Game Tech: How BioShock Infinite's Lighting Works 55
An anonymous reader writes "The Principal Graphics Programmer for BioShock Infinite has put up a post about how the game's lighting was developed. We don't usually get this kind of look into the creation of AAA game releases, but the studio shut down recently, so ex-employees are more willing to explain. The game uses a hybrid lighting system: direct lighting is dynamic, indirect uses lightmaps, shadows are a mix. 'Dynamic lighting was handled primarily with a deferred lighting/light-pre pass renderer. This met our goals of high contrast/high saturation — direct lighting baked into lightmaps tends to be flat, mostly because the specular approximations available were fairly limited.' It's interesting how much detail goes into something you don't really think about when you're playing through the game. 'We came up with a system that supported baked shadows but put a fixed upper bound on the storage required for baked shadows. The key observation was that if two lights do not overlap in 3D space, they will never overlap in texture space. We made a graph of lights and their overlaps. Lights were the vertices in the graph and the edges were present if two lights' falloff shapes overlapped in 3D space. We could then use this graph to do a vertex coloring to assign one of four shadow channels (R,G,B,A) to each light. Overlapping lights would be placed in different channels, but lights which did not overlap could reuse the same channel. This allowed us to pack a theoretically infinite number of lights in a single baked shadow texture as long as the graph was 4-colorable.'"
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yeah I dunno why even write an article about it.
and bioshock infinite.. ..isn't that infinite at all. the lighting didn't really add anything to it.
like, how is the lighting different from bioshock1?? if i is calculated differently it sure as fuck doesn't change anything gameplay wise nor even graphically...
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Other game mechanics are also pretty whiffy - the expository voxophones lying conveniently around are such a lazy gaming trope (other games might use email terminals, voi
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Re:Graph was 4-colorable... (Score:5, Insightful)
See, this is something actually nerdy but nobody gives a shit. /. is dead.
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The best part is that most of the people complaining about it or making idiotic comments without reading the article are the same people who will, tomorrow, be bitching about "slashvertisements" and "important world news isn't news for nerds!", etc. They act like they want slashdot to be a recondite technical news and discussion site, but when they are actually given that, the comments sections languish and are filled with people who know little or nothing about the subject matter deriding it to feel better
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It's early yet. Believe it or not, many Slashdot readers do other things during the evening hours like go out (of the house, not just the basement) and socialize (with real people in the flesh)... Sometimes pick up the kids, swing by a grocery store (believe it or not, many Slashdot readers do not live on Cheetos, Dew, and the occasional Ramen noodles anymore).
Had this story been posted during working hours, there would be twice as many comments by now, since most Slashdot readers surf the site at work...
baked shadows (Score:1)
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Sounds like burnt. You like burnt muffins.
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There are occasional gems in the comments, enough to make older visitors browse them, but you are quite correct, most of us have moved on to better sources of news.
Quit complaining, it doesn't help. I suggest visiting reddit and finding some topics you enjoy, perhaps /r/programming or /r/technology, and also move along to sources like IEEE and ACM discussion groups.
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No, it's an excellent technical write up for those in the know about 3D lighting but I'm still at a loss for anything to actually discuss about it. I think even the old guard are 99.9% out of their depth trying to discuss whether any of the techniques used were appropriate or optimal. It's not even remotely trying to make it accessible to the general nerd as it's throwing references, acronyms and low level implementation details at you at a blazing pace with little to no explanation. The only summary I got
Re:Graph was 4-colorable... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Oh stop it. You're overreacting.
So what if the article does not have a huge conversation tacked on. You expect 500 comments about video game lighting? While the article is in fact very nerdy and jives with the whole "news for nerds" thing. It's one of those articles that caters to a limited number of people, namely video game developers. For most people its overly technical and beyond their understanding. There are plenty of other technical articles that don't get a large number of posts either.
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Ignoring the obvious performance issues you can't make any substantial changes to the behavior of the engine. Take a look at most games shipped with Unreal and you'll see they use different middleware (audio, pathfinding + others) to what is in the shipped engine. This is not something which can be practicably done via UnrealScript. Even if you could manage to make it work the performance will be appalling. Transitions between UnrealScript and native code are expensive.
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i touch da pepe (Score:1)
and a small further note you can use the same technique to cull the geometry fed into the shadow pass as well - if its not in the pvs from the light's perspective then it can't cast a shadow you will ever see from that light. :)
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From the readme:
windows 7 / directx 11 required
high end directx 11 gpu required
ati 7970 or nvidia 680 recommended
due to the intense pixel work, max 720p resolution recommended
Just buy it and STFU! (Score:1)
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Because, like Hollywood, or any kind of photography, making things more realistic does not get you any more people going "wow".
We've reached a point now where we can make photorealistic scenes. The problem is that photorealistic scenes have to be of something fantastical for you to be able to see what's going on, what's an enemy and what's prop furniture. Like the old Holywood adage - it has to be light enough to see the dark by.
Otherwise you get complaints like those that surrounded Doom 3 upon its relea
handbag store http://www.shoesctv.com (Score:1)