UE4, Shaders, Bloodstained, and you

kinda off topic but I don't really like fighting games...but one of the ones I played somewhat was guilty gear and guilty gear 2 when they were new... and back when when I mentioned them, NOBODY knew them, and the few that did, thought they sucked because they were supposedly horribly balanced and venom or the pool cue guy was considered too op or something, and everyone else was imbalanced too, I don't recall... Then years later everyone is like BLAZBLUE BLAZBLUE I SLEEP WITH MY BLAZBLUE DAKIMAKURAS EVERY DAY BLAZBLUE YAAAA... and I'm like what's so good about blazblue.. and people are like OMG THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE CANNOT CONVEY ITS AWSOME... So I look and I say "looks like guilty gear".. and they say "it's made by the same people... BUT ITS WAY BETTER IN EVERY WAY"... I'm like ok whatever.

then years later.. now everyone's like "FINALLY NO MORE USELESS BLAZBLUE, BACK TO THE GODLY GUILTY GEAR!!!"..

seriously.. what da, flippin' fruit!

Haha, pretty much applies to me as well. 

I've been playing the unreal tournament pre-alpha and the optimzation is extremely good, so based on that they should have no problems with hardware scaling on a multitude of platforms/system specs while achieving maximum IQ with no downgrading.

hey I acknowledged it was kinda off topic, but I was bottling up the rage for ahwile now, and this was just begging for me to peep.

First off, shaders are shaders, and I don't think that just because people feel one is really good at making 3d look 2d, it is somehow magically harder on a computer than other kinds of shaders. While it's true that a game like bloodstained with multiple objects on the screen at all times would have a harder time applying shaders in general, I find it very hard to believe that xrd's shader is somehow miraculously impossible for other games to handle when there are thousands of other shaders that haven't had any problems yet. If anything, xrd's might be easier to process because they know it'll have a 2d display all the time, so it might not even BOTHER applying itself to the 'back side' of everything unlike traditional 3d shaders.

plus xrd was running on a ps3, which is near archaic at this point... the systems on bloodstained should be able to handle that easy even if the above was all false. Except the portables, which I wont get into because I have no clue about that kind of thing.

That depends on the porting process Wii U and Vita themselves lack native unreal 4 support so Armature will have to port it into an existing unreal 4 pipeline. My guess would be that on these systems they would probably use the unreal 4 mobile framework and then adapt it to run on the hardware.

They said they were gonna release the code for free to UE4 developers, so if nothing else, it'll be REALLY GOOD publicity.

That was me, and its very relevant. What you are all looking at as a "3D that looks 2D" shader that can just be slapped on a character is actually so much more... It's the very high detailed character models, the extremely high bone counts in the skeletal rigs, the custom outline meshes, the hand tweaked normals/vertices for shadows, the mesh swaps for abilities and animations, and finally, but most importantly the lighting.

Now I want to be clear here, I love the Xrd style and would be giddy if they pull it off for BS. But I think the application of technique is different enough that people shouldn't get their hopes too high for visual parity between the two. Here's why:

UE3 works with a forward rendering solution. UE4 made the switch to a deferred renderer and there is no option to go back. The engine now uses PBR (physically based rendering) for all of its materials. Without getting technical, it's a HUGE change to the way the engine works, specifically to lighting and rendering of things like... Shaders.

The Xrd team was working with a completely different type of rendering and they heavily customized it for their purposes. On top of that, yes they only had to worry about rendering 2 characters at a time in one isolated environment. The VFX as mentioned, are the least impactful variable of the equation. It's everything else they're doing, that's impressive.

UE4 is great, I use it everyday. But achieving what the Xrd team did, and doing so in <2 years with dozens more characters, hundreds more animations and countless more environments is going to be one hell of a task. Bottom line, please don't hold Inti to the Xrd standard. BS is a different type off game using a different engine and working within a budgeted timeframe. I am certain they will make awesome art and no one should worry, I just want to be realistic about expectations.

So you're basically saying the shaders themselves are the least significant part of the equation, the significance is ultra high poly models, normals being adjusted for said shaders rather than just the textures, high bones, etc...

that's another story altogether. Honestly I don't have a clue about how Xrd functioned, or how it looked. But I would say that if they had a brutish amount of verticies and UVs and all that jazz that pushed hardware to the limits for a 2 model 2d game, then applying it to a game with potentially dozens would certainly be unlikely...

however the characters in fighting games are also fairly large in terms of screen size. like they are typically as tall as 1/2 or 1/3 of the entire screen, with width to match their height... objects in a game like BS are likely much much smaller, and quite simply will not require that much detail since they are so much smaller or distant looking.

I think half of your admiration is that you are an artist, and you desire a job where you don't have to go out of your way to reduce hardware demand, and a game with so few actors on the screen at once giving their artists free reign, you covet their job more than their results... I say this because I've known many artists who wish they didn't have to go out of their way to make their projects less detailed on the computer side so they can focus on their personal goals.