did for the IW engine.
EDIT: And then a crap ton of various visual effects and post-processing shaders and other stuff, texture quality going up to 2048x2048 and compression with BC7 allowing for far better quality without artifacts for just one thing.
Sub surface scattering and SSR together also working really well for things like skin and moving beyond the flat or plastic look used in early tests with bump and later on normal mapping to simulate depth. (Well it's still used but now with far better lighting and reflective properties giving a more waxy sheen for example.)
Suppose AI is still a crap-shoot though and in the west the open world design is currently really dominating and well online this or that and micro transactions hah though programming wise I suppose AI is the current main flaw though there are other stuff as well.
Animations for example but short of "AAA" budget titles motion capture tech and convincing animations especially for facial movement is not cheap or easy plus talented actors and then hand tweaking these for the in-game experience.
Witcher 3 is a pretty good example here since they did that for most of the major cutscenes and characters in the game compared to the more simple and canned animations for generic actors.
I'd say Mafia 3 did a good job too even if the game was a technical mess at launch and gameplay was pretty repetitive after doing the same tasks over and over to get to the next actual story part.
EDIT: And I suppose using physically based lighting and rendering techniques together with photogrammetry also allows for reducing the workflow and simplifying asset and content creation even further and giving more time for other parts of the game.
Suppose that's where ray-tracing will also lead but for now it increases workflow as you have to use a mix of ray tracing and rasterization plus support for hardware that lacks ray-tracing support entirely or vendor specific implementations which is another problem area entirely.
(Though moving beyond raster to ray well that's years away from full realization.)
As for Star Citizen here well I guess with the 100+ million they do at least have a solid base for what this sort of tech will cost and the lengthy development time depending on how they have budgeted this.
And then split into Squad 42 as well for the solo experience even if focus is probably more on Star Citizen as a major contented on the MMO scene which yeah it won't be easy.
EDIT: Though feature creep is a very real concern and time might see budgetary problems as well but so far it looks like they're still gaining a lot of funding from fans either via game purchases or add-on content.
EDIT: Well something to that effect, I am curious to see where this will all end up but so far they're going pretty strong even if it's taking time so development is progressing little by little on both Squad 42 and Star Citizen itself from what I'm hearing.
I think you have a much more discerning view on graphics than I have. I think Crysis, for what it is and for it's age is still looking really nice, especially compared to other games made in 2007. Sure, 2017/2018-games have new technologies for lighting.
ps. I haven't even played Crysis 3 so I can't say much about that. I don't care about 4K either since I'm stuck on my old Radeon 7950 with 3GB of VRAM.
But it's just my personal opinion.
Yes, I am demanding of graphics these days (and always have). I have railed on and on about how shader-based rendering isn't the future; how limiting it is to quality and performance. PBR based solutions (with proper materials by the art teams) give somewhat a reprieve to this railing. While still true that some aspects are crude yet more, the general direction is a considerable improvement over yesteryear games. It took both algorithm advancements as well as hardware power brute force to reach this stage, but it's a welcome stage nonetheless. This is why modern games are very taxing on old hardware and people cry about optimizations; PBR requires a very high floor of hardware performance, and it being a shader-based solution still, each bump in resolution raises the permanence ceiling very high. This is why modern day game ports to Nintendo Switch are so problematic—the hardware to push these modern engines is just not there at the scale that the games require. That's no to say the Switch is not able to push a PBR pipeline—it does it pretty well in the Zelda and Mario games, but it requires purpose-built engines with their own specific optimizations for the hardware and its limitations.
My point here is that once the eye is trained to expect these kinds of results from modern engines, it's really hard for me to go back to an old engine and find the result acceptable.
JBeckman wrote:
And I suppose using physically based lighting and rendering techniques together with photogrammetry also allows for reducing the workflow and simplifying asset and content creation even further and giving more time for other parts of the game.
Suppose that's where ray-tracing will also lead but for now it increases workflow as you have to use a mix of ray tracing and rasterization plus support for hardware that lacks ray-tracing support entirely or vendor specific implementations which is another problem area entirely.
(Though moving beyond raster to ray well that's years away from full realization.)
That's not accurate. PBR actually raises the bar for what is necessary to achieve an acceptable look from art assets. Each step we have had over the years has complicated the art production pipeline further.
Long time ago, all you had to do is either draw a texture or take a photo and at most need to make it tileable. Along came static "dynamic" lighting, which suddenly required baking of light into textures, and often variations of the same texture with different baked lights. Then we saw bump maps, normal maps, parallax maps, displacement maps, specular maps and what not enter, further complicating the asset creation process. If until now you only had to create an image, now you had to manually (or automate using render tools) different light information maps. This is where graphics were for a very long time, so many artists learned this flow. Then suddenly came PBR, which is a completely different process with a completely different information—an information that if achieved well, will create very realistic looking materials, but if done inaccurately, will achieve terrible results due to the the uncanny valley effect. Not everyone has mastered this PBR asset creation pipeline. You see this is "remastered" games the most, where even if PBR has been incorporated into an engine, the assets are lazily "converted" to PBR assets and the result is terrible.
Thanks for clearing that up, makes sense it puts more demand on the artists when you need to have the various properties down and working with the rest of the game engine to accurately convey cloth, wood, skin and then metal which all can have additional layers and properties.
(EDIT: And movies but they do have the benefit of not having to be real-time so these can be rendered in much higher quality with sufficient hardware.)
And yeah that's a big thing too, uncanny valley as we head to more photo-realistic looking 3D experiences so if everything looks like plastic or it's a mixed bag then the illusion or "feeling" of it being real just falls apart.
Optimization and simplification of lighting and shadow techniques also play a role, striking a balance between speed (performance, time for each effect to complete or run and it's cost.) and image quality is also a factor although I do expect the new console hardware to be a big push forward here once we leave the aging current-gen behind though this will happen gradually.
EDIT: Which as I recall my initial belief is from the various charts provided for e.g Resident Evil 7 showing a much simplified and faster flow when working with PBR and photogrammetry which I suppose might still be true but it also puts demands on the developers ensuring it all looks like it should and we're still just seeing the start of this type of workflow and render pipeline although it's coming along nicely now though not without some snags and problems varying from game to game.
EDIT: Was it Fallout 4 that really cheated with it's PBR implementation? Granted from my understanding this was added in mid-development as a response to changes in the game development industry and seeing a bigger move towards PBR but the games way of doing certain things isn't anywhere near the correct or standard method.
Metal for example has a metalness or roughness property from how I recall and the game essentially cheats that by having one of the normal map color channels acting as a combination of these instead of a separate map.
Other properties are skipped or ignored entirely and overall some later or more carefully updated assets are much better looking than others that end up looking like plastic with a simple gloss map effect or something like that although not quite as bad as I probably make it sound like.
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