Alien: Isolation

[marks]

FYI - concept art:

http://bradleywright.wordpress.com/2014/10/07/alien-isolation/

[Taylor Swift]

thats some cool concept art. very skilled

[Skacky]

I've been playing this for about 7hrs. If the quality is as consistent throughout I can safely say this is BY FAR game of the year 2014 along with Wasteland 2. 

[Sigma]

 

That is the parking/construction cone from hell! Now I must play this.

Edited October 8, 2014 by Sigma

[-HP-]

Holy shit, sat down at 8pm yesterday and only stopped at around 2am cos my eyes wouldn't take it anymore, this game is SO right up my alley.

 

Gameplay is very unique, it's a different kind of stealth, it's fearful stealth not the typical stealth where you sneak behind a enemy then press a button to take him down, if you're seen you gotta be extremly resourceful and gtfo and hide for a while, very good system I can see why some don't like it but I LOVE it.

 

The environments are the crown jewel of this game imo, so creepy and atmospheric, this is the most atmospheric game I've played in a while. (If you have a good surround setup, make sure you use it, this engine has some of the best surround mixing I've experienced. It had me turning back and look behind me a couple times, i could swear something fell on my kitchen or something, ahah)

 

The environment art is also extremely well done, (geo geo geo, bevels, custom normals, decals, done) I was wondering since a couple of years now when was a game going to just stop using baked tangents and straight off model everything. On today's hardware, tri count is the least of our worries whereas texture memory is still a bit of a bottleneck. With this workflow, you keep material count to a minimum which is good for memory and is also good for artists because they can really focus on making all those tillable materials look good and reuse them at will.

I loved how you just modeled everything, and overlayed decals for details on what seems to be like what, 90% of the whole game? Leaving tangent space baked stuff for hero / unique assets.

It's a GREAT workflow, finally a game has decided to step up and do that, I genuinely think this is almost a revolutionary step in the right direction, it wouldn't work on all kinds of art diection of course but it's perfect for hard surface environments like this.

 

Please, extend my honest congratulations to the whole team! Specially the environment and tech art team, nailed every aspect you should have nailed.

[FMPONE]

Alright HP you convinced me. When I finish Ethan Carter this is my next game to play.

[-HP-]

I have some quick tech questions, maybe Mark could answer?

 

What custom normals solutions did you use? Did you guys develop a inhouse script? I know max isn't very good with custom normals, mainly because the nature of the modifier stack. How did you work around that? Did you leave the smoothing for last? What about asset iteration?

 

What AO solution(s) did you use? This engine has a really decent SSAO, but I noticed there's something else going on there, did you bake AO on vertices as well, or?

 

I'd be extremely interested in seeing a break down on the environment modularity, with a environment like this it's extremely easy to see repetition everywhere, but I found you guys managed to mask it very well. I figure due to the nature of the workflow you used, you can always just model some extra tech doodads, quick UV, throw a tillable material on it and mask a few areas? I'd love to hear a few words from a artist that worked on this on that topic. (Maybe a GDC talk or something, hint hint)

[ElectroSheep]

I want to play it after seen it at work.

 

The environment art is also extremely well done, (geo geo geo, bevels, custom normals, decals, done) I was wondering since a couple of years now when was a game going to just stop using baked tangents and straight off model everything. On today's hardware, tri count is the least of our worries whereas texture memory is still a bit of a bottleneck. With this workflow, you keep material count to a minimum which is good for memory and is also good for artists because they can really focus on making all those tillable materials look good and reuse them at will.

I loved how you just modeled everything, and overlayed decals for details on what seems to be like what, 90% of the whole game? Leaving tangent space baked stuff for hero / unique assets.

It's a GREAT workflow, finally a game has decided to step up and do that, I genuinely think this is almost a revolutionary step in the right direction, it wouldn't work on all kinds of art diection of course but it's perfect for hard surface environments like this.

 

Wait, there is no normal map on evn ? Even on floor with metal plates ?

[-HP-]

I want to play it after seen it at work.

 

The environment art is also extremely well done, (geo geo geo, bevels, custom normals, decals, done) I was wondering since a couple of years now when was a game going to just stop using baked tangents and straight off model everything. On today's hardware, tri count is the least of our worries whereas texture memory is still a bit of a bottleneck. With this workflow, you keep material count to a minimum which is good for memory and is also good for artists because they can really focus on making all those tillable materials look good and reuse them at will.

I loved how you just modeled everything, and overlayed decals for details on what seems to be like what, 90% of the whole game? Leaving tangent space baked stuff for hero / unique assets.

It's a GREAT workflow, finally a game has decided to step up and do that, I genuinely think this is almost a revolutionary step in the right direction, it wouldn't work on all kinds of art diection of course but it's perfect for hard surface environments like this.

 

Wait, there is no normal map on evn ? Even on floor with metal plates ?

 

Yeap, absolutely everything was modeled. I guess I saw some floor grates use a cutout alpha map here and there, but it's rare. They seem to have more or less zero bakes, it's all tilable materials and gloss maps got 90 percent of the way there, they do all the job along side good lighting too.

 

All round edges seemed to be done using custom normals, so most if not all the mesh uses one smoothing group; that's really good because smoothing groups (hard edges) actually add up a LOT of vertices to your models, so they had twice the tricount to play with.

[PogoP]

I have some quick tech questions, maybe Mark could answer?

 

What custom normals solutions did you use? Did you guys develop a inhouse script? I know max isn't very good with custom normals, mainly because the nature of the modifier stack. How did you work around that? Did you leave the smoothing for last? What about asset iteration?

 

What AO solution(s) did you use? This engine has a really decent SSAO, but I noticed there's something else going on there, did you bake AO on vertices as well, or?

 

I'd be extremely interested in seeing a break down on the environment modularity, with a environment like this it's extremely easy to see repetition everywhere, but I found you guys managed to mask it very well. I figure due to the nature of the workflow you used, you can always just model some extra tech doodads, quick UV, throw a tillable material on it and mask a few areas? I'd love to hear a few words from a artist that worked on this on that topic. (Maybe a GDC talk or something, hint hint)

 

We had a script made by the wonderful mr Andrew Oakley (lead tech artist), who is a maxscript scripting genius and the nicest guy you'll ever speak to. Very easy to iterate upon models and then edit the custom normals using his script, and it was all saved in the max file so other artists could run the same script (not sure exactly how much I'm allowed to divulge). Whenever you want to edit a model, I usually just reset the normals, did my changes, and then re-applied the script, telling it which faces I wanted flattened. In general it was a super fast workflow, but you struggled to get a massive amount of detail on stuff because you had to chamfer everything. I noticed when playing that some of the Engineering assets (which were the oldest assets, made very early on) look very low poly.. But the lighting/atmosphere/vfx etc more than makes up for it and you don't really notice.

 

We did use vert AO in most materials, not sure about the SSAO solution though. Mark would know more about that. I did know we had some really cool dynamic GI tech though which I'm sure Mark could explain in more detail. We 

 

I did a lot of the unique normal map decals when I started at CA. There was already a load that were used, but I made some more based off Ron Cobb's concepts which seemed pretty well used throughout.

 

We did have a big library of materials though which did use normal maps, but the average tiling metal/plastic didn't use a normal map.

 

Damnit I miss that workflow!

Edited October 8, 2014 by PogoP

[KoKo5oVaR]

How did you do the uvs easily with that amount of polygons ?

[-HP-]

Pelt mapping?

 

It's mostly tilables, you just need to put your seams in places where you can't see it.

[WD]

 

I love the subtle hint of human skull on the xenomorph.

[dux]

So I bought this today. Then went and looked specially for a HDMI cable around my friends house so I can plug my PC into my 50 inch plasma tv to play this in the dark on. Just need to find some time to move my PC across the flat

[-HP-]

Get a long HDMI cabble, I got a 15 meter one a couple years ago and it works flawlessly. So you can still leave your PC in another room and controll it with one of these so you wont have to get your ass off the couch.