Probably ambient occlusion, because why would you want your game to load more unnecessary meshes??

How about this. I do. I'm a programmer. Recently got heavily into studying game development. Umbra is useless for people who can build their own engine. It requires time to learn the APIs specific to that middleware instead of just making your own that is more intuitive and adapted to your game. Occlusion culling is nothing special. They already implemented culling in FO3. <== That's a big one right there. They did that themselves. It was basic, but clearly they have been working with each engine they do to improve it.

The Havok Behavior excuse is weak to say they are open to any middleware. Guess why they did it!? It Integrates with Havok Physics! Nobody in their right mind would write their own physics library, but occlusion culling is much more simple. But now see them getting their own animation blending engine integrated with Havok Physics. It'd be hard.


This. I'd rather see them get the money for their own work, than have $500,000 license fees.


It exists for people with a team that is too small to have the capability of doing so themselves. Maybe they specifically lack the knowledge. Maybe they lack the time. A team of 100 people with multiple game programmers does not need middleware that does what they already started implementing in Fallout 3.

Well, if you check some of SpeedTree's showcase you can see that it can do pretty much everything tree / foliage related.

Bethesda said that they dropped it because now they are using a system that artists can craft any tree and add different weight for each branch, modify how wind affects it, etc. SpeedTree can also do the same, and more, it can animate each single leaf, and implement physics that allows you to break each branch, or draw a tree out of nothing and still look great.

Take a look: http://www.speedtree.com/showcase/

This is the list of games that used Umbra occlusion middleware: http://www.umbrasoftware.com/index.php?page=shipped-games

Clearly, these are not all games that can do this kind of occlusion, implying Umbra is not really the only choice, or the most viable.

The implementation in FO3 was pretty shoddy though. You had to manually place meshes to create the occlusion. But if you say it's easy to do then I believe you . I haven't really looked into the sizes of other teams. I wonder how much umbra costs. It must be less than hiring an extra guy to write your own occlusion.

Apologies on that, although I do believe that once you enter the strip it is all one worldspace. I believe that is what I was thinking about there.

There is a mod on the nexus that removes the loading screens on the strip since it is all one worldspace, but entering from Freeside is not in the same worldspace as the strip http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=38056

Again, apologies for not getting my facts straight. Fifty lashes with a wet noodle for me. :facepalm:

This is exactly why twitter really isn't that great for getting any specific info, because it demands context, which we really can't with 140 letters limit. He's misunderstanding the question, because we can't explain the details.

Edit: My bad it is one worldspace but you teleport from one area to the next

Just want to quote this for others to see. OPEN CITIES ARE NOT CONFIRMED

Also, Pete Hines really isn't the guy that should be answering technical questions about the engine, considering he's not really a dev.

@ The OP, you should probably get a dev to change the name fo the thread to open cities *NOT* confirmed

You would rather sacrifice detail?

Yay! =) I love open-worlds to be more...well, open, lol! =D

It's easy, yes, relative to writing their own animation blending and scripting software, that needs to integrate with their physics middleware. It is not "easy" in that anybody and everybody can do it. A basic explanation is that you put everything into the scene in its own box, and it's hierarchical, such that if you don't see one of the boxes, you see none of the boxes inside of it. So it's quick to turn off an entire cell, and everything in it because it can all be addressed by the parent box. And it doesn't HAVE to be pixel-perfect like Umbra claims theirs is, that starts trading CPU time for GPU time. But there has to be a good enough system to handle occlusion problems like a person behind a tree. Those are tougher to solve.

Obviously you think that Umbra has the market cornered. If it was needed to have culling then every game would use it, but they don't because did you ever think that game developers have their own programmers to deal with culling? When they built their new engine, they didn't make it a shell. It will need some middleware to be able to do everything they want but for the most part it seems they created their own middleware tools in, like a dynamic tree tool, that seems to have more options than even speedtree. That just goes to show you don't need 3rd party software to function with the same, if not better performance of features.

I know how you meant easy, relatively easy .

I haven't really looked into how Umbra works, but I imagine it just checks line of sight to everything and if it's blocked then ignores stuff behind that. Obviously things half hidden would be rendered because you can't (as far as I am aware) render just half a model.

If I remember correctly in FO3 you just have to mainly place occlusion planes or boxes, and if you were on the specified side of it the stuff behind/inside wasn't rendered.

That too, I think he means well, but most of the things that people would like to see changed demand a certain context to be understood clearly.

Looks like he may have misunderstood the question...

@DCDeacon You made the forums pretty happy with the tweet about the outside world being one open space. I love the news! Thank you!

@The_Impaler22 Uh, why? It's been like that in every ES game we've made for the last decade +?

I hate to be the party breaker but it seams that it's not confirmed...


@DCDeacon You made the forums pretty happy with the tweet about the outside world being one open space. I love the news! Thank you!
@The_Impaler22 Uh, why? It's been like that in every ES game we've made for the last decade +?

:(

ninjaaaaad

Unless the city is confined inside an NFL dome, then yes, it is outside

Owww, but I enjoyed finding ways of jumping out of the city walls and explore the void :/ WOE IS ME

.....but wait, he said ,,It's been like that in every ES game we've made for the last decade'', so, THERE IS STILL HOPE FOR ME TO FULLFILL MY SICK CLIMBING FETISH, HURRAY! I mean, uh....... LOOK A DRAGON!

Well I sent a tweet to Pete that was a direct question of whether or not the cities are open in Skyrim. Hopefully he answers this one, so far I haven't got any answers back on my other questions :sadvaultboy:

Well, they, like any occlusion system use the "boxes" method I was describing which is usually called "octrees". They cut out a huge majority of the scene just based on which way you're facing first (can't see what's behind you) and then based on your view frustum (your field of view in both axes). Depending on the FOV in game, that takes out a huge amount of stuff. Then, they probably work from the foreground occluders and start removing the largest boxes possible behind these first. Like you said for anything that is partially visible, they probably dive into that node and see which of the "boxes" in that node are visible, they probably don't traverse very deep for performance reasons. And then they apparently do something that achieves "pixel perfect" occlusion, but who knows how they define that. I see "pixel-perfectness" as unnecessary because the FPS boost probably is negated by the CPU /GPU cost to compute that level of accuracy.

Edit: But since they claim GPU acceleration it could also be done via other methods like occlusion mapping. They probably use a combination.

"Manual" could be better in their case. Static architecture is what occludes the most and what helps performance the most by applying occlusion to. Unless they have some very very massive things moving around dynamically in Skyrim, occlusion isn't going to matter on non-static things for the most part.

....

I am sad to hear it may be a misunderstanding, but I'll remain hopeful that they improved the engine enough for open cities. Maybe they're backtracking because it was meant to be a surprise.

I didn't mean to spread false hope :sadvaultboy:

Awesome, just awesome.

Here we go http://twitter.com/#!/DCDeacon/status/28958388385751040