dezvous

@dantebk: I didn't know I could be so easily convinced of further subscription support than with that Shenmue 2 idea.

This is a bit confusing but I've always been here with you guys even though I haven't watch much at all in the last year or so. Been following since Arrow Pointing Down and subbing since it was possible and I've always had 2+ years purchased ahead of time.

Like many others I have no interest in a Discord but I know some do, I just hope that whatever additional premium tiers get added they don't involve putting content behind some higher paid tier. Curious to see what this level 3 tier is.

Thanks so much guys, this podcast has made such a positive impact on me and so many others. <>

@av_gamer: the charge gate is really only in a handful of areas throughout the entire game and literally none of the levels up until Vinny got to this one hahah. I think I saw maybe 10 total throughout the 17 levels and 3 or 4 of those are in the level they picked here? It's just a very minor and infrequent added difficulty challenge that requires you to stick around the enemies a bit more instead of just blasting through it - plus - in the fiction the whole story centers around a hyper capitalist society and this is an example of the employers literally charging their employees to get from place to place while at work, so a small bit of world building as well. If you're not trying to run through the whole thing and restarting every 5 minutes it takes only a couple extra seconds per. I get it's not for everyone but the charge gate thing is such a non-issue haha.

The most glaring issue is definitely the checkpoint system, the game desperately needs quicksaves (or alternatively the ability to re-trigger a checkpoint & switch to a previous checkpoint as a backup) if you're trying to save everyone as the difficulty ramps up later. Though if you're totally fine letting some Mudokons die it's not so hard at all. I really enjoyed it, wish they could have showed some of the excellent cinematics.

Bowser's Fury is fun enough but I vastly prefer Odyssey and seeing people talk about this being some mind blowing revelation with the "open world" aspect has been confounding to me, it mostly feels like a larger but more empty Odyssey level in some ways. It doesn't work particularly well at all when it comes to having to go back to the same gate to trigger the new level permutation and even that is inconsistent and clunky. The need to return to the exact same spot to trigger a "new level" kind of flys in the face of the purpose of an open world to begin with. There are great elements here but as a whole I think if you just made a Mario Odyssey style game with a larger more interconnected world I'd much prefer that as Odyssey is plenty open to begin with. I find the density in Odyssey much more satisfying, not to mention the incredible move set.

I wanted to like this game so much more than I did. I really want Bloober to have another go at this style of fixed camera game but I think the writing and overall fit and finish need a lot more work. It's wild, even with Microsoft's backing The Medium still feels like it tried to bite off way more than it could chew. The two worlds concept is interesting but I think it works better in cutscenes when things are directed, during gameplay I just wanted to look at one or the other most of the time.

It did make me go and install Silent Hill 2 Enhanced Edition though, what a treat, if only the HD Collection had as much care and attention.

I don't mean to take anything away from Hades landslide victory, it's a phenomenal game, but I would imagine a large reason for its ubiquity across so many lists comes down to a very important detail. It's an incredible 25 dollar game compared to the seven other 60 dollar games that make up the top 10.

Certainly its quality alone earns it the top spot but that significantly lower barrier of entry means it probably should show up on more lists than the others where people are likely having to pick and choose which full priced games they're picking up rather than getting them all. And the buzz around Hades was so much higher than any of the other great lower priced games as well.

@jbick89

Yep! Happy to provide some extra details. It's pretty wild that many elements of my career and favorite hobby are converging but they very much are. Real time raytracing is an absolute game changer for anyone involved in CG work. And while it's still very rudimentary compared to offline renderers, people are already starting to get to see that even relatively simple implementations of raytracing make an enormous difference. It's all extremely cool.

Many renderers are starting work on implementing a "realtime" version of their existing offline render engine. The idea being you do your lookdev (look development - where you do all your initial setup with shader creation) and general lighting in the realtime version and you get a close enough result without having to wait while working, essentially a much faster iterative working process. But when it's time for final delivery you switch over to the offline render version that will be higher quality by shooting more rays and a more robust feature set.

I can answer that for you in a rough artist sort of way (not super technical), it's definitely an imposed limitation, reflections of reflections refers to something called Trace Depth which essentially just describes how many times a ray bounces before it stops futher calculation.

The fog you see is basically a visually decent fallback option they have implemented to make it look less awful than just going black or some other more stark cut off.

So if you had a Reflection Trace Depth of 1 you would only get that first hit of reflections in the mirror, but you wouldn't be able to see the reflection of a mirror in another mirror. That goes for anything, you can have a trace depth for Global Illumination/Diffuse Bounce Lighting and there the trace depth value would refer to how many times the light ray bounces off something before it stops being calculated.

Same for Refraction rays (transparency rays). If you have a 3d model of a drinking glass you would generally need a trace depth of 4 or higher to get through the outer side of the drinking glass, come out on the inside of the glass (where the liquid would go) then go through the other side of the glass and then finally out the other side of the glass where it can finally look to see what it sees through the entire glass object. If it were set to 3 or lower the Refraction ray would terminate too early and you wouldn't be able to see the world beyond the glass.

Here's a documentation page for RenderMan for visual examples if you're curious. Renderman Trace Depth

In general subsequent bounces for Diffuse Lighting are far less noticeable than reflection or refraction trace depth unless your scene is really dark, but even then after 2 or 3 bounces the light energy falls off so quickly the differences are negligible.

Long story short, increasing the trace depth can increase render times exponentially, it is generally brutal on performance and you optimize these values for the lowest that you can reasonably get away with while retaining a nice looking image.

This was super fun! You guys must know some talented graphics programmers, people like Cowboy, to have come and join you to explain things with more confidence right? Sounds like something like that could be an interesting show.

I'm a 3D artist, I deal with raytracing in offline GPU rendering all the time, real time raytracing for games is so exciting and it's converging with my professional work as well. Within the next year I will probably be completing most of my shader lookdev in real time versions of the non-real time render engines that I use, using the non-real time render version for final renders. Extremely rad stuff.