#shadow = same biome map but different structure/terrain

[dumpy-dump]

it's kinda a shame shadow seeds and sister seeds arent a thing in minecraft anymore (think it was 1.17/1.18 that did away with it? bc world gen changes)

even bigger shame that outside that one antvenom video ppl dont seem to know/talk much about it

like, there used to be weird, slightly different parallel worlds for each seed. the idea that not every minecraft world was entirely unique and that each had a shadow and a sister world is (was) fascinating. a bit surprised it didnt inspire more mods/fanworks

[entergamingxp]

Call of Duty: Warzone declassified

When we look back at a console generation for its greatest hits, it’s invariably the first-party titles that dominate – but sometimes multi-platform technologies emerge that are truly exceptional, and the fact they need to accommodate four very different consoles plus myriad PC hardware configurations only adds to the scale of the achievement. Today, Season Four of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare arrives – and I’d suggest that the IW8 engine from Infinity Ward is one of the most impressive accomplishments of the generation.

Modern Warfare 2019 is the most complete COD package of the modern era. We’ve reported before on the key technologies that make it stand apart – an engine that renders in both visible, invisible and thermal spectrums (!) while also supporting volumetrics on every light source. IW8 shifts to a physically-based materials system, bringing COD into line with the most advanced engines in the business, and offering a beautiful level of realism from every authored asset in the game. Geometry is also massively improved, delivering an unprecedented level of detail to the Call of Duty franchise. All of this is achieved in a title targeting 60 frames per second.

IW8 also revamps the background streaming system, using a hybrid tile-based approach, opening the door to bigger, more detailed worlds. It’s the reason why the campaign is more detailed, but it’s also how Infinity Ward delivered the vast Ground War mode of the launch code – but battle royale takes this to another level, as I discovered when visiting Infinity Ward’s tech hub in Poland at the end of February. I spent the day with Principal Rendering Engineer Michal Drobot, who is also the studio head of the Polish arm of the developer.

To begin with, it’s true to say that Treyarch presented the first COD battle royale, using its own engine to deliver 2018’s Blackout – but aside from some initial tech sharing based on the Black Ops dev’s super terrain technology, Warzone was built independently. And what’s fascinating about it is that a whole slew of new techniques were deployed to make battle royale possible – but all of these systems integrate with the other game modes too. The optimisations that make Warzone possible feed back into every other mode, improving performance.

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Call of Duty Modern Warfare’s engine upgrades for battle royale revealed and explained with exclusive behind-the-scenes information and debug code access.

Infinity War’s objectives for Warzone were ambitious. The aim was to create a battle royale map that had the same level of fidelity and detail as the core multiplayer maps – and that’s precisely what’s been delivered. The multiplayer maps are the battle royale map. When the locations are authored, they are done so within the overall canvas of the Warzone map. This makes Warzone the largest map in the history of the Call of Duty franchise. Its basic structure is derived from satellite data – it’s shrunk down to a certain extent but its geography mirrors the landmarks of a real city, with the downtown section alone comprising of six districts. A Ground War map takes around four to five months to successfully execute and there are seven of them contained within the single Warzone map, along with other major multiplayer maps – and that’s before we factor in the connective areas of the map between these major blocks.

There’s also continuity too. If you’ve been playing Modern Warfare across its seasons, you’ll note that there’s been a consistent narrative emerging that spans across game modes – so the upshot of this is is that not only are the multiplayer maps contained within Warzone, if the content changes as we move between seasons, that should be reflected across all modes. I also like the way that the Infinity Ward taps into their own heritage – Modern Warfare 2019 is a reboot, but there are nods to the old continuity. The TV studio in Warzone is a remake of the map found in Call of Duty 4, the original Modern Warfare. The gulag essentially the same structure we saw in Modern Warfare 2 and its recent remaster.

Making all of this possible is the process of technology evolution within the IW8 engine. The hybrid tile streaming system that Modern Warfare 2019 shipped with has radically evolved. The fundamental idea is still the same: tiles or chunks are loaded into RAM based on an algorithm that determines the priority of data most likely to be needed as you look around the terrain and move through it. In the video above, you’ll see the debug tools Infinity Ward uses to visualise the streaming system. Environmental ‘chunks’ can be sub-divided into four smaller chunks, and they’re three levels deep. Streaming begins with what Infinity Ward calls transients, the foundations if you like, and on top of that is loose loading for meshes and textures.

The streaming system relies on three LOD levels. Click on the thumbnail here for a closer look.

Accommodating Ground War and Warzone’s needs for extreme visibility across big maps, the refined IW8 engine has a fascinating level of detail systems. LOD0 is, as you might expect, the full detail model authored by Infinity Ward’s artists. Further out, you get LOD1 – meshes and textures are distilled down and simplified into a single block. I got the chance to see the various LODs at close-range in a way that they were never meant to be seen, and it’s interesting how well LOD1 holds up. I also saw a LOD1 chunk in situ within the game, and again, I was hard-pressed to tell the difference at the range it was rendered at (which was closer to the player than I expected). The final level of detail is LOD2, which takes four LOD1 chunks and simplifies them again, collapsing them into a single chunk.

Also key to level of detail are the use of imposters. Elements like trees can be pretty difficult and costly to render and at range, you’re potentially paying a heavy cost for rendering something that’s really small and may only occupy a few pixels on-screen. Imposters are used fairly commonly now (Fortnite is a good example) and the idea is straightforward enough. When an object is far enough from the viewer, there’s no need to render a 3D model at all. You can use a 2D billboard – a flat texture, a single triangle – instead. Typically, each object has 36 billboard variations, designed to represent the 3D model viewed from various angles. Trees are the obvious example for the use of imposters but other elements get the billboard treatment too – vehicles, for example.

Streaming, memory management and accurately predicting what data is going to be needed and when is essential in making the larger scale Call of Duty work. It satisfies the design objectives in allowing artists to equal core multiplayer map quality and to run the game at 60 frames per second. The entire approach also allows Call of Duty to do things in battle royale that is competitors are struggling to match. For example, Warfare has internal access to pretty much every building there is and not only that, these interiors were properly modelled too, in a world where some titles use procedural generation to fill empty spaces with what looks like random clutter.

A debug view of Warzone in motion. On the bottom left, you can see the tile-based streaming system and a legend describing what’s happening in system memory on a per-chunk basis..

The latest Call of Duty engine does use procedural generation, however, mostly for incidental detail on the terrain: foliage, rocks and other random items. In fact, pretty much anything that doesn’t impact collision detection is procedurally generated and the nature of what you get depends on the surrounding biome. This is procedural generation and not random generation, so the same seed variable is used for all players on all systems. In practise what this means is that the nature of the environment is identical to all players on all systems, something we verified by capturing crossplay Warzone on PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, while spectating the same player. Procedural generation adds to processing time of course, but the bigger win comes from a reduction in the storage footprint: Infinity Ward reckons it saves around five to six gigabytes of data.

More instrumental to actual performance is the new shadow map caching system, which required a fundamental revamp, as shadow rendering is essentially incompatible with the chunk-based streaming system. Imagine the sun quite low in the sky, with light hitting a tall skyscraper. In theory, its shadow could cast across the entire map, way beyond the single chunk the building resides in. At the basic level, the new caching system brings in the most efficient shadow map based on the view frustum, with a level of detail system used.

Wavelet compression technology, used in video compression, is used to reduce the footprint of shadowmaps versus standard birmaps. In terms of what is actually streamed in and when, the new set-up is an efficient caching system with building blocks similar to those found in actual an actual physical CPU. Infinity Ward talks about building is own prefetcher and predictor – the same language used by Intel and AMD processor architects.

The shadow cascade streaming system is vastly more efficient and prevents larger scale game modes from becoming CPU-limited.

It’s all very clever but what fundamental difference does it make? Going back to the launch of Modern Warfare 2019, the closest thing we had to battle royale was Ground War, and there the tech team discovered that for pretty much the first time in COD history, they were CPU-limited. The new shadow caching system wasn’t devised solely for use by Warzone, it wasn’t a battle royale-specific piece of tech, it’s an optimisation in the truest sense of the word – taking something that already exists and making it better, meaning that it’s rolled out to all areas of Modern Warfare 2019. CPU-bound limitations in Ground War are therefore eliminated. A revamped shadow caching system is also in place for other shadows – those which are not cast by the sun. Especially for indoor locations illuminated with spot light, this system also caches in shadows. There are 64 slots of prefiltered shadow maps here with eight shadow updates per frame. Again, similar to the main system, it’s not something that runs on a per frame basis – and it doesn’t really need to.

Back in the day, Call of Duty shipped with two physical executables – one for the campaign, the other for multiplayer with both presumably optimised accordingly. A core change in philosophy has seen this approach binned in favour of a unified codebase that brings together all technology into a single package – but ongoing optimisation means that all parts of the game cumulatively benefit. The Pine level, for example, launched on PlayStation 4 Pro not quite hitting its performance target. It still maintained 60 frames per second, but it had to lean into the dynamic resolution scaler to reduce pixel count and ensure full frame-rate.

Multiplayer maps are authored within the battle royale map and always have been. It ensures continuity of content across the whole game – and despite the larger scale, Warzone is as detailed as core MP.

Foliage rendering has significantly improved since launch, so there’s an improvement in resolution. In fact although you won’t feel it in terms of frame-rate in this specific case, render times generally are improved by 10 to 20 per cent. Similarly, optimisation across the board with each new title update has also seen progressive improvements to overall performance. On a content level, Infinity Ward has targeted the multiplayer maps as a priority for improved performance because that’s the area of the game most players are accessing but the knock-on effect is that systems in campaign run faster too.

Speaking to Infinity Ward, I made a startling discovery. When you stand back and look at the four console platforms, there is a lot of commonality between them. All of them use the same core AMD Jaguar CPU technology and they all feature AMD’s GCN graphics architecture. While this may be more straightforward than the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 set-up of the last generation, the tech team estimate that around 30 per cent of their time is spent addressing multi-platform development issues. Interestingly, Infinity Ward ranks PS4 Pro as the most challenging of the four current-gen consoles that Call of Duty is available for.

Put simply, the expectation from the user base is for 4K video output, but Sony only gifts developers an extra 512MB of RAM to play with. Meanwhile, the boost on Xbox One X is four gigabytes in total – eight times as much. This opens the door to higher resolution, but also gives the streaming system much more room to stretch its legs. Theoretically, this should result in less pop-in and less aggressive LODs over longer distances – but head-to-head video doesn’t provide much in the way of a noticeable advantage.

Warzone performance sees Xbox One X deliver more pixels with a slightly lower level of performance – but the gap has tightened since battle royale launched.

With consoles targeting 60 frames per second, Call of Duty has to cram the rendering for each frame into around 16ms, and this broken up into two distinct phases. First of all, the basics of the scene are calculated and lit – a process that takes around seven milliseconds. The next seven milliseconds is spent on basically everything else: volumetrics and post-processing, for example. Around 1.5 to 2.5 milliseconds is spent on temporal upsampling – integrating visual data from prior frames into the current one. The more detail rich a scene is, the heavier the cost in rendering terms. Asynchronous compute is used on all systems, including PC. It’s more heavily optimised on consoles though, providing performance uplifts of around 20 to 30 per cent in the expensive scenes. Systems like volumetrics and particles can run asynchronously.

All of this technology comes together to make Warzone possible – and even factoring out IW8’s application in campaign and core multiplayer, its deployment for battle royale alone sees a radical improvement in technology, visual fidelity and performance over other genre entries. Compare and contrast with the fortunes of PUBG that launched late in 2017 and it’s fascinating to see how colossal the improvement is in every regard in less than 2.5 years. Back in May 2019, I first visited Infinity Ward to get a breakdown on the technological leap delivered by IW8, and it was clear that this engine was designed to straddle the generations and to allow Infinity Ward and other COD studios to transition more seamlessly to PS5 and Xbox Series X. What we didn’t know was what hardware the developers would have access to.

While Infinity Ward itself wasn’t sharing specifics, it’s easy to see how the existing systems could transition across to next generation hardware. Extra graphics power means denser visuals, obviously, but the concept of the streaming systems we’ve discussed here backed up by a storage speed multiplier of 40x or 100x (depending on the console) opens the door to the kind of visual quality that exceeds the campaign being made possible in multiplayer. The streaming system also fits hand-in-glove with the fact that PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X do not deliver what we would typically consider to be a generational leap in memory allocation. Modern Warfare 2019 also saw some tentative experimentation with ray tracing support, which may be invaluable research when dealing with the hardware RT functionality baked into the new consoles.

In the meantime, it’s all about Season Four of Modern Warfare and the debut of a specific mode may put into practise a theoretical scenario I put forward to the developer: what if all of the battle royale players grouped together and one player stepped back to get all of the others into view – would the system be able to cope? According to the studio, they’ve witnessed legitimate scenarios where 50 to 100 players could be seen on-screen. Looking from one big city area to another via sniper scope, apparently up to 120 players could be observed. Season Four’s new 50 vs 50 mode should really allow us to stress test the massively multiplayer aspect of this remarkable engine in a way that Ground War never could – and we’ll be fascinated to see how it holds up.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/06/call-of-duty-warzone-declassified/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=call-of-duty-warzone-declassified

[netunleashed-blog]

Fortnite Update 5.10 Patch Notes: Birthday Event, Slurp Juice, Compact SMG, Playground LTM, And More

http://www.internetunleashed.co.uk/?p=18008 Fortnite Update 5.10 Patch Notes: Birthday Event, Slurp Juice, Compact SMG, Playground LTM, And More - http://www.internetunleashed.co.uk/?p=18008 Fornite's 5.10 update is now live and developer Epic Games has released patch notes detailing all the additions and changes coming to the game's Battle Royale and Save the World modes. The main attraction in the new Fortnite update is the birthday celebration event, during which players will be able to find birthday cakes around the island and earn special cosmetics by completing challenges and quests. You can check out our Fortnite 1st Birthday challenge guide for more on that.Beyond that, the patch also preps the game for the return of Playground LTM, which will be playable again from July 25. This time, however, it will include team select options and the ability to drive ATK vehicle. Epic has also promised there will be "lots more loot," though it didn't provide any specific examples.Fortnite update V5.10 also adds the Compact SMG to the Battle Royale mode. "Unwrap the newest weapon in Battle Royale. Engage in close quarters combat with the high capacity, fast firing Compact SMG," the description reads. As you might expect from an SMG, the gun is incredibly useful for catching enemy players off guard and dishing out deadly damage up close.In Save the World, meanwhile, players can now head to the desert of Canny Valley, where they'll be able to explore Thunder Route 99. "Immerse yourself in the story, uncover its secrets, and explore the new Arid Biome with your friends," Epic says. Take a look at the full Fortnite: Battle Royale update 5.10 patch notes below, courtesy of Epic Games.Click image to view in full screenFortnite Update 5.10 Patch Notes#Fortnite1st BirthdayWe've got a birthday party planned for #Fortnite1st and you're invited! Eat cake, party and bring your friends. Each Birthday Challenge you complete unlocks a slice of the birthday cosmetic set.Playground LTM (Battle Royale)Playground mode is back on Wednesday, July 25! New team select options let you and your squad set up team battles for practice and training. Race! Create, and share your screenshots and cinematics on social.Compact SMG (Battle Royale)Unwrap the newest weapon in Battle Royale. Engage in close quarters combat with the high capacity, fast firing Compact SMG.Canny Valley (Save the World)Adventure into the desert of Canny Valley and explore Thunder Route 99... Immerse yourself in the story, uncover its secrets, and explore the new Arid Biome with your friends.Save the World CelebrationCelebrate #Fortnite1st with cake, loot, and a special in-game questline. Complete the questline to unlock Birthday Brigade Ramirez. While you're partying, find and eat birthday cakes to earn event tickets which can be spent on the limited time Birthday Llama.GeneralNew default keybindings for new players.All keyboard layouts will continue to default to the QWERTY bindings for new players or those who reset their back to default.Changed countdown timers to display more useful informationShows hours left instead of days when under 72 hours.Shows hours:minutes:seconds left when below 13 hours.Changed the background of the loading screen bullet points area to be partially translucent.Removed the "static noise" when switching tabs.The "Restore" button has been removed from the settings screen. Also, the "Reset Defaults" button has been renamed to "Reset."Leaving the settings screen before applying changes will give the option to apply changes and exit or discard changes and exit.Double clicks now register as two clicks on a button, allowing for faster navigation through Next/Previous type buttonsBug FixesItems on the ground will properly have their stack counts updated if the stack size changes while the player is currently looking at them.Fixed a frame delay on some text layouts, which would cause large blocks of text to reflow their wrapping one frame after seeing them.Corrected text shadows that were appearing incorrectly in certain areas of the UI.Battle RoyaleBirthday EventYou can now find birthday cakes placed around the map with consumable slices next to them. Enjoy those tasty treats! Cake slices give +5 health and +5 shield instantly when consumed.Complete three birthday even challenges to unlock a new emote, spray, and Backbling.The Battlebus and Supply Drops have been decorated to celebrate #Fortnite1st.Limited Time Mode: PlaygroundPlayers can now switch teams in-game. Join the same team to work together creatively, join separate teams to practice fighting each other! Note: Voice chat will remain on across all teams, future iterations of the mode will offer more customization.Aim assist will work when using a gamepad against players on an opposing team.Matches will no longer end if one player leaves the server.Golf carts have been added and spawn 100% of the time.Ammo cans spawn 10x the amount of ammo.Removed grey vending machines, increased the chances of higher-tier machines spawning.Increased launch & bounce pads spawn likelihood.Lowered forced glider deploy height, so players can get back into the action more quickly.Increased max rocket ammo cap to 60.Increased rocket ammo drop rates.Added 100 Supply Drops.Chests now spawn 3 weapons and more ammo & consumables than normal.Floor loot now spawns 3 items.Increased Chug Jug and Slurp Juice spawn chances, decreased Bandages.Added Chug Jugs to floor loot.Respawn timer lowered from 10s to 3s.Weapons and ItemsCompact SMG added. Available in Epic and Legendary variants. Uses Light Ammo.50 round capacity.Can be found from floor loot, chests, Supply Drops, and Vending Machines.Slurp Juice now grants 1 health every 0.5 seconds, up to a total of 75. If health is full, shield will be granted instead.Supply Drop loot rates adjusted. Weapons (drops 1) Assault Rifles to 25% from 14.2%.Explosives to 25% from 28.5%.Compact SMG 14.58%.Sniper Rifles to 14.58% from 28.5%.Heavy Shotgun to 10.42% from 7.1%.Minigun to 10.42% from 14.2%.Removed Hand Cannon, Dual Pistols, and Silenced Pistol.Traps (drops 2) Launch Pad to 44.44% from 9.6%.Cozy Campfire to 33.33% from 7.5%.Bouncer to 22.22% from 15%.Removed Damage Traps.Consumables (drops 2) Shield Potion to 20% from 19.1%Small Shield Potion to 17.50% from 12.7%Med Kit to 13.75% from 6.3%Slurp Juice to 11.25% from 5.11%Clinger to 10% from 6.3%Remote Explosives to 10% from 3.3%Impulse Grenade to 10% from 4%Chug Jug to 7.5% from 2.1%Removed Boogie Bombs, Grenades, Bandages, Stink Bombs, Port-a-Forts, and Bush.Materials (drops 2) Wood to 33% from 47.6%.Stone to 33% from 35.7%.Metal to 33% from 16.6%.GameplayChanges to building materials. Wood wall starting health to 80 from 100.Stone wall starting health to 80 from 90.Wood wall max health to 150 from 200.Metal wall max health to 500 from 400.Metal build time to 25s from 20s.Storm Circle changes. Safezone 2 wait time to 120 from 150.Safezone 2 shrink time to 120 from 90.Safezone 4 wait time to 90 from 120.Safezone 6 wait time to 60 from 90.Safezone 7 wait time to 45 from 60.Safezone 8 wait time to 30 from 60.Safezone 9 wait time to 30 from 45.Added moving circle to Safezone 6.Added "Sprint By Default" option, when enabled this makes sprint the default movement. The sprint key will now be used to transition into walking.Newly-placed building pieces will now appear in a different color while players are still overlapping the structure.Improved handling of collision when building pieces are placed right on top of a player. It's much more likely for players to be moved outside of newly-placed structures.Pickaxe damage against enemy and ally player built structures increased to 75 base damage and 150 critical damage.The slow motion and confetti effects for a Victory Royale will now play for the winner regardless of how they win the game.Changing the gyro motion of the Nintendo Switch to rotate around the roll instead of the yaw. This is intended to allow for the users to be able to hold the device in any situation and always have the motion react according to the screen direction instead of being in the Switch's world space.Bug FixesFixed an issue causing bullets and projectiles to be blocked by invisible collision. This was being caused by player placed map markersAutorun can now be used while in vehicles. Fixed a logic issue in the autorun canceling code. This should also fix autorun canceling when releasing the stick while using a gamepad.Changed the button layout for Old School and Quick Builder configs so that the “change seat” action button is not the same as the “powerslide” button.Sniper rifle bullets no longer incorrectly stop when passing through certain trigger volumes.Eliminating players will now properly grant challenge progress. If the same player knocks out and eliminates an enemy with two different weapons, they will get elimination quest progress for both weapons.Players will no longer get stuck in the coasting state if they change seats while in a vehicle.Pickaxes will no longer stretch and appear incorrectly if the slow-motion effect plays while players are riding in a vehicle.Fixed an issue where a player would not have a weapon out if hitting a bounce pad into a jump pad under certain network conditions.Players will no longer hold weapons while emoting if they're riding in an All Terrain Kart.Players will no longer fall through floor or pushed through walls when placing or editing structures.Remote Explosives will now only show damage numbers when damage is done to players.Vehicles can no longer be flipped while standing on top of them. This fixes the issue where players would sometimes become stuck or teleported if standing on a vehicle that flipped.Crouching is no longer allowed while emoting.The Wave emote, emoticons, and sprays will now continue to play even if you're moving.PeformanceVarious server performance improvements focused on the 50v50 LTM.Server performance improvements were made to the custom matches used during competitive events.Significant All Terrain Kart (ATK) performance improvements.AudioAdded spatialization to the sound played when a marker is placed on the map. Now you will hear it coming from where the in-world marker was placed.All Terrain Kart (ATK) audio improvements Improved All Terrain Kart (ATK) audio attenuation fall-off.Added a unique sound when the All Terrain Kart (ATK) is destroyed.Added sounds for when the All Terrain Kart (ATK) is in water.Improvements have been made to grenade bounce audio so they don't sound as spammy under certain conditions.Lowered the volume of the AC/DC pickaxe.Added a unique sound for bouncing off a diving board.Added a unique sound for destroying cacti.Audio panning logic for Switch has been changed. Sources panning from one side to another will be more dramatic.Bug FixesConquest glider's open and close sounds no longer stack when spamming the action.Twist emote music no longer overlaps with other emote music.Re-added metal impact sounds when shooting or pickaxing Shopping Carts.Weapon fire audio no longer cuts out when low on ammo for some weapons.UIAdjusted lobby nameplate arrangement to better account for long player names.Added the ability to combine stackable items in player inventory if the stack sizes aren't already capped.The Game Mode Select screen now sorts in the following order from left to right: Bug FixesFixed an issue preventing players to select nothing as an Outfit and Backbling. Removed the 'Save and Exit' option for items without variants.Double tap the accept hotkey/button to confirm your selection.Fixed an issue in the locker where the shuffle icon for randomized outfits was drawn slightly differently to other shuffle icons.Removed an error message when trying to purchase the Battle Bundle while at tier 76 or above.The correct actions are now shown on the HUD when you get into a Shopping Cart for the first time after being in an All Terrain Kart (ATK).Art and AnimationBug FixesPrevented sprays from affecting the eyes of the Rainbow Smash pickaxe.The Toilet Paper contrail animations now appear correctly.Replay SystemChanged the icon when a player has been downed to an exclamation mark.Bug FixesBattle Bus positioning now appears correctly in replays.Fixed an issue with focus distance when changing cameras in replays.Fixed issues with drone cameras when viewing players in vehicles during replays.Fixed an issue where the camera controls would not display when toggling the HUD visibility.MobileDownloading patches will now continue when you switch to a different app. When the download has completed, you'll receive a notification.Fire mode selection now has preview videos to better illustrate the functionality.Added new placeable individual quick bar buttons to the HUD layout tool. Can be set to either locked Combat, locked Build, or Automatic mode to switch based on the player's currently selected mode.Tapping a currently selected build item from the quick bar will now build the item.Bug FixesFixed texture streaming issues with the battle bus.Audible pops will no longer occur on iOS during loading screens and gameplay.To read the full patch notes for the Save the World mode, check out Epic's full update post.July 24 is the first anniversary of Fortnite's release. We've got a guide for the upcoming set of special quests that'll let you unlock birthday-themed cosmetics and an XP bonus. Find out where the Fortnite birthday cakes are here. Once you've danced in front of all the cakes, and completed the other two challenges, you'll get a new Back Bling. You've only got until August 7 to do it, so get to work. Source link

[entergamingxp]

seamless scaling from gas giants to detail-rich alien worlds • Eurogamer.net

Cloud Imperium Games’ Star Citizen is a unique proposition: a game designed from the ground up to support the seemingly limitless scalability and scope of the PC platform – something of a rarity in the multi-platform age. Unfettered by the limitations of the current-gen consoles, CIG’s efforts stand apart simply by virtue of the fact that it is not beholden to locked, ageing hardware designs – it’s forward-looking in every regard and the way the technology scales and renders everything from a far-flung star system to the smallest piece of debris on a barren moon is an extraordinary technological achievement.

Of course, Star Citizen is a game that has attracted plenty of controversy in the way it is funded and related to that, how CIG has interacted with customers unhappy with its extended development. In 2012, the game raised $2.13m from its initial Kickstarter from 34,000 backers with a mooted 2014 release date. Recently, the studio revealed that investment stands at around the $250m mark with over 2.5m backers. The scope of the project has evolved alongside the size of its backing. An actual release date for what could be considered an actual game remains unknown but this clearly isn’t vapourware – there is a real achievement here and on a recent visit to CIG in Wilmslow in the UK, I got to see something rather fundamental: how Star Citizen seamlessly scales from solar-level rendering to offering up the most minute detail on its richly rendered worlds.

One of the greatest challenges in getting Star Citizen working in the first place as a massively multiplayer game is due to the nature of its scale. In a typical game, you have dedicated levels or dedicated open worlds of limited size. Star Citizen operates on an entirely different level of magnitude – and to enable this, the developers converted the engine to use 64-bit coordinates to enable solar system-sized game spaces – 536,870,912 times larger than a space based on 32-bit float coordinates.

However, the size of the play area is only one aspect – speed of traversal through this space is another key issue, and in the current generation, it’s typically achieved by streaming world data or having dedicated loading. Taking Marvel’s Spider-Man as an example, the design and presentation of the streaming world is built around the fundamental limitation of how quickly the player can travel through it (a point Sony itself has demonstrated via its PS5 SSD demos). Star Citizen has a vastly more complex challenge: the player can move at great speeds, requiring a new way to access a lot of high-detail world data. Imagine jumping to a planet or entering a space station and suddenly having a loading screen pop up, or even worse, a massive stutter – traditional systems might have that, but that would not live up to the game’s design ambitions for being seamless.

Our first look behind the scenes of Star Citizen development – yes, we’ve got capture from the latest 3.8 alpha, but it’s the development tools and demos that really show the scale and scope the team is aiming for.

Even if the user had hundreds of gigs of system memory, this still wouldn’t be enough to get the job done. Star Citizen’s solution is the use of what CIG calls object containers. Put simply, this is any world object large enough to have a number of nested objects within its bounds or an object with an extensive amount of sub-detail. It could be an entire planet, a space station, a city or a ship.

In a traditional game structure, these object containers themselves would be levels or multiple game levels in their own right, which would require dedicated loading sequences. In Star Citizen, as you move through the 3D game space, this hierarchy of object containers is loading in and out in the background in an efficient multithreaded manner to keep slow-down to a minimum. In Star Citizen, the planet itself is an object container, the space station in orbit above is another and then various points of interest dotted around the surface of the planet are other object containers, streamed accordingly.

In combination with the 64-bit coordinate structure, object container streaming allows the player to travel at incredible speeds while also maintaining detail at both the macro and micro level. In the embedded video above, you’ll get to see a key example of macro scale rendering. Star Citizen sets about rendering properly three-dimensional volumetric clouds of dust or gas at a solar scale. The galaxy is handcrafted to a certain extent, with artists and designers creating large swirling nebulae or planetary rings, using similar ‘froxel’ techniques seen in other engines. In Star Citizen, the gas medium itself is lit and shadowed in real-time from the sun or any other light sources placed into it, representing pockets of especially active gas, chemical reactions or other phenomena.

Since this is all carried out in real-time, this means you can fly into it with your ship and watch as the larger structures from the distance become more diffuse as you progress until you are completely enveloped by the gas cloud. For those areas where designers want even more detail, smaller formations of voxel gas clouds can be placed into the overarching gas cloud to represent hero details such as smaller clouds forming around a jump gate, for example. Or they can add in scattered objects into the clouds, like asteroid fields where even the comparatively miniscule asteroids can cast real-time shadows on the extremely diffuse medium of gas surrounding them.

We put together this overview of Star Citizen last year, based on its 3.7 alpha. Clearly, a lot has changed, but as an overview of the project, it’s still well worth a look.

The sheer scale is difficult to process at the cockpit level but perhaps more comprehensible are the game’s planets – where the technology behind their creation is now onto its fourth iteration, changing greatly in the latest 3.8 alpha. Planetary development involves the work of graphics programming, physics programming, environmental artists, hard surface artists, video effects artists and many more. A variety of different skills and disciplines re required as the planets themselves are so much more diverse.

You have colder worlds, warmer worlds, barren worlds, and so on. An individual planet may be diverse in its own right with various distinct biomes – with each having their own weather effects. It’s a fascinating development challenge as CIG wants a certain level of handcrafting in its game world, so a more straightforward level of procedural generation as seen in a game like No Man’s Sky isn’t a good fit. That entails the development of a system that allows for minute detail and diversity on a world level that doesn’t require an eternity to produce – and that’s what this fourth iteration of CIG’s world-building tech is all about.

The basic idea behind planet generation in Star Citizen is all about unifying much of the creation of the planet into interacting systems – and this all starts with two basic variables in describing a planet: how warm it is and how wet it is – temperature and humidity, basically. These aspects work in tandem with a height map defining mountains, plains and valleys. With this the developers essentially map out an entire texture set describing how humidity, temperature, and elevation are scattered across an entire planet surface.

Combinations of these variable define a biome – so, for example, you could have a biome type that is semi-humid and of a moderate temperature while at a specific elevation range, as well as another biome at the same elevation but with different ranges of humidity and temperature. Imagine the difference between coastal cooler grasslands of Scotland and the stretching deserts of the Sahara as it meets the sea. They could be at similar elevations but the temperature and humidity ranges found in each are very different.

A mixture of procedural generation and artist effort across a range of disciplines is used to deliver Star Citizen’s geography, biomes – and scalability.

The 3D terrain underlying the biomes is based on the texture height maps created offline and then generated in real-time with CPU-based in-engine tessellation. To keep performance high and with as few visible edges as possible, the GPU further tessellates the geometry as the camera gets closer to the ground, to the point where geometry size is just a little larger than a centimetre.

With the terrain in place and humidity and temperature decided, artists cooperatively build assets like ground textures, rocks, bushes, boulders and the like based on different biome types. These assets are then placed on the planet as the artists sees fit. As the assets are placed, they are tied into a specific biome range. For example, a formation of rocks an artist places in one location will also be found in any place of similar biome type – so it’s at this point where procedural generation kicks in, shaping the world according to the basic rules and precedents laid down by the developers.

To keep it all coherent and believable and not looking oddly stratified or just crudely placed, a number of other features come together – like the ability for objects and particles to partially inherit the colour from the terrain they are located in so they fit together, or for temporal dithering to occur between biome zones to smoothen their fall off as the view slowly moves away from the terrain. At the planetary scale you can still see how the planet’s textures manage to show the colour of tree canopies, even though the camera is much too far away for the tree models themselves to be rendered.

On an almost galactic scale, Star Citizen uses volumetric rendering to deliver some beautiful gas nebulae effects.

Ultimately, the new system allows the developers to create planets with as many scattered biome types as the designer wants, based upon how they want to divide up the various ranges of height, humidity and elevation. While this may sound like it only would work on Earth-like planets, a simple changing of the paradigm allows this system to describe a whole host of other world types. Instead of describing humidity and temperature on a moon that is extremely cold and has no water, the two texture types could describe the level of acidity or the presence of some other element.

From there, the artists can vary the terrain and asset scattering for more hostile environments with unique biomes, while the game’s remarkable weather systems are also derived from those three key world data parameters. At the macro level, the height map is used to generate real-time soft-shadows from the sun, with proper penumbra and umbra that stretches as far into the distance as the eye can see with no level of detail switching. This also means so you can see massive shadows from the terrain on the planet from space.

Procedural generation is also used to aid in the creation of Star Citizen’s space stations. Given how these structures outnumber planets in the game, they also needed to be able to be varied, efficiently built but also highly detailed. To achieve this, artists design rooms or tiny cubbies and other modular areas of details and pieces within the rooms with a variety of props and useable game items. Using these bespoke modular bits (which can be further customised) a procedural tool takes all of these elements and systematically generates commonsense layouts based upon a generation graph. In the end, an entire space station can be generated with lodging, a food court, landing spaces and the like.

A look at how CIG shapes worlds with its bespoke editor.

The power of that same idea in the layout tool is harnessed to generate other areas of the game as well, such as the cave systems found on a number of planets where you can go spelunking for mining purposes or set off in search of loot. The same system can also populate planets and moons with a number of tiny research outputs or mining stations. Viewed from the top down, the mixture of artist-driven work backed up by procedural generation looks set to radically improve efficiency in creating Star Citizen’s worlds. To give some idea of this increase in efficiency, all of the game’s pre-existing moons and planets required almost two years of work to create manually but took just a few months to remake using the new system.

There’s a lot more I discovered on my visit to the CIG studio and while the focus of this piece has been on the innovations found in the recent 3.8 alpha, there’s a lot more to come. For example, at the moment, the pop-in you see no longer comes from the planet generation textures or geometry, but rather the level of detail ranges for cascaded shadow maps or the LOD ranges for scattered objects like smaller rocks, trees, or boulders on mountains. These are all tuned for the current performance level of CPUs and GPUs – but some fundamental shifts in the game’s rendering setup look set to shake this up significantly, with some profound implications across the game.

Other work in progress includes a much more realistic atmospheric simulation. Currently, this is handled by local froxel fog volumes going out in front of the camera with very distant atmosphere rendering that looks rather uniform. The next iteration utilises the planet’s height map data to draw fog into valleys far into the distance, beyond the local froxel grid. And similar to the terrain shadows, ray marched volumetric shadows will pierce through this extremely distance fog. This would mean you could see massive columns of fog being lit from the sun and shadowed by terrain all the way out into space.

We’ll be looking at micro-level detail next in Star Citizen. Here’s a teaser image of battle damage on a starship.

All of which suggests a game that is still deep in development, where progress is defined as much by work in overhauling existing systems as creating new ones. So if you do back Star Citizen today and load up the latest alpha, what should you actually expect? Well, the goal is to be a massively multiplayer first-person space simulation – but clearly, it is not there yet. As I see it, there are three main elements required to transition Star Citizen from large scale demo to an actual game. First of all, the current servers do not hold thousands of players – perhaps up to around 60. To get so many more people in one playable instance, this requires so-called server meshing technology to be added into the game. This is where multiple different servers work in a lattice and hand off information, simulation and tasks to each other cooperatively. It’s a key piece of technology and right now, it’s still in development.

The next key technological milestone is NPC behaviour. While NPCs are in the game right now, their behaviour is odd at times or rather limited – and they certainly aren’t the player facsimiles they are destined to become. To make them better in general and to have more simulation of the game world, the game still needs to fully integrate server object container streaming. At the moment, the game servers are pretty overloaded with tasks and can slow down as more AI and simulation occurs over time after players spawn and interact, limiting NPC counts and behaviour. Server object container streaming intelligently culls and time slices aspects of the simulation so that much more of it can happen simultaneously – paving the way for more detailed AI simulation. With server object container streaming in, game development can move on, delivering crucial additions to make NPC behaviour more believable.

The last element we need to see (from my point of view, at least) is persistence tracking. Right now, your characters, ship items and status won’t persist from patch to patch – every time a new update arrives, progress is reset. This is possibly the most crucial test of Star Citizen’s transition into an actual game. Full persistence tracking for item placement and the status of all NPCs and characters requires some extremely beefy servers – not to mention some level of finality in core game technology – but it is scheduled to arrive concurrently with server object container streaming, the first iteration of which we’re seeing in the latest 3.8 alpha.

In the here and now, Star Citizen is still very much work-in-progress and whether you decide to join the 2.5m backers needs some consideration because clearly, this isn’t a game as such. Not yet. However, that’s not to say that there isn’t a huge amount of work-in-progress development to check out. Whether it’s playing and exploring with friends, or simply enjoying some exceptional technology, I’ve personally enjoyed my time with each new version – and those updates do keep coming, allowing you to appreciate the progress the developers are making. But on the other hand, let’s be clear, it’s not an actual game as such in the here and now – and there are still big challenges to overcome. My visit to CIG gave some idea of the progress being made and the amount of resources being poured into the development and having had a preview of the new technology to come, I’m really looking forward to seeing more.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/02/seamless-scaling-from-gas-giants-to-detail-rich-alien-worlds-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=seamless-scaling-from-gas-giants-to-detail-rich-alien-worlds-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net