In this video emerges something about what we can expect in the upcoming update.
Next come my review of this talk with some of the info extrapolated from the video.
Those are some salient moment of the video.
A New Major Gift from Havok.
2:40 Joel during his talking refers to a slide where you can see the bundle content and name upon others middlewares we used to know, Autodesk Beast as a free of charge light mapping solution included in Project Anarchy.
This is something I was waiting from day one and I hope it get confirmed and will ship in the next update.I'm still curious to know the level of customisation of the baking process and is something is changed with the light grid.
Optimisations
5:00 in the overview Joel say that they collaborated with arm to maximise performances.
I cannot imagine how much of an improvement we have to expect but it's something really good to know especially if it translates to specific optimisation for arm GPUs that represent a consistent percent of the mobile gpu market share.
My wish is to see something like that to happen even for Tegra 3 and 4 as they are platforms with very different architecture generally more problematic if not targeted specifically(es non tiled rendering and lack of stencil buffer make them quite different than other mobile solutions).
Samples
From 8:30 up to 14:00 we can see some specific middleware demo not included in previous version of Project Anarchy.
AI user edges and crowd steering demos and powered rag doll hit reaction will be very great to have.
I hope it represent an inversion of tendency and they will get included in the Project Anarchy release .
Pc release of free Havok Physic and Havok Animation comes with far more examples showing every features of these middlewares.This is not the case of AI and Animation Studio where no free version with feature showcase demo seems to exist at the moment.
PC Exporter and PC Renderer
14:48 Seems that PC exporter finally will come with this update with the confirmed price of 500$.
In the Slide it's stated that both deferred and forward render are present.
I'm in a very early stage with my game but the release of the pc exporter it's something good to know in any case.
The deferred render is something unexpected, but lot of people was asking for it in the forums, so I guess they will be very happy to know.
It remain to see if it will come with the full range of shaders and shadow features.
It makes my more motivated to continue my Render Effect Project as the presence of the depth and normal information opens the way to more complex Post Process Fx.
This release will probably make my work to add more features to the simple render obsolete,but it is all but a problem for me as I can focus on Post FX.
Joel doesn't talk about dx9 or dx11.
I' will remain really impressed if dx11 will come out.
I die to try some compute shader programming on Project Anarchy.
I don't want to exclude that as now with everything that is going on with the other AAA engines, adding dx11 to the offer could be an additional selling point for Project Anarchy.
Mobile Graphic
15:09 Opengl es 2.0 new effects Particle lighting, light shafts, water shader , hardware pcf shadows, fxaa.
As opengles 2.0 platform is very wide in offering very hi and very low end devices, Project Anarchy gives a good support for both with a solid feature base that performs good on a wide range of devices plus some special eye candy to display something more on the newest devices.
-Particle lighting:
I love this one.
Mobile implementation sound to be very fast too.
It's something that you don't see every day in mobile games even if quite standard on today hi end console and pc games.
-Light Shafts:
Looks very well made and very interesting the possibility to colourise it from a texture.
No details on the specs of the implementation but it's generally something to use sparingly and or at very low resolutions.
Featured on Ios in the Infinite Blade series from the second chapter on and not so many other games.
In the video apart from the windows sample that helps sell the effect other samplesseem to lack any kind of light source. (however this issue has nothing to do with the effect's implementation).
-Water rendering:
Animated ripple sound really cool but demo is showed in this video.
Water fog sound to be a different fog setting for when the camera is submerged as i don't think it is per pixel depth fog applied to the water surface , for performance and looking at screen shots.
Static light on water let it to fit correctly in the environment blending very well with the rest of the scene.
Customisable shader is nothing new on Project Anarchy that makes possible to customise everything by design.
-Hardware pcf Shadow filter:
This is another thing that has been not showcased in this video but just added to the feature list.
It's a great addition and even if theoretically not too slow it is something you can simply switch on and off based on the power of the device or at will during specific sequences to save some performances.
It's probably a single bi linear 4-tap filter.
Quite advanced on mobile where actually we see that most of the games run with unfiltered shadows(or totally fake shadows).
Oceanhorn on ios is one of the few titles featuring pcf and may represent an example of what we can expect to see on Project Anarchy.
-FxAA
Anti aliasing is still the holy grail for every platform that doesn't feature some outstanding 4k resolution.
Even if MSAA is really solid on some devices(es iPad 2) thanks to power vr tile deferred rendering, but doesn't seem to be so practical on other GPU architectures.
FXAA on the other hand isn't based on hardware features, but differently applies to the entire image (also alpha test/blend) in post processing so just rely on raw power even if it is one of the lighter AA of this kind.
Against other AA filters the blurring is more evident than other, slower, but more advanced, solutions.
It seems to be something quite demanding on low spec hardware due the per pixel cost especially on an hi dpi device's native resolution.
I never checked it personally, but It's what you theoretically expect due to way it works.
No details are given about the implementation.
Generally the standard(non mobile) effect comes with some kind of blur vs sharpen setup to better match your game graphic and style.
It may be the key on hi end devices to make a real difference with the low end ones.
The Future
Finally some kind of road map seems to emerge.
At least for the graphic side but I hope to see a more complete one in the next months.
Road map shows opengl es 3 implementation, but with no approximate release date and too variable mobile specs it's hard to guess a complete mobile graphic evolution.
Possibly a very smooth change is more arguable with some compatibility with the past in the first place.
A radically new renderer built on opengl es 3.0 specs and capabilities will probably follow only when opengl es 3.0 capable devices will get a bigger percentage of market share.
I think that opengl es 2.0 have still lot of things to say as actually we have implement just a mix of old and actual techniques adapting them to mobile capabilities, but something say me that there will be a lot of more exploit possible especially leveraging some unique gpu extensions.
What is missing
Joel didn't spend a word about the 2d tool set, this made me a bit worried as I expected it to rule this update(all fruit of my sick mind).
I will wait to read the official announcement and to know something about the destiny of what seemed to be a really promising addition to the overall capabilities of the engine.
The end?
I hope this release to be available before I will leave to Spain so I don't have to download it by 3g.
As soon as everything get real with official announcement I want also to start and maintain a wish list page for the upcoming versions.
As Joel stated that all content is open I think that I will use some rpg demo asset to speed up my actual project at least to have something to show on this pages.
This was something i didn't know about and great to hear.
Special Thanks
I want to give my thanks to all the Havok staff, for the great and hard work they put in this upcoming release that apart from many eye candies will contain a large amount of fixes and new features.
Even if in past I was the first to state that it seems that user's feedback get lost on some old forum posts you always shown not to miss anything that get asked by users, this release really confirm this trend.
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