CyberPunk 2077

[Ed P]

Cyberpunk 2077 is now out on Gog. It looks like a very high octane game – I’m not certain my reflexes are up to it!

I have not committed to it yet as the next couple of days are busy ones, so the weekend will be my £50 decision day. (what happened to the world of £15 games!)

[Drezha]

I’m thinking I’ll get it and from GOG this time, as they’re doing a deal for it and the Witcher series.

£50 is pricey, but looking back, they were £30 when I was a kid, and that was almost 16 years ago, so accounting for inflation, it’s not to bad.

Trouble is, I’m still considering Fallout 76, even after the bad press (as it looks like it’s getting better).

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Ed P]

Unfortunately as the blogs makes clear this is a nine month pre-order offer and the price will not go up. Bottom line it is  a BAD deal!

[keith with the teef]

Spome games are coming in at £100. What has happened. Games was £30 for ever and then something changed.

I think the re-boot Doom was the last AAA £30 game on launch. Although Doom 3 was £35.

Not playing my games as of late and have half a dozen un played.

Cyberpunk is on my raidar.

[Ed P]

My guess is that games now require huge amounts of unique eye-candy. As an example compare the very limited differences in each Doom 1 corridor with the complex street scenes of Cyberpunk, and the unique NPCs – very often each has a well known actor doing the voice-overs. All very expensive to put together.

The trouble is all this overhead does not lead directly to a great game that draws you in, yet is highly playable.

[The Duke]

I must have close on 50games unplayed. I still think I’m a gamer, but haven’t had the time for probably 4 years. So I keep buying them when they pop up on sale etc.. But never play them.

[Ed P]

I certainly have a number of Gog games that are purchased but not played. I think I’m a creature of habit as I keep circling back to the various Fallouts/Elder Scolls and a large number of mod adventures built on them such as Enderal etc.

I think what I like is a game that I can dip into for just 30 minutes  yet offers both intellectual challenge and engrossing game play.

[Ed P]

Looks like my comment on eye-candy were correct CD Projkt Red have put back the release date of this massive game to September 17th this year. The good news is that it gives me enough time to save up the loot for the new rig I’ll need to do ray tracing (RTX)!

[Ed P]

Well Cyberpunk 2077 was finally released, however I think I’ll wait until I have upgraded my PC! According to a CodeRed Press release it plays really well on top of the range PCs and consoles, but it plays like a dog on older XBoxes and Playstations . Big updates to the console code to address this problem  are planned for January and February so a wait may be wise. B-)

link to CodeRed pdf

[edit] However some of the bugs almost look worth the money! Wired Link

[Drezha]

Yeah, they’ve been issuing refunds to players on XBox and PS4 who want them, because it’s not playing well at all.

I didn’t pre-order in the end – probably wise. Besides, my Christmas holidays are put aside for some Red Dead Redemption 2 that I picked up on sale on Steam this month. :good:  Between that, and trying to learn Blendr for 3D architecture, I should be covered for a bit.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Ed P]

Knowing your interest in aircraft, and your desire to learn Blender you may be interested in this link. (Polish versions of the e-book are free). The book is split into 4 parts, a General (Linux FOSS Apps) Book, a Modelling (Blender) book, A Texturing Book, and A Rendering Book. As a very cursory overview the books detail the process of acquiring and editing technical drawings of an object, then the translation of this into a model accompanied by all the pretty bits. Ignoring the subject the process should be similar for turning building plans into building models. :scratch:

You can freely download the four parts as a single (Polish) e-book here to browse and see if it is of value to you before buying the individual English sections.

[keith with the teef]

Looks like the game could do with some optimization patches.

But with all this new tech under the hood from NVIDIA and then AMD looking to get in on some kinda optimization for there hardware how could this game ever be optimized and so its no wonder Apple are now making there own chips as the piper calls the tune when it comes to optimized software.

I am convincing my self that the latest consoles are now the way to go.

[Dave Rice]

The development times are getting so long it’s no wonder new hardware trickery overtakes it.

Just looked at a buying guide from 2011, a gaming workhorse was a 2nd gen i5-2500K, 4GB ram, N560GTX-Ti and a 1TB HDD with a £100 64GB SSD for the system. Total cost £915. A Ryzen 3 3200G would keep up with that CPU.

[Ed P]

Hacker News linked to an extremely interesting blog article on how a scene is rendered in Cyberpunk. Although I’m familiar with most of the tech referenced in the blog, it revealed to me that I was ignorant with respect to the pains-taking work by a team of artists who spend hours tagging all the objects and surfaces. For example, tagging objects  that can move in a scene for special treatment. All that in addition to special lighting set-ups for many scenes (shadow casting lights etc.).

Regardless of any views you may have on a game, it is a worthwhile read that gives insights on its rendering mechanics.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I am not at all up on 3D rendering techniques but I did look into DX12 features a couple of months ago.

A developer can target DX12 and the result will probably run on DX9c and above hardware but the Hardware Driver DX level profile will report which features are actually supported in hardware and any that aren’t will be emulated by software running on the CPU.

Both the new consoles use graphics hardware based on the AMD Big Navi architecture and it provides hardware support for many more features, so if a game is using them it will run like a dog on older hardware.

I believe that the Vulcan API behaves in a similar way but I haven’t looked.

[Ed P]

The link ignores the Directx SDK, and focusses on the way the game is coded, and how CodeRed have used their game engine to work with the lower level GPU ‘handles’.

As a simple example when a scene is rendered, how are the coordinates of any object used to set up the depth culling that is then used to render the scene. Depth culling simply means that if an object obscures one that is further away in the scene then the far object (or parts) will not be shown. (There are a number of different techniques that can be used to handle this, each with pluses and minuses). Real time  Rendering mechanics are nearly always a set of trade-offs and the article both hints at these and makes guesses on how they have been applied.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Yes I saw that, but I recon the biggest cause of slowdowns in cyberpunk is its use of “Groundbreaking”  new features that are not directly supported in older hardware. The rendering must fall back on software emulation routines provided by the API.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Optimizing for older hardware is not so simple because their code will have to interogate the hardware for its profile level and then supply different code to match. This is really like writing more than one version of the program.

[Ed P]

On PCs the M$ SDK should handle all the mechanics of the lack of certain facilities in say going from Dx12 to Dx9.  However, as you say this is all about coding for obsolete kit. The real problem appears to be with older consoles rather than older PCs. It seems it isn’t just optimisation, but possibly a need for eliminating background detail as well.

From the comments section of the blog it seems that older consoles just do not have the grunt (speed and memory) to handle everything that is happening – hence the culling and object placement problem that resulted in an avatar apparently standing up and showing its butt in a speeding car.

[Ed P]

[edit] I’ll guess that CodeRed will have to fix this on old consoles  by fiddling with the LOD cutoff points and try to balance popping with game play.

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