Game engine & physics

[Smoke Screen]

Originally Posted by Kneo24

And the only reason you need Vista to run DX10 is because M$ decided to lock it out of the older OS's.

I guess thats right. It signals if ure a "serious" gamer u need vista.

Originally Posted by Kneo24

I'm sure it wouldn't be much work for M$ to allow DX10 to work with XP, but if they did that, people wouldn't have a reason to buy their POS OS that they call Vista.

Well,im not sure if it would be easy. However M$ clearly intentional misses the
chance here to establish a recaped XP,preferably 64Bit,as the main-OS on Desktops in privat use. I personally skip Vista,stay with XP,and look towards Vistas follower Windows 7. Probably they get things right this time.

[matches81]

I personally don't see anything wrong with the choice of the engine. It's an in-house engine (although from another dev team), so they either have guys with experience in their team to begin with, or will have no problem getting almost instant support. Getting an engine from a team you have close ties to is a good thing in my book.
Whether TR:L looked good or not is a matter of taste. Saying it looked bad or awful or something like that is just a lie or only based on personal dislike for the game itself. Also, it doesn't say much about the engine used, because looks always will depend more on the artist than on the engine. An engine can limit what an artist can do, but every engine will only look as good as the art used with it. You can pretty easily have a game with UE3 look crap by having an ugly map with awful lighting, for example.
I don't think the Source engine sucks. It might not be a current-gen engine anymore, but back when it was first delivered it sure was a really nice engine. Also, the animation system seems to be quite good. Took other engines quite a while to catch up with that. Quoting VTMB as a failure for the Source engine isn't fair, IMHO. VTMB was a bugfest, yes. But I doubt that was due to the engine used. No engine will fix fubar'd animations by itself for example, or quest bugs...
A good example of how less of an influence an engine has to have on a game is The Witcher. Noone would look at the Witcher and scream "NWN!" instantly, and most people are rather surprised that it uses that engine, although vastly modified.

That said, I hope they can extend the Crystal Dynamics engine in the ways they want. I don't know how well that engine performs, because honestly I have never played TR:L, but even that can change drastically. I don't know what Crystal Dynamics are up to right now, but I think it isn't unreasonable to assume they're probably optimizing the engine, too, so it's not up to Eidos Montreal alone to do that.

Originally Posted by GundamXXX

And the reason why they differ is because DX10 isnt a newer version of DX9 but because its a totally, new, built from the ground up version and XP doesnt have the power to run it

By the time DX10 was introduced I was programming for DX9 myself and read some of the MS introduction for DX10. It isn't built from scratch or something like that, it's just streamlined. Support for fixed function pipeline finally has been dropped, and all sorts of other deprecated things have been removed. Some other things changed, too. And they've drawn a line and for once didn't care about backwards compatibility, which imho was needed, but also results in a longer time until DX10 or its successors will be widely used. But saying it was built from scratch doesn't hit it.
Also, "XP doesnt have the power to run it" is simply wrong. Where do you get that idea? A simple piece of evidence against that claim would be OpenGL, which offers just the same features as DX10 does in terms of graphics programming, but runs just fine under XP. The only reason DX10 is not available for XP is that MS doesn't want it to be. As others have said: There's hardly a reason to switch to Vista right now, except for DX10. Take that away and nobody would actually need Vista. DX10 is a simple incentive for the hardcore gamers to switch to Vista sooner.

[GundamXXX]

Originally Posted by matches81

By the time DX10 was introduced I was programming for DX9 myself and read some of the MS introduction for DX10. It isn't built from scratch or something like that, it's just streamlined. Support for fixed function pipeline finally has been dropped, and all sorts of other deprecated things have been removed. Some other things changed, too. And they've drawn a line and for once didn't care about backwards compatibility, which imho was needed, but also results in a longer time until DX10 or its successors will be widely used. But saying it was built from scratch doesn't hit it.
Also, "XP doesnt have the power to run it" is simply wrong. Where do you get that idea? A simple piece of evidence against that claim would be OpenGL, which offers just the same features as DX10 does in terms of graphics programming, but runs just fine under XP. The only reason DX10 is not available for XP is that MS doesn't want it to be. As others have said: There's hardly a reason to switch to Vista right now, except for DX10. Take that away and nobody would actually need Vista. DX10 is a simple incentive for the hardcore gamers to switch to Vista sooner.

Well thats what I heard from a programmer and I trust his vision on it.
If Im wrong I sincerly apoligise, but fact is....its still Vista only :P

[Kneo24]

There is a person (or group of people) working on porting DX10 over to XP so you can play DX10 games on XP. The project is still in the alpha stages. You can read more about it here.

[Smoke Screen]

Originally Posted by Kneo24

There is a person (or group of people) working on porting DX10 over to XP so you can play DX10 games on XP. The project is still in the alpha stages. You can read more about it here.

Its dead.

[matches81]

Yesterday I purchased Tomb Raider - Legend for 10€. I began playing with version 1.0 of the game and the performance with "next-gen content" on was just awful: really drastic frame-rate drops at about every longer corridor or, good lord, a larger area. After installing version 1.2 it got much better, actually the game now never drops into unconvenient regions performance-wise. Definite gain. Btw I'm using an 8800GTX 768MB, Core 2 Duo E6600 and 2GB RAM, so no crappy machine.
It doesn't look absolutely stunning when compared to other, especially current, titles, but it manages to have some beautiful areas. I think I'll check out that Tomb Raider - Anniversary title. It uses the same engine, so I'm interested how that goes.

PS: If somebody wonders why I'm even posting this: I wanted to check out the engine (especially its performance). So far, not too good, but the patch represented a big gain, so I'm interested how the next version fares (TR - Anniversary).

[Xcom]

Originally Posted by matches81

so I'm interested how the next version fares (TR - Anniversary).

TR Anniversary was (I think purposely) dumbed down to allow larger audience to play it on low specs machines. It looks reasonably pretty, will run like Energizer bunny on your PC, but it doesn't have next-gen at all. I am only saying this because I don't believe TRA will provide fair indication of how engine performs or what it's capable of. We'll probably have to wait for Underworld to get an idea.

Legend was the first game made with this engine. It's no surprise it had some issues, but Crystal has been working on it non-stop.

[matches81]

Okay, I just finished the TRA demo. So far I've seen no "dumbing down" except for the missing flash light. Other than that it's just more like the old Tomb Raiders, I actually managed to get stuck for a little, scratching my head. Was always bad with those "spot the ledge" things

Anyway, you're right about the next-gen thing. It's about as next-gen as Legend was. Still, it performs a lot better on my machine. Legend was pretty shocking performance-wise. Anniversary is in the range of what I would have expected. The department where those two Tomb Raider titles lacked the most visually were the characters, but I don't know whether that's due to the engine or other reasons. I don't see anything utterly wrong with the Tomb Raider engine (is it called Crystal Engine, I thought I read something like that?) currently. Perhaps Underworld will take the visuals a whole step further. That should probably show how the engine fares a bit better.

[-=fox=-]

SCi plans to delay TR:Underground in order to get a better impact by reeasing it around christmas...
Sadly one of Crystal Dynamics designers passed away. He worked on previous TR titles. I don't know which impact that will have.

[guru7892]

ok, I know I heard its the same one you guys used for tomb raiders something and what-not (sorry, never got into tomb raider), but what is it? why are you using it? what are the planed tech implimentations? (any third party engines like havok or physX)

also what engine did you derive your Tomb Raider engine from (or did you make it ground up?)

I mean if Carmack gonna talk smack about mega-textures, UE3 is gonna boast high-poly actors and static meshes, and Valve gonna rail on about shaders and facial animations...

(although you arn't really going commercial with your engine, so I can't blame you for not talking, I also can't balme you for signing an NDA (if you did jsut say so))

[Xcom]

This is from Crystal's website:

We believe that next gen technology coupled with strong tools support is the key to building next gen games. Crystal Dynamics employs a common next generation engine across the studio, supporting game specific additions and specializations. Here are a couple of our guiding principals we follow:

Powerful Tools: As the content requirements for game teams are increasing dramatically, the need for powerful tools to streamline workflow is key. Our goal for tools is to provide data driven solutions with minimized iteration time. For many resources this includes live editing on all target platforms.

Game Focused: Engine features are driven by existing game teams needs. Our shared technology group works directly with the internal game teams on a day to day basis. Philosophically we are a studio working on multiple games, rather than separate games using shared technology.

Almost all of our technology is developed in house, with a current focus on XBox 360, and Playstation 3 technology. Here is a sampling of some notable features:

• Streaming: Asynchrous streaming of all resources is fully supported, allowing entire worlds to be traversed without loading screens.
  
• Rendering: A lot of development is going on for next gen rendering including full dynamic lighting, shadowing, and shader work.
  
• Physics: Our robust in house physics system supports a wide range of features including full rigid body dynamics with multiple constraint types, boyancy, and vehicles, among other things.
  
• Animation: The animation system is data driven and supports many features including multiple simulatious blends and interpolation, cloth simulation, IK solutions, and a data driven way to support higher order animation states.
  
• Audio: We have many powerful features in audio, including physics driven sound, dynamic music systems, and multiple simultaneous audio streams.
  
• AI: Some of the notable features of our AI include a robust path planning system which can be automatically generated from world mesh, and an advanced scripting system for scripting nearly any part of the world.
  
• Cinematics: We support a highly interactive cinematic system for authoring detailed cinematics realtime using in game assets in combination with streaming cinematic data.

[WhatsHisFace]

The recent Tomb Raider games were developed with the PS2 as the lead platform. Don't take the visuals out on the engine, it's the PS2's fault.

[gamer0004]

@Xcom: thanks for the information.
The engine sounds quite good, although this is purely marketing, of course.

[G.A.Pster]

Hmm, frankly I think it’s a mistake to use it.
......
But, I don’t really know much about engines I’m just basing my opinions on the TR games.

[RedFeather1975]

I am not familiar with the Tomb Raider game in question, but if this engine can support physics and collision well enough to facilitate emergent game play in DX3, it's fine by me.

[DXeXodus]

Incase you are scared that the Crystal Dynamics engine falls short graphically:











http://www.gamersyde.com/news_6957.html

And they are tweaking this engine specifically for DX3. So I'm happy.

[Necros]

Holy ***** that looks awesome! Oh, come one guys, throw out a screenshot from the game, it doesn't matter if it's still unfinished, in the pre-alpha/beta whatever stage.

[Larington]

Necros - That depends on who sees the screenshot, problem is that not everyone is as mature and understanding of the nature of games development as the members of this forum are, certain angry internet types will inevitably be judgemental.

[Jerion]

The engine only plays a minor part in how good the game looks, guys. 70-90% of the look of the game will come from the artists. From what I've seen, It DX3 has the potential To have photo-realistic ( or damn close) graphics, with large, sprawling maps.

Basically the engine takes all the content you throw at it, and puts it all together.

The engine does have a large role in the quality of the game's physics, though.

[DXeXodus]

^^Agreed. It is just good to see that the engine is in fact capable of generating beautiful graphics. And we havn't really seen anything to conclude that Deus Ex 3 will have near photo-realistic graphics.

[Fen]

WOW!

If Deus Ex 3 looks as good as that, itll be sooo awsome.

[DXeXodus]

Originally Posted by Fen

WOW!

If Deus Ex 3 looks as good as that, itll be sooo awsome.

It will look better!
Disclaimer: The above statement is a result of the posters positive outlook and is not to be regarded as true by any means.

[Necros]

Originally Posted by DXeXodus

It will look better!

I think so too, the team has more time to finish the game, so they can improve the graphics too. And Stephane D'Astous talked about this too (improving the engine) in some interviews.

[CJRamze]

Looking at those picture's even if It looked a little worse I'd still be impressed and happy!
Hopefully with an engine that powerful they can have large level designs aswell,

I do not want a repeat of IW's level designs!

[minus0ne]

Originally Posted by DXeXodus

^^Agreed. It is just good to see that the engine is in fact capable of generating beautiful graphics. And we havn't really seen anything to conclude that Deus Ex 3 will have near photo-realistic graphics.

Photo-realism that crosses the uncanny valley probably won't exist till 2020 (according to AMD), so perhaps that'll have to wait for DX5

Until then the devs shouldn't push for pure realism eye-candy, but rather try to give each game a distinctive graphical style. If you look at all the great games since the mid 1990s, pretty much 99% has a distinctive feel and look to it, from Monkey Island to Grim Fandango, Half-Life, Super Mario or Thief (and of course even Deus Ex has it's own gritty and ominous look and atmosphere).