Alien: Isolation

[dux]

That's actually a pretty good idea. I'd need a 30 or so meter one though lol.

[Puddy]

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.

Kids, just remember to get a high quality HDMI-cable as it needs to carry the signal without any loss (especially relevant for longer cables). I once tried a cheapo 10m one and the image was absolutely dreadful.

[-HP-]

Oh of course, that should go without saying. Get a plated one too to avoid static

[Pericolos0]

isnt HDMI supposed to be digital? How could the image degrade?

 

You could also try wireless hdmi but I have no idea if that comes with input lag.

 

And you could also just play this with a controller I guess since it was designed for consoles as well.

[dux]

Oh yeah I'd be playing it with my PC 360 controller, I just consider this game worthy of my big tv

[Mazy]

Love the atmosphere so far, looks and sounds absolutely brilliant, but I haven't been particularly impressed with the pacing and the first bunch of human/android encounters (the very first one where you grab the tuner was pretty terrible to be honest)......but then I finally got the the

Medical Facility

, and man now I'm totally hooked. They've totally nailed the feel of sneaking around with the motion tracker, shifting focus between that and what's in front of you, even if it ended up with me staying under a bed for like 5 minutes at one point D:

[Izuno]

Shopping list:

18 pack jumbo paper towels

24 pack bulk underpants

Tide Ultra UF-plus (urine and fecal matter from underpants removal ingredient)

Alien: Isolation for PS4

Bucket

Bulk garbage bags

2 copies of Ace Ventura Pet Detective (just in case the first one breaks)

My Little Pony anything

[holiestcows]

Just finished installing this. Time to have a spooky night.

[PogoP]

Love the atmosphere so far, looks and sounds absolutely brilliant, but I haven't been particularly impressed with the pacing and the first bunch of human/android encounters (the very first one where you grab the tuner was pretty terrible to be honest)......but then I finally got the the

Medical Facility

, and man now I'm totally hooked. They've totally nailed the feel of sneaking around with the motion tracker, shifting focus between that and what's in front of you, even if it ended up with me staying under a bed for like 5 minutes at one point D:

 

Yeah I felt like it really started getting good after that Hospital section.

 

I think the middle portion of the game is the best. I'm at the end now, just about to get to the Towing Platform I think which is the level I worked on, so I know exactly what happens... And I know that from now on it's just gonna be a bit of a letdown.

The bit where you go out onto the communications array was cool but the walk speed was so, so slow.... That was a bit annoying.

[marks]

 

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.

 

 

Yeah that's pretty much exactly it. I would say from technical point of view though it was so absolutely horrible to get to work nicely, I would not recommend that workflow at all almost all tech/coder guys were agreed by end of the project that we should have used a texture-based approach for much, much more stuff.

 

 

 

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)

 

• What custom normals solutions did you use?
  • Inhouse solution, based on a 3rd party script, think Liam already described it in depth. It was a last-stage step before export. All the data was saved in vertex colours so iteration was remove the custom normals modifier, iterate on the asset, edit the vert colorus if you need to and then re-apply the modifier and export.
• What AO solution(s) did you use?
  • Nothing special in terms of SSAO, but yeah also used vertex AO aswell, mostly baked in max using FAOGen but also a lot painted by hand.
• GDC talk / environment art workflow stuff
  • What specifically are you interested in finding out about? It's something we're talking about at the moment (maybe putting a talk together)

Edited October 9, 2014 by marks

[marks]

-snip

Edited October 9, 2014 by marks

[El Moroes]

 

[knj]

Set a spoiler tag on dat, Gat Demyt !

For me, I just can't wait to go back home after work and play this !

[Zyn]

I was planning to get this but then I got too poor when it mattered. Whyyyyy did I have to buy that new desk chair?

[Vaya]