Saturday 6 December 2014

Bwaaah!

So... I was at Ubisoft Toronto all of last week... Gotta say, I like it there. Definitely going to keep trying to get a job in the studio~ Maybe I'll update this post later with a few pics I took of their holiday decorations. The Rabbids are pretty cute and they're hand-painted when you look at them close up.


As for why I was there? I can't say for the next 15 years~


Those 12-core Xeons @ 3.2GHz, 32GB of RAM, 670s... I'd love to have an overkill system, even if that 670 is damn outdated by now.

Sunday 27 July 2014

Interrupt the hiatus

The Disrupt engine is pretty interesting. It's a combination of new tech, whatever Ubi Reflections was working on, AnvilNext (open world), and Dunia (vegetation, AI). I've really only seen PS4 and PC screens floating about. Practically nothing from last gen and the X1, which might be either a little odd or that I've been hanging around the wrong places (pretty sure it's the latter). Because of that, can't really comment too much about the cross-generational issues. Wouldn't mind grabbing a last-gen copy to play around with. It'd probably run smoother than my PC copy. Hell, might even look better, even though there won't be any cockpit driving (I suck at it, so it wouldn't matter anyways).

One of the things I really disliked about Watch_Dogs was the inconsistency of the character models. You have Aiden, who looks awesome due to all the detail, and then you look at the various NPCs and see something that could probably be rendered in the late PS2 era. Even other key characters like Nicky and Jackson suffer from this, which is really too bad since you see them alongside Aiden up close a fair number of times. The quality difference is jarring. You can also sort of come across this if you've been doing some model swapping. Saw a few pics of Aiden's casual wear during from one of the flashback scenes, and his hair rendering is pretty terrible. It looks rather plastic and layered instead of being a bit more hair-like and curly. The light bouncing off the strands was off as well. The textures on the inner layer of his jacket is quite low-res when compared to the leather texture on the outside. I get that it was part of the flashback scene where there's a lot of filtering involved, but it does make it look bad if that texture was used elsewhere.

Another thing that bothered me while playing: eyes. The pupils don't dilate or contract based on how much light is present in the area. Aiden's green looks somewhat unnatural. Not sure if that was intentional though. It's almost like we take him and dunk him in some mako. It's pretty, but strange... The way light bounces off them, it's just odd. Ah well. Graphical calculations and whatnot can always be tweaked with iterations. I'm not going to worry about it too much.

But hey! At least the water is amazing, minus it not reacting to gunshots. I think I already see some of the cloth physics in Assassin's Creed Unity. It's probably going to be shifted back to the next Watch_Dogs. And IIRC, animating women shouldn't be hard with this engine either, considering that someone on the Watch_Dogs team called out the ACU on that (internal drama! And to think I want to work for them).


I think they have a good engine on hand. Now if only the PC iteration didn't suck so badly when it's the lead platform. And everyone not being afraid of hair? That might have been more of a cross-generation issue. Not really sure. Even inFAMOUS Second Son tried to keep everyone's head either shaved, tied up, or otherwise hidden. I have high hopes of refinement, but not high hopes of execution. We'll see.

Sunday 11 May 2014

Lots of graphics~

Looks like I still have a lot to learn about graphics. Different hosting sites seem to have varying levels of extra compression added to images, which may not be easily noticeable at first glance. Been looking at the hosts that the screenshot threads have been using, and they generally don't like using Twitter and Facebook because it just kills everything. It's mostly evident when looking at gradients. Most people probably wouldn't care about it, but sometimes the artifacts really hurt the presentation when you're looking closely enough.

Learned about chromatic aberration while poking at the new Arkham Knight game. Honestly, that's really not a good "technique", if you can even call it that, to showcase how your game looks. Also, that moon? Seriously? Are you trying to invoke Majora's Mask here? Also learned the term "bokeh". Something about focus differences based on distance. Has something to do with depth...? Either way, it can be pleasing or completely disastrous.

The new Mario Kart game seems to be lacking AA, but it'll probably look fine while in motion. It's almost kinda funny... PS4 games seem to be pushing 1080/30 mostly OK (2 games that I know of so far have patches for a 30fps cap), X1 seems to be struggling to get 1080/30 (some games have weird resolutions like Titanfall's 792p), and Wii U is minding its own business while trying to push out 60fps. All sorts of priorities here, but it's still early in the generation. I'd honestly take performance over IQ when forced.



Also, normal mapping is hard. I'll learn it right someday. Maybe even soon.

Saturday 29 March 2014

Oops

I think I have to write about 15 programs in the next 2 weeks. Almost double that if you want to think about porting the code from GLSL to HLSL... which is funny because the labs are mostly done in HLSL first before porting to GLSL. For the project, it's the opposite since all the tutorials I've found are for GLSL instead of HLSL. At least I have a lot of resources to draw from, including from my own games! Because the developers were "kind" enough to leave the shader code alone while also having their binaries/compiled versions in the same directory.


I have a lot of reading ahead of me to do. Not that I mind. The topic is rather fascinating (normal mapping, practically essentially to games nowadays), although I'd much rather be reading about anti-aliasing techniques right about now. You can blame the screenshot thread on neoGAF for that. And inFAMOUS Second Son. My god that game looks nice... Can't wait to see what new techniques are developed this generation.





And someone should really remind me that oolong tea expands like nothing is their business. Some of the leaves have reached the top of my teapot's lid. Whoops.

Thursday 6 March 2014

Been reading

Kinda noticed that a lot of things are happening in Seattle and San Fran this year. Kinda makes me wish I would be in the city for a good chunk of the year, but I doubt I'll even get near it. Most notably the GDC, which is coming up pretty fast. About 2 weeks from now. One of the bigger talks that I just caught wind of was about DirectX 12. Just a brief look at the comments over at Kotaku, and there seems to be someone that's really for it. At Polygon, it's quite the opposite. They like OpenGL/OpenCL more. No word on Mantle that I can see so far. There's very likely going to be a talk about that since AMD is going to be there (the list is quite long, and I don't really want to sift though it).

I don't really have a preference at the moment. There are some things in terms of syntax that I think Direct3D does better, and there are things that OpenGL does better. Both have pretty funny quirks to deal with. But Microsoft being Microsoft, they're probably going to be pushing for DX12 on their next Windows iteration. Maybe 2015? Either way, it's going to be interesting to see what happens with 3 major APIs in the mix. Kinda rooting for OpenGL because it's x-platform.



It's also really funny. My sister thinks there's nothing to do in Seattle other than to check out the original Starbucks location. Whereas I would love to visit because of all those software related ventures hiding around, and some marine based research if I'm not mistaken (there was something about starfish tearing themselves apart).

Sunday 2 March 2014

At the MaRS Building

Pretty fun "lectures". Don't care for the Microsoft things though, but at least I know that they have an office here for porting/coding related questions should I pursue those platforms. Still interesting to hear about the porting processes though. Kinda had an idea. The Wii was poked fun at a lot. Unsurprisingly, since it was one the weakest of the main platforms in the previous generation. This generation, it's still Nintendo in terms of computing power. Still early to really call anything.

It's really too bad we didn't get into too much code. Wanted to see more about scripting, AI, shaders, etc. You know, getting right into the heart of the engine for customizing it for specific projects. Asked one of the speakers, Carl Callewaert, about it and he said that there might be another meetup about those topics later on. Awaiting an email about that~ And maybe someone from Unity will show up at Seneca at some point later on. They've apparently been meaning to show up again either for promotion or recruitment. We'll see what happens. In the meantime, I have someone at UofT looking out for anything from Ubisoft. Because they have an office here and that means not having to move out of the city. Although I'm not opposed to ending up in Washington because of all those software companies hanging around in or near Seattle... But I would like to stay in Canada.

Monday 24 February 2014

Cleaning

After a little bit of struggle, finally broke one of my laptops open. It's actually quite similar in structure to the Aspire 4750G, which was nice. The lappy's just reached 2 years old now, going onto its third. It really shouldn't have that much dust in it, but what can you do. It happens. The only problem I have with it right now is that the Enter key feels... different. Must have accidentally hit something along the keyboard component that has loosened it. It'll only really be a problem when typing on it directly. Usually going to be using the mechanical on top of it.

Also. Fun thing about asking for some compressed air. I was expecting to get a can of air. What I got was a tank of it, although of very little air. It was pretty funny since when I first saw the tank, I couldn't figure out what was in it. It looked like your typical propane tank for a BBQ unit. Turns out it was just air. Go figure. Wanted to apply a new layer of thermal paste for my CPU. Couldn't get to it without further prying, and I wanted to get the unit back online within the day since the Dell's absolutely horrible with its wireless more than half the time, so I'm going to leave it for another time. Pretty annoying. It's running a little cooler now. Just need to figure out a few things with the GAM532 labs since something seems to have gone horribly wrong somewhere after I tried to include a .gitignore file. I may need to nuke it... something I really don't want to do. We'll see.

Tuesday 18 February 2014

Tinkering a bit

As I had suspected, using one of my old normal 2.5" HDDs resulted in higher battery usage than the hybrid. Guess I should have just deployed one of my SSDs for the time being, although their life is a bit more limited, but not to the point of being detrimental in the long run. Still, the temp is holding up quite nicely without any noticeable performance loss, other than the battery life issue. It can't even go further than the 2-hour classes I have. Which is annoying.

Something rather amusing popped up less than a week ago. A little something known as Twitch Plays Pokémon. There's something about watching thousands of Twitch viewers attempting to play the game in a "coordinated" manner that's just so funny. Their efforts are seemingly always being compromised by someone else unknowingly due to the lag the servers create. Before the whole thing really blew up a couple of days ago, they were actually able to get some decent progress in due to the noticeably lower input frequency. Now? They're having trouble getting through a puzzle floor. Not that I can really blame them for it. Hopefully they'll be able to get past it soon. Even their Google Docs has "Get the Lift Key" in rather large font, right beside "stop using dig" crossed out.


Still waiting for my copy of Sengoku BASARA 4 to come in. Wait to see if moving to the full-fledged MT Framework did it any good. It was "crippled" by being built on the MT Framework Lite due to it being multi-platform for both the Wii and PS3. Not that I had much of a problem with it since you could see all the crazy flowery decals on their models for both versions.

Monday 10 February 2014

And we're already off to a relatively bad start

It's not good if I already want to commit bloody, bloody murder less than a month into classes. But that seems to have resolved itself somehow. Still, somewhat annoyed. Now to work on that map so we can start building it in the editor... Since we billed it as a side-scroller, I think we need more horizontal traversal, as much as I would like to add more vertical to make use of the traps and mechanics.

A more pressing issue is my hardware being not up to snuff, min. temp being higher than usual, and being a pain to deal with when it comes to OpenGL implementations. There could be other issues as well, but those are the most immediate since I've had my main BSOD thrice within 3 days while not doing anything. Could be too much dust in there, could be a crap install that's getting screwy in the registry, etc. It's still mostly functional. Missed the "sign on at 12PM EST to break a record!" thing for TESO on Saturday though.

The temp seems to be a bit lower on the new install. However, there's also something really weird with the original hybrid install... Its temp also dropped. Weird. Not that I'm complaining too much, but it's somewhat odd. It's hovering around the usual mid-40s. Still going to look into getting a better laptop as an interim to upgrading the rig, because that thing still needs either a wireless card or cable to be networked. Along with general upgrades all-round, like an SSD, better RAM, etc. Something's going be to getting some attention soon.

Wednesday 8 January 2014

Starting the new semester

Well. That was off to a great start.

Java was cancelled. Didn't know until I got on campus. Email was sent out 16 minutes after I had already left the house.

Also didn't expect a quiz worth nothing the first day back in GAM532 either. Oh well.

Got 3 classes today. Wonder if they'll go any better.

Friday 3 January 2014

Cameras

If there's one thing I absolutely hate about cameras, it's how they're implemented sometimes. I really don't like them acting like solid objects within the game's world. Been playing inFAMOUS a lot lately, and that series' camera irritates me at times.

I understand that there's a near and far clipping plane to work with. Maybe something to do with face culling as well? I wonder how hard it is to implement a camera system where the camera isn't an object. It getting stuck behind something, not knowing where to go if the actor gets stuck in something (this happened a few times already, resulting in me mashing X trying to jump out of the structure), or its movement being restricted because you've hit a wall or corner. A few of the things that have happened over my (relatively) long gaming career. Then again, it's quite an issue when you're running around in a game with 3D environments.

I remember Romancing SaGa's camera being pretty weird. It's always angled a certain way and you can't really move it (it rotated by 90 degrees based on where you were). That one I didn't have too much of a problem with, until there are objects that obscure your view. Like pillars, foliage, and the like. Because there might be monsters hiding around and it makes sneaking around some of them that much harder (depending on the type, it's based on sound or line of sight; game's kinda funny like that). But enemy placement was fair enough that it wasn't too much of an issue. Pretty sure that 3D Dot Game Heroes was much the same, although being a Zelda "clone", it wasn't exactly an issue. Camera implementation in Last Remnant was decent. No real wonky angles to deal with, although it does sometimes zoom in on Rush too much if you're standing right by a wall and try to move it a certain way.

Devil May Cry's fixed camera angles were interesting, something that it "inherited" from biohazard. They were placed in a way that gives you a decent view of everything in that section of an area. It does sometimes move with Dante depending on his movements, although it was relatively rare. It did have the side effect of screwing with jumps, sometimes mid-jump, since movement is relative to the camera, although it does maintain the original direction for a bit after the angle change. Still screws with direction if you're not used to it (4 had a bit of an issue with this during their platforming sections, and it had a mostly adjustable camera).

I wonder how to implement a camera that could be placed within a object (say... a building) and still see the rest of the world from its determined distance. Admittedly it would look pretty weird (you're looking through the building as if it's a void!), but so does a camera that's practically on the character itself. I don't think I've encountered a game in a while where the camera is so close to the character, and yet it remains rendered as solid colours. In the games I've played recently, they go transparent, which is nice.



There's not much of a point to this post. Just ranting a little bit on something that has always annoyed me. Because I don't like cameras that either get confused or stuck in something.