Im really glad that Remedy has been pretty open about their devolopment and not only talking "PR". And not only that, im glad that "tech teams" gets more spotlight not just actors and directors like most game studios do.
1000 % agree. It's quite expected for Sam and Ilkka to be on almost everything since they are the designated faces of the company and the project by their occupations, but as a developer these kind of videos are the ones I'd love to see more. Definitely many things were added to my to-study list while watching this. Can't wait for the GDC presentations
I'm glad that Digital Foundry exists to give people like this the opportunity to talk about their craft to a wide audience because they're definitely some of the unsung heroes of the industry who'd otherwise be relegated to just working away in the background. It's nice to see them get some recognition and talk about the brilliant work they do.
honorable mention, Alex's great interviewing skills. never jumped in, never really rushed them or anything, just goos questions that give us the chance to learn valuable information about the game
Yeah, too many interviewers interrupt and insert their own thoughts constantly (which might be valuable to hear at some point but shouldn't be allowed to disrupt the interview).
@@Jarnis-v1cThere is a phrase in professional auto racing that also applies to real time graphics programming: "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying!"
If I see that in your resumé? You’re hired. Except I don’t run a game development company or any kind of company BUT if I did, that would be your golden ticket.
Alex, these interviews are extremely unique and appreciated. You do a great job highlighting folks who we don't generally get to hear from, and your questions are spot on. Keep up the amazing work!
interesting thing I noticed is how in describing any aspect of the game they mention a narrative element of it as well, it's not "a very dense pacific northwest forest" it's a "primordial forest" it's not "a big building" it's "a supernatural shifting building", no wonder the vision always comes through so clearly in Remedy games, all hands on deck are in on it, they mention it. the Narrative direction and vision is at the very core of these games from the most basic levels of development to final product
Remedy has some of the best people in videogames creation from all departments hands down. Their output is truly astonishing and the overall taste and sensibilities are inspiring and remarkable. Here's hoping Remedy keeps at it for decades more, centuries even.
All departments ? They haven't been able to deliver a game with decent gameplay after MP2 and AW2 is no exception. Just servicable Their soundtracks are also corny and unremarkable. Not to mention audio positioning is not the best in AW2 and it lacks the ineractivity and physics of Control It's v good, just clearly not the best😮💨
What an amazing interview (despite mic/call quality), amazing deep dive into this technical masterpiece of an engine and work made about it! Just watched a video about the Bethesda Engine state too and… yeah… some people do their work around and with issues and some people make excuses. Well, I’m glad we still have developers like those Finnish guys, Kiitos!
They got it right with Avatar. It looks incredible. This game is linear and bakes more elements. The more restrictive game would have to be effectively flawless in its rendering to win a technical comparison if both games look good.
Thanks for the interview to both Alex and the guys from Remedy, it's great to get insight into my second favourite game of 2023 and overall a game that achieved cutting edge visuals on a (relatively) small budget.
Great video, always love the technical insights i know they probably dont get as much views but this are so important for starting conversations like bvh pipeline not getting much love since RT came out that Tatu mentioned
As a graphics programmer IMO what BVH needs is more granular control over the actual hierarchy itself. I'd like to have more than just bounding boxes. Spheres are pretty cheap to intersect against and can be much more efficient for some geometry because you can more closely fit a sphere to it than you can a bounding box. It would be super nice to be able to have geometry and inner nodes of the tree as bounding boxes or spheres, mix and match them in the BVH. It would be nice to be able to have characters be a medley of these spheres following joints on their animation skeleton, instead of bounding boxes.
hope this message finds you well. I wanted to discuss this potential improvement that could greatly benefit our game development process. I was involved in the process. Currently, we use geometry and inner nodes as bounding boxes in our game. While this approach has its advantages, I believe that incorporating bounding spheres alongside bounding boxes could enhance our workflow and save valuable time and effort. Bounding spheres are generally easier to intersect, which would streamline the overall process. By implementing both bounding boxes and spheres, we would have more flexibility in choosing the most suitable method for each specific scenario. However, I understand that implementing this change would require additional labour and time, which may not be ideal given our tight game development timelines. I wanted to raise this as a suggestion for the future, when we have more resources and time at our disposal. By adopting this approach, we can potentially improve the accuracy and efficiency of our collision detection system, resulting in a smoother and more immersive gaming experience for our players. I would appreciate it if you could consider this request and discuss it with me . If there are any concerns or alternative suggestions, I am open to discussing them as well. Thank you for your attention to this matter. I look forward to your response.
@@SimonBuchanNzYeah that's kinda wacky - RUclips says the account joined in 2012. It may potentially be someone who doesn't speak English well and translated a prompt for GPT to expand on what they wanted to inquire about? I imagine it's more likely it's a hijacked account and someone's using a script to surf RUclips video comments, using them as a prompt, and replying with the response generated to fish for suckers who will install something or whatever.
@gavinderulo12 you are right he is missing out on a good game! I guess some people just don't want to admit it. The awards this game has won speaks for itself. So I guess he likes missing out on a good game.
AW2 had it all. Incredible graphics, truly next gen. Gameplay was fun and immersive. Story was also good. This makes me very excited for the Max Payne remake.
@@uncouthliyouth4486yup and Rockstar will be funding, marketing and publishing it I believe which is even better for them as it gives them freedom to make the Remake amazing
Aside from the fact it had some very irritating woke, race baiting unnecessarily inserted into the script, it was a good game yes. From what I understand this is the work of a relatively unknown consultation company by the name 'Sweet Baby Inc'. A number of games recently have had similar race baiting and forced diversity/race mixing endeavours specifically around topics and beliefs that many feel important to their ancestry, identity and ancient culture.
Excellent interview and thank you Alex for asking the right kind of questions to give us a better look at how things are done. I was surprised when Antti mentioned that they had to spend some time on optimizing the game for series S. I wonder how often its done by studios 🤔.
Yeah the series s is the bane of game development’s existence right now. It pissed me off, but I mean if it can get studios more sales, I’m all for it, as long as it’s actually selling games, cus I have a feeling most series s owners are only using it for gamepass.
You must be new, lol. Series S is the running joke among developers, needing to work around it. I hope to god Microsft doesn't do that shit next gen, and if they do make a much weaker console, that it at least has the same amount of memory.
@@buenasondas1147Can you explain to me why memory is so important in that context (and which memory even)? I’m not very tech savvy and never understood the DF team saying that
Really interesting to hear from the developers that certain lighting scenarios, such as lighting an interior environment through the windows with outdoor sunlight, were so complex and expensive that they opted to use baked global illumination for those, instead of real-time path traced lighting. [This baked vs. real-time ray-traced lighting distinction came up in the Graphics of the Year discussion in comparison to Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the latter of which is more dynamic.]
This is still the case, people are mislead to think that current raytracing is better than backed lighting in everyway and thats false, we have seen gran turismo 7 with baked lighting beat forza with raytracing already, raytracing is an artists bottleneck in certain situations, its why most ue5 games look and perform like shit cause its expensive to do realtime raytracing, both baked and realtime lighting have pros and cons.
unrealengine runs games 1080p and mostly sub 1440p with temporal artefacts only netgen consoles will make raytracing more practical the only console games that have used it well are playstation exclusives, insomniac studios id say@@hasan1980hb
@@machinefannatic99 Baked lighting can also be a bottleneck on the dev's end, especially for smaller developers, since it makes it take far more time to see the results of the lighting changes you make. Big lightmaps take a long time to compile.
the part about mesh shader vs primitive shader was very interesting to me as i believe this is the first time ever any dev has talked about this and they basically said its the same
These kind of videos are so insightful and it's such unique content. We rarely get insights this deep into game tech and some people are just too blind to look past their fanboyism. Cannot seriously understand the downvote ratio. Love DF, keep up the great content
Just to the devs, what a magnificent game the Remedy team has pulled together here. An amazing visual, audio, story telling, and immersive adventure. It was so confusing and disorienting to play. As a player I felt like the story was happening to me. Control was definitely fun and a visual showpiece but I've never played a game like AW2 before and you guys deserve all the accolades for producing such an industry defining work. Thank you! You guys are amazing.
Good to see the Northlight Engine and these Mavericks get their shine on DF. Much deserved - AW2 is nothing short of a master class in development. Very creative solutions. Can’t wait to see where these guys go with the next Control title.
Unfortunately for me that's all it had to offered. I couldn't even get past the 1st hour of the game due to how insanely slow and methodical it gets, very slow paced and boring. Still require serious tinkering with the settings to make it run half-way decent each time even on High End hardware.
It's definitely not for the normal gamer. It's a thinking man's game. There's a reason why it won best narrative and why the studio won best direction. Sam Lake is a genius who will take you down the rabbit hole and never let go. It was the one game people can't put in a box, because it transcends any sort of genre. Its uniqueness is why it confuses and astounds. It was the one game we weren't ready for, but for me, it was the one game I'm glad we got.
Aside from the fact it had some very irritating woke, race baiting unnecessarily inserted into the script, it was a good game yes. From what I understand this is the work of a relatively unknown consultation company by the name 'Sweet Baby Inc'. A number of games recently have had similar race baiting and forced diversity/race mixing endeavours specifically around topics and beliefs that many feel important to their ancestry, identity and ancient culture.
The game also respects the player's intelligence. There isn't much hand holding yet the environment gives you clues as to what to do next. I found myself being surprised repeatedly by this. Similar to "Control" (which relied a lot of the sign boards), this time the game takes it to a whole other level. The visuals are just chef's kiss.
The endless chore that was pinning notes to a board with Saga certainly didn't respect anyone's intelligence, though. That was truly a mindless slog and probably the number 1 reason why AW2, unlike Control, will remain a one and done kinda game for me.
Not a jab at the developers for their amazing technical achievement nor against DF for their making this interview possible. However i think DF in the future should consider adding subtitles. Again this isnt a shot against the developers, being multilingual is a accomplishment but following along the video is a bit of a challenge at parts.
why all the dislikes? I feel like this was an incredibly detailed deep dive into the technology behind AW2. I wish these developers would have a free platform to talk and write about this stuff. I love to read about and listen to the masters of their craft.
Probably to do with the very irritating woke, race baiting unnecessarily inserted into the script. From what I understand this is the work of a relatively unknown consultation company by the name 'Sweet Baby Inc'. A number of games recently have had similar race baiting and forced diversity/race mixing endeavours, specifically around topics and beliefs that many feel important to their ancestry, identity and ancient culture. It's the usual, tiresome shit on 'whitey' psychological operation that most young gamers are completely oblivious to. Gamers are more concerned with the 'Muh nice foliage and ray tracing' to notice this and actually pay attention to script. Most will just say we're exaggerating, or shout down 'conspiracy theorist/racist', which is untrue. I'm certainly not opposed to blacks having their own games with their own ancient mythology, which is only fair. When there's this weird amalgamation deliberately being exploited for no other reason than to cause division and trouble, and to trash ancient cultures that some still consider dear to them, then we need to call it out for what it is. Imagine the lead protagonist from Ghost of Tsushima or Miles Morales being on the end of a racial slur? They simply wouldn't dare.
Just rolled credits on Alan Wake II last night. Great, great game. Visually, it has a very cool presentation that takes a lot of cues from Control. There's a lot of extra touches added that really makes for a game unlike anything I've ever seen. Remedy did an awesome job. Can't wait for the expansions this year.
Most of what they are talking about is too low and distorted for me to make out through a thick accent. This is SERIOUSLY hard to follow even if you do know what they're supposed to be talking about.
Love this tech deep dive with the actual responsibles of the the game but please Alex first thanks to the dev team fpr participating on camera before start the actual interview. It feels so harsh to jump straight into the questions. Beside that, amazing content.
The problem with series s is that devs arent developing the games around it but instead using the ps4 or ps5 as base than porting to it causing big problems
I just played through it on GeForce Now Ultimate. It was a pretty great experience. Their servers were able to run it with ease completely maxed out at 3840x1600 with DLSS and frame gen. It was a bit stuttery though due to the lack of an FPS cap with frame gen, but it was perfectly playable.
Hi, You often can't run a traditional frame cap with Frame Generation on. When you do have a cap you see very jerky motion or skips. When hitting the refresh rate limit (Vsync) this sometimes works OK with FG. VRR works really well with Frame Generation and also using Nvidia reflex to buffer before the Vsync limit also really works well. I know very little about GFU but I don't think VRR works with video streaming so it is likely you are seeing stutters due to that.
@@micb3rd Yeah. Vrr doesn't work with a video stream. I was talking more about that the frame rate would often be above 120 FPS, which would result in stuttering since I couldn't just cap to the 120 FPS stream rate.
Really impressed by what Remedy managed to achieve with this game, it was a joy to play from start to finish. The visuals, the story, the audio and music, everything was top tier. Also love how they play around with space in Alan's parts, where you may go down a staircase but end up on the roof of a building, or how they play with looping levels. My personal GOTY, but I'm only 1/3 of the way through BG3 so who knows if that'll change.
The only technical thing that takes me out of the otherwise flawless immersion of this game is the horrible foliage pop in. Can anyone tell me if that was present from the beginning or if that was introduced in a later patch? Do we know if they plan on fixing it? Great content as always and great game
I think mesh shaders are misunderstood by the gaming community. A lot of the community looks at it as being "demanding" when in reality it's a performance boosting tech. Because of the performance boost they were able to add more detail.
Must be awkward after crowning the Avatar Frontiers game as graphics game of the year. I do agree with their sentiments though and they did give credit where it was due just that rasterized performance beats out pathtracing last year.
I love the respect they have for Sam Lakes creative vision and its clear that developers love having such a strong direction to work from. My personal game of the year!
I have this video bookmarked for watching later. The audio prevented me from hearing the developers chatting on my speaker setup where I usually catch up on things like this while washing dishes.
Very curious about this as well! I know the days of boasting about poly counts are long gone, but that just makes it all the more mysterious now. Seeing as there were games pushing 1 million triangles per frame over 15 years ago, something like AW2 must have astronomical counts, even with all of its optimizations.
Excellent interview. I really enjoyed Control, the first Alan Wake and in the beginning Max Payne 1&2. I have Quantum Break on PC, but couldn't quite get into the mechanics. I look forward to playing Alan Wake 2 as soon as it lands on Steam.
I played Alan Wake 2 maxed out on a RTX4070 and I thought it looked bland visually. I'm currently playing Batman: Arkham Knight from 2015 and it impresses me more than Alan Wake 2. Hell, Robocop Rogue City impressed me more than Alan Wake 2
@@jorge69696 we dont use these types of microphones in conference room. In our company we use products from Lenovo and the microphne is kind of “UFO disk” in the middle of the table. I bet thats what they use here. And since there a ton of agenda just to alocate some resources like microphone and camera, I believe they optet for this simple solution. Keep in mind they are like me Devs and we dont care much about these things
I'm not sure I fully agree with the example about baked lighting vs path tracing variances like in a room with an open window or door, the lighting is completely baked. Alex notes that this path traced would be very expensive to affirm when Remedy are saying - Yet we have Cyberpunk, also path traced and any open window or door, even dynamic, will utilise path traced GI and react accordingly and convincingly, whereas in AW2 there is no reaction at all, and AW2's game world is sandboxed and linear, whereas Cyberpunk is open world. IN Cyberpunk there isn't a performance cost to having indoor lighting react this way (aside from the usual fps hit from generally enabling path tracing anyway), the game still runs at high fps with frame gen and dlss enabled, the same as Alan Wake 2's feature support. I noticed this very early into the game when playing as Saga and could swear these issues did not exist in Cyberpunk, so switched over to Night City and did direct comparisons of similar rooms with open doors and posted my findings on a couple of forums accordingly. So what's the real reason here, engine limitation? REDengine is highly scalable, we know this already, and it's become even better since launch, or was it simply a case of there wasn't enough time to fully implement path traced lighting for these scenes in AW2 so baked was the direction they went because that was the original intention before Nvidia came in with a wad of cash to get the whole Full RTX:ON experience put into the game?
I doubt they're lying, just because one studio manages to achieve something doesn't mean every other studio is equally able to achieve the same thing. Cyberpunk also got full path tracing AFTER it's release, that game has been in development a LOT longer than AW2.
I wished Ready At Dawn got the same kind of coverage with The Order 1886 like Remedy get with Alan Wake 2. What they achieved 10+ years ago kind of makes them feel more like wizards than game developers. Say what you want about The Order 1886 but no other game of that gen held up as well in some aspect, it still better than many current gen games.
I played the game on the Series S and I'm very surprised to hear from all the outlets that it plays and looks great on that platform. I think the game is very constrained there and the platform is not a good fit for such a visually impressive game. I enjoyed enough to suffer through the absymal texture resolution of the mind room, the very distracting and persisting temporal artifacts, and the 20+ crashes I had to endure towards the end of the game. I hope to get a new video card soon and play it again and finally enjoy it properly.
The games presentation is phenomenal, HOWEVER... It still has many issues game mechanic wise. Such as floating collisions and invisible boxes, sticky UI elements and even a few issues with enemy AI getting stuck. All minor things, but during a hectic boss fight it leads to literally getting soft locked and dying in a reset loop multiple times on hard mode (ironic considering narrative of the game itself).
Alex, why didn't you ask them to record their speech on a separate microphone in their studio to then put together a quality sound for the viewers afterwards instead of that horrible sound from Zoom call I guess
it is visually great, but the game was lacking in so many departments. the visual glitches and artifacts did not help it's case at all. not quite able to understand why this is so highly rated.
The next step should be to release a physical special edition in the way in which Larian did with Baldurs Gate 3.There are so many which are wating for a physical release in order to play the game.
@@MetalDeathHeadDid you play the game? Or are you just being a silly goose and calling something you don't like "woke"? Or, is it because they included a black women as a lead?
If only they could clean up the fsr on console. The game looks great but there is so much aliasing on man made objects and it really takes away from the overall image.
compressed baked lighting textures, yep like jpg/png whichever is smaller, you get the edges and gradients nicely in small space, use some format that is directly compatible with the gpu texture compression, or just dont care, you can do LOD style loading of the baked light maps, the closer the more detail like textures. compressed images takes care of the disk space, make sure the compression is very agressive like 1/1000 or more of the original uncompressed image light map size. yep you can get high detail baked light maps with smart compressing strategy (where it counts, like jpeg compression of detail, very aggressive compression to make the final surface light maps small but appropriately detailed, yep jpeg does essential image component analysis, also similarity of small triangle surface baked lighting nearby will make the compression better). take your time. there is no hurry.
I don't want to watch this until I've played through the entire game in case I "spoil" some of the effects for myself, but realising Control was using seamless switches from real-time to video and mixing both with some fancy filters was so cool. Games that have coders with a demo-scene background always stand out quite quickly imo, I swear there's someone at Machine Games who consulted on games like Wolfenstein The New Order and RE7 and can't help but wonder if they were either in or closely associated with Triton after working so long on Into The Shadows and then going on to make Butcher Bay. Whoever they are their abscence shows once they leave, not so much in RE8 but 100% in Wolfenstein 2. Alan Wake 2 desperately needs to be played with "proper" HDR, I definitely didn't buy a new LG TV for it, that was just a coincidence..
I take back what I’ve said before. The developers did a great job. Our consoles just can’t handle the greatness. Looking forward to either seeing improvements on the PS5 Pro or I may finally purchase a GPU (4000 series) once the 5000 series launches this year.
I do have a VRR tv but it seems they’ve really cleaned up the PS5 version. First time I was very disappointed with performance to the point I felt I’d picked the wrong version.
Just finished part one! I LOVED IT and i forgot that REMEDY made Max Payne which happens to be my number one game back in the day! Cannot watch this yet for spoilers so i'll be back. Bye for now :D
Im really glad that Remedy has been pretty open about their devolopment and not only talking "PR". And not only that, im glad that "tech teams" gets more spotlight not just actors and directors like most game studios do.
1000 % agree. It's quite expected for Sam and Ilkka to be on almost everything since they are the designated faces of the company and the project by their occupations,
but as a developer these kind of videos are the ones I'd love to see more.
Definitely many things were added to my to-study list while watching this. Can't wait for the GDC presentations
I'm glad that Digital Foundry exists to give people like this the opportunity to talk about their craft to a wide audience because they're definitely some of the unsung heroes of the industry who'd otherwise be relegated to just working away in the background. It's nice to see them get some recognition and talk about the brilliant work they do.
not to mention their very specific brand of humor :)
Wasn't GDC more or less this? Aside from the delay on Vault.
@@Lishtenbird It essentially is, yeah.
honorable mention, Alex's great interviewing skills. never jumped in, never really rushed them or anything, just goos questions that give us the chance to learn valuable information about the game
Yeah, too many interviewers interrupt and insert their own thoughts constantly (which might be valuable to hear at some point but shouldn't be allowed to disrupt the interview).
In Tatu's next promotion packet: "My animation LOD hacks were so good that Alex from DF did not notice any artifacts"
Ha ha ha!
Graphics programmers, always cheating whey you are not looking too closely. And the really crafty ones cheat so well you can't tell.
@@Jarnis-v1cThere is a phrase in professional auto racing that also applies to real time graphics programming:
"If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying!"
@@Jarnis-v1c Graphics and UI are all about cheating, brother.
If I see that in your resumé? You’re hired. Except I don’t run a game development company or any kind of company BUT if I did, that would be your golden ticket.
Alex, these interviews are extremely unique and appreciated. You do a great job highlighting folks who we don't generally get to hear from, and your questions are spot on. Keep up the amazing work!
interesting thing I noticed is how in describing any aspect of the game they mention a narrative element of it as well, it's not "a very dense pacific northwest forest" it's a "primordial forest" it's not "a big building" it's "a supernatural shifting building", no wonder the vision always comes through so clearly in Remedy games, all hands on deck are in on it, they mention it. the Narrative direction and vision is at the very core of these games from the most basic levels of development to final product
That shot of the idea in 'Sam's' head at 46:36 is absolutely sending me.
Remedy has some of the best people in videogames creation from all departments hands down. Their output is truly astonishing and the overall taste and sensibilities are inspiring and remarkable. Here's hoping Remedy keeps at it for decades more, centuries even.
they are just ripping off Resident Evil
@@Therizinosaurus nice bait bro, now go play max payne 1 & 2.
@@ishansingh9633 I did, all Max Payne game from 1 to 3.
I guess this is their first attempt at ripping off Resident Evil?
All departments ? They haven't been able to deliver a game with decent gameplay after MP2 and AW2 is no exception. Just servicable
Their soundtracks are also corny and unremarkable. Not to mention audio positioning is not the best in AW2 and it lacks the ineractivity and physics of Control
It's v good, just clearly not the best😮💨
Thank you to Tatu and Antti to give this lovely interview 😊
Tatooooooooo
What an amazing interview (despite mic/call quality), amazing deep dive into this technical masterpiece of an engine and work made about it! Just watched a video about the Bethesda Engine state too and… yeah… some people do their work around and with issues and some people make excuses. Well, I’m glad we still have developers like those Finnish guys, Kiitos!
Yes their mic was very muffled I have to turn on CC.
@@HamsterXFiles same and I was on the go and wanted to just listen to it 💀
46:35 love how when Antti mentions the story being for so long in Sam's head we get an actual shot of Sam's head lmao
The B roll that Alex used i'm now leaning toward AW2 being the best graphics game of 2023. Avatar is cool and eautiful but damns....this is amazing.
Always has been.
They got it right with Avatar. It looks incredible.
This game is linear and bakes more elements.
The more restrictive game would have to be effectively flawless in its rendering to win a technical comparison if both games look good.
It's so hard. I believe whatever I've seen last is the best looking 😅
They're both technical masterpieces.
Yes . Alex himself said that it was avatar tho , I dont understand for me alan wake 2 is the best
I literally cannot stop playing this game. It’s such a visual treat maxed out on pc that I just keep loading in and looking around
Thanks for the interview to both Alex and the guys from Remedy, it's great to get insight into my second favourite game of 2023 and overall a game that achieved cutting edge visuals on a (relatively) small budget.
That honesty is the greatest. So great to hear it straight and without any weird company bs.
Great video, always love the technical insights i know they probably dont get as much views but this are so important for starting conversations like bvh pipeline not getting much love since RT came out that Tatu mentioned
As a graphics programmer IMO what BVH needs is more granular control over the actual hierarchy itself. I'd like to have more than just bounding boxes. Spheres are pretty cheap to intersect against and can be much more efficient for some geometry because you can more closely fit a sphere to it than you can a bounding box. It would be super nice to be able to have geometry and inner nodes of the tree as bounding boxes or spheres, mix and match them in the BVH. It would be nice to be able to have characters be a medley of these spheres following joints on their animation skeleton, instead of bounding boxes.
hope this message finds you well. I wanted to discuss this potential improvement that could greatly benefit our game development process. I was involved in the process.
Currently, we use geometry and inner nodes as bounding boxes in our game. While this approach has its advantages, I believe that incorporating bounding spheres alongside bounding boxes could enhance our workflow and save valuable time and effort.
Bounding spheres are generally easier to intersect, which would streamline the overall process. By implementing both bounding boxes and spheres, we would have more flexibility in choosing the most suitable method for each specific scenario.
However, I understand that implementing this change would require additional labour and time, which may not be ideal given our tight game development timelines. I wanted to raise this as a suggestion for the future, when we have more resources and time at our disposal.
By adopting this approach, we can potentially improve the accuracy and efficiency of our collision detection system, resulting in a smoother and more immersive gaming experience for our players.
I would appreciate it if you could consider this request and discuss it with me . If there are any concerns or alternative suggestions, I am open to discussing them as well.
Thank you for your attention to this matter. I look forward to your response.
Huh, blatantly AI generated responses to just generically get a reply, first time I've seen (or at least noticed!) that.
@@SimonBuchanNzYeah that's kinda wacky - RUclips says the account joined in 2012. It may potentially be someone who doesn't speak English well and translated a prompt for GPT to expand on what they wanted to inquire about? I imagine it's more likely it's a hijacked account and someone's using a script to surf RUclips video comments, using them as a prompt, and replying with the response generated to fish for suckers who will install something or whatever.
They did a really fantastic job on AWII. Congrats
I wouldn't know. I don't play epic only games.
@@saphricpcgaming5182 That is a "you problem", to be honest.
@@saphricpcgaming5182without epic the game wouldn't exist in its current form. And you are missing out.
@@gavinderulo12And as long as it's an epic exclusive, the game does not exist in my eyes.
@gavinderulo12 you are right he is missing out on a good game! I guess some people just don't want to admit it. The awards this game has won speaks for itself. So I guess he likes missing out on a good game.
Great interview, thank you both Tatu, Antti and DF!
AW2 had it all. Incredible graphics, truly next gen. Gameplay was fun and immersive. Story was also good. This makes me very excited for the Max Payne remake.
That remake is official?
@@uncouthliyouth4486yup and Rockstar will be funding, marketing and publishing it I believe which is even better for them as it gives them freedom to make the Remake amazing
@@uncouthliyouth4486 yes, max payne 1 & 2 remake
Aside from the fact it had some very irritating woke, race baiting unnecessarily inserted into the script, it was a good game yes. From what I understand this is the work of a relatively unknown consultation company by the name 'Sweet Baby Inc'. A number of games recently have had similar race baiting and forced diversity/race mixing endeavours specifically around topics and beliefs that many feel important to their ancestry, identity and ancient culture.
@@SF61984 revolving around what character or plot thread? I just don’t see it. where as it’s quite obvious in most modern games.
I had no idea this would be as interesting as it was. Great talk, love how it didn't have a Wrap It Up for the devs, the tempo was perfect!
Very good point!
This is great stuff to hear this level of feedback from developers.
Excellent interview and thank you Alex for asking the right kind of questions to give us a better look at how things are done. I was surprised when Antti mentioned that they had to spend some time on optimizing the game for series S. I wonder how often its done by studios 🤔.
Yeah the series s is the bane of game development’s existence right now. It pissed me off, but I mean if it can get studios more sales, I’m all for it, as long as it’s actually selling games, cus I have a feeling most series s owners are only using it for gamepass.
You must be new, lol. Series S is the running joke among developers, needing to work around it. I hope to god Microsft doesn't do that shit next gen, and if they do make a much weaker console, that it at least has the same amount of memory.
@@buenasondas1147Can you explain to me why memory is so important in that context (and which memory even)? I’m not very tech savvy and never understood the DF team saying that
You just gotta love Finnish people, that accent is incredibly charming
Really interesting to hear from the developers that certain lighting scenarios, such as lighting an interior environment through the windows with outdoor sunlight, were so complex and expensive that they opted to use baked global illumination for those, instead of real-time path traced lighting.
[This baked vs. real-time ray-traced lighting distinction came up in the Graphics of the Year discussion in comparison to Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the latter of which is more dynamic.]
This is still the case, people are mislead to think that current raytracing is better than backed lighting in everyway and thats false, we have seen gran turismo 7 with baked lighting beat forza with raytracing already, raytracing is an artists bottleneck in certain situations, its why most ue5 games look and perform like shit cause its expensive to do realtime raytracing, both baked and realtime lighting have pros and cons.
Nothing but reflections and AO utilize RT in Forza. If it had RT global illumination it would destroy GT in terms of lighting.@@machinefannatic99
It shouldn't be expensive or complex if using a engine that takes care of all that for you such as unreal engine
unrealengine runs games 1080p and mostly sub 1440p with temporal artefacts only netgen consoles will make raytracing more practical the only console games that have used it well are playstation exclusives, insomniac studios id say@@hasan1980hb
@@machinefannatic99 Baked lighting can also be a bottleneck on the dev's end, especially for smaller developers, since it makes it take far more time to see the results of the lighting changes you make. Big lightmaps take a long time to compile.
Audio is really bad for the two guests, can barely hear anything.
the part about mesh shader vs primitive shader was very interesting to me as i believe this is the first time ever any dev has talked about this and they basically said its the same
These kind of videos are so insightful and it's such unique content. We rarely get insights this deep into game tech and some people are just too blind to look past their fanboyism. Cannot seriously understand the downvote ratio. Love DF, keep up the great content
I love videos like this! Getting a peak behind the curtain of game studios is very interesting, inspiring, and informative!
Love that you get technical in this interview, they are really interesting.
Just to the devs, what a magnificent game the Remedy team has pulled together here. An amazing visual, audio, story telling, and immersive adventure. It was so confusing and disorienting to play. As a player I felt like the story was happening to me. Control was definitely fun and a visual showpiece but I've never played a game like AW2 before and you guys deserve all the accolades for producing such an industry defining work. Thank you! You guys are amazing.
Good to see the Northlight Engine and these Mavericks get their shine on DF. Much deserved - AW2 is nothing short of a master class in development. Very creative solutions. Can’t wait to see where these guys go with the next Control title.
This was my GOTY, and it literally has very little to do with the graphics or visual fidelity. This game offered so much more.
I feel like I’m missing something… I uninstalled it three times and keep coming back.. I must be doing something wrong
I'm really disappointed in it so far 🤷🏻♂️
Unfortunately for me that's all it had to offered.
I couldn't even get past the 1st hour of the game due to how insanely slow and methodical it gets, very slow paced and boring.
Still require serious tinkering with the settings to make it run half-way decent each time even on High End hardware.
It's definitely not for the normal gamer. It's a thinking man's game. There's a reason why it won best narrative and why the studio won best direction. Sam Lake is a genius who will take you down the rabbit hole and never let go. It was the one game people can't put in a box, because it transcends any sort of genre. Its uniqueness is why it confuses and astounds. It was the one game we weren't ready for, but for me, it was the one game I'm glad we got.
Aside from the fact it had some very irritating woke, race baiting unnecessarily inserted into the script, it was a good game yes. From what I understand this is the work of a relatively unknown consultation company by the name 'Sweet Baby Inc'. A number of games recently have had similar race baiting and forced diversity/race mixing endeavours specifically around topics and beliefs that many feel important to their ancestry, identity and ancient culture.
still playing trhough this, amazing so far
yeah, i love the wokeness about it
@@MetalDeathHeadWokeness? Did you even play the game?
no, just watched a playthrough@@dehavillandcanadadhc-6twin20
@@MetalDeathHead Snowflake.
This game is not only a technical masterpiece. Really loved it and i can´t wait for DLCs
The game also respects the player's intelligence. There isn't much hand holding yet the environment gives you clues as to what to do next. I found myself being surprised repeatedly by this. Similar to "Control" (which relied a lot of the sign boards), this time the game takes it to a whole other level. The visuals are just chef's kiss.
Yes! The game’s environment hints you a lot about where to go and what to do unlike other games where you’re just told outright
The endless chore that was pinning notes to a board with Saga certainly didn't respect anyone's intelligence, though. That was truly a mindless slog and probably the number 1 reason why AW2, unlike Control, will remain a one and done kinda game for me.
I really like this kind of video that communicates with developers, which allows players to have a deeper understanding
Not a jab at the developers for their amazing technical achievement nor against DF for their making this interview possible.
However i think DF in the future should consider adding subtitles. Again this isnt a shot against the developers, being multilingual is a accomplishment but following along the video is a bit of a challenge at parts.
I think the issue is the audio volume/quality for the developers relative to Alex.
There are closed captions...
Edit: Sure they're auto-generated but they're accurate enough.
@@MacGuyver85By accurate do you mean unreadable
@@willloman812If your comprehension of the English language is insufficient or you have poor vision: sure. Otherwise: serviceable.
Great video. Thanks for the shout out 😊
It would be great if DF had a sound design analyst. This game pushes 3D sound to its limits. Dolby atmos creates so much of the atmosphere here.
why all the dislikes? I feel like this was an incredibly detailed deep dive into the technology behind AW2. I wish these developers would have a free platform to talk and write about this stuff. I love to read about and listen to the masters of their craft.
Probably to do with the very irritating woke, race baiting unnecessarily inserted into the script. From what I understand this is the work of a relatively unknown consultation company by the name 'Sweet Baby Inc'. A number of games recently have had similar race baiting and forced diversity/race mixing endeavours, specifically around topics and beliefs that many feel important to their ancestry, identity and ancient culture.
It's the usual, tiresome shit on 'whitey' psychological operation that most young gamers are completely oblivious to. Gamers are more concerned with the 'Muh nice foliage and ray tracing' to notice this and actually pay attention to script. Most will just say we're exaggerating, or shout down 'conspiracy theorist/racist', which is untrue. I'm certainly not opposed to blacks having their own games with their own ancient mythology, which is only fair.
When there's this weird amalgamation deliberately being exploited for no other reason than to cause division and trouble, and to trash ancient cultures that some still consider dear to them, then we need to call it out for what it is. Imagine the lead protagonist from Ghost of Tsushima or Miles Morales being on the end of a racial slur? They simply wouldn't dare.
Just rolled credits on Alan Wake II last night. Great, great game. Visually, it has a very cool presentation that takes a lot of cues from Control. There's a lot of extra touches added that really makes for a game unlike anything I've ever seen. Remedy did an awesome job. Can't wait for the expansions this year.
FSR 3 Mod works Awesome for Alan Wake 2. I can play it now with Ray and Pathtracing. And it looks Georgous on my 3060.
FSR 3 mod is a blessing, enjoy the game!
AW only or is this a mid which works with every game?
@@wanshurst2416only dlss 3 fg games
@@wanshurst2416 works on every game with frame gen implemented, such as cyberpunk, witcher 3 next gen upd, etc
Very bad framepacing on nvidia cards.
best looking game ever, should have won DF's graphics of the year
i don't get how this studio can't set up a good mic
Haha exactly what I said. Sounds like they’re gargling water
Most of what they are talking about goes way over my head, but since I love Alan Wake 2, I’m here 🙈
Same 😂
Most of what they are talking about is too low and distorted for me to make out through a thick accent. This is SERIOUSLY hard to follow even if you do know what they're supposed to be talking about.
44:00 this is the most beatufiul toilet i've ever seen
Love this tech deep dive with the actual responsibles of the the game but please Alex first thanks to the dev team fpr participating on camera before start the actual interview. It feels so harsh to jump straight into the questions.
Beside that, amazing content.
The problem with series s is that devs arent developing the games around it but instead using the ps4 or ps5 as base than porting to it causing big problems
Fixed time game ? bake those light, that is the right decision.
I just played through it on GeForce Now Ultimate. It was a pretty great experience. Their servers were able to run it with ease completely maxed out at 3840x1600 with DLSS and frame gen. It was a bit stuttery though due to the lack of an FPS cap with frame gen, but it was perfectly playable.
Hi, You often can't run a traditional frame cap with Frame Generation on. When you do have a cap you see very jerky motion or skips. When hitting the refresh rate limit (Vsync) this sometimes works OK with FG. VRR works really well with Frame Generation and also using Nvidia reflex to buffer before the Vsync limit also really works well.
I know very little about GFU but I don't think VRR works with video streaming so it is likely you are seeing stutters due to that.
@@micb3rd Yeah. Vrr doesn't work with a video stream. I was talking more about that the frame rate would often be above 120 FPS, which would result in stuttering since I couldn't just cap to the 120 FPS stream rate.
every game shipping with FG really needs an ingame FPS cap for this reason!!
@@iamastrangeloop96 for sure
Really impressed by what Remedy managed to achieve with this game, it was a joy to play from start to finish. The visuals, the story, the audio and music, everything was top tier. Also love how they play around with space in Alan's parts, where you may go down a staircase but end up on the roof of a building, or how they play with looping levels. My personal GOTY, but I'm only 1/3 of the way through BG3 so who knows if that'll change.
The smashcut to roblox is one of the most jarring assaults on my eyes that ive experienced all day.
You should invest in some audio repair software to clean up these VOIP interviews, izotope RX10 is really good
The only technical thing that takes me out of the otherwise flawless immersion of this game is the horrible foliage pop in. Can anyone tell me if that was present from the beginning or if that was introduced in a later patch? Do we know if they plan on fixing it? Great content as always and great game
From the beginning
Remedy had an announcement tweet a while ago about integrating omniverse in their pipeline. Would've been nice to get details about that.
Mesh Shaders!!! Hells yeah!
I think mesh shaders are misunderstood by the gaming community. A lot of the community looks at it as being "demanding" when in reality it's a performance boosting tech. Because of the performance boost they were able to add more detail.
Must be awkward after crowning the Avatar Frontiers game as graphics game of the year. I do agree with their sentiments though and they did give credit where it was due just that rasterized performance beats out pathtracing last year.
the closest entities to a modern day Gandalf, right there.
I love the respect they have for Sam Lakes creative vision and its clear that developers love having such a strong direction to work from. My personal game of the year!
I have this video bookmarked for watching later. The audio prevented me from hearing the developers chatting on my speaker setup where I usually catch up on things like this while washing dishes.
I wonder how many triangles an average AW2 scene entails drawing per frame.
Very curious about this as well! I know the days of boasting about poly counts are long gone, but that just makes it all the more mysterious now.
Seeing as there were games pushing 1 million triangles per frame over 15 years ago, something like AW2 must have astronomical counts, even with all of its optimizations.
It runs on the Xbox Series S... shocking some gamers
Excellent interview. I really enjoyed Control, the first Alan Wake and in the beginning Max Payne 1&2. I have Quantum Break on PC, but couldn't quite get into the mechanics. I look forward to playing Alan Wake 2 as soon as it lands on Steam.
I love when Alex does technical interviews.
Amazing work Alex! Thanks!
Antti... Sounds like the Ahti the Janitor, now we know where that name came from.
Nice video guys 😀
I played Alan Wake 2 maxed out on a RTX4070 and I thought it looked bland visually. I'm currently playing Batman: Arkham Knight from 2015 and it impresses me more than Alan Wake 2. Hell, Robocop Rogue City impressed me more than Alan Wake 2
DF should make decent microphones a requirement for technical interviews.
They were probably in some conference room in their company. thats standard teams call/slack quality.
@@kukuricapica And yet the quality is lower than the microphone of a cheap phone positioned right in front of the speaker.
@@jorge69696 we dont use these types of microphones in conference room. In our company we use products from Lenovo and the microphne is kind of “UFO disk” in the middle of the table. I bet thats what they use here. And since there a ton of agenda just to alocate some resources like microphone and camera, I believe they optet for this simple solution. Keep in mind they are like me Devs and we dont care much about these things
I was able to understand them, could be worse tbh
@@kukuricapica they work with pc, can't they buy good stuff ? isn't that hard tbh, the aidio/video quality on the devs side is baffling...
Good to see the BTK giving us his feedback on the game, really good stuff.
Fantastic job guys. Well done.
I'm not sure I fully agree with the example about baked lighting vs path tracing variances like in a room with an open window or door, the lighting is completely baked. Alex notes that this path traced would be very expensive to affirm when Remedy are saying - Yet we have Cyberpunk, also path traced and any open window or door, even dynamic, will utilise path traced GI and react accordingly and convincingly, whereas in AW2 there is no reaction at all, and AW2's game world is sandboxed and linear, whereas Cyberpunk is open world. IN Cyberpunk there isn't a performance cost to having indoor lighting react this way (aside from the usual fps hit from generally enabling path tracing anyway), the game still runs at high fps with frame gen and dlss enabled, the same as Alan Wake 2's feature support.
I noticed this very early into the game when playing as Saga and could swear these issues did not exist in Cyberpunk, so switched over to Night City and did direct comparisons of similar rooms with open doors and posted my findings on a couple of forums accordingly.
So what's the real reason here, engine limitation? REDengine is highly scalable, we know this already, and it's become even better since launch, or was it simply a case of there wasn't enough time to fully implement path traced lighting for these scenes in AW2 so baked was the direction they went because that was the original intention before Nvidia came in with a wad of cash to get the whole Full RTX:ON experience put into the game?
I doubt they're lying, just because one studio manages to achieve something doesn't mean every other studio is equally able to achieve the same thing. Cyberpunk also got full path tracing AFTER it's release, that game has been in development a LOT longer than AW2.
I wished Ready At Dawn got the same kind of coverage with The Order 1886 like Remedy get with Alan Wake 2.
What they achieved 10+ years ago kind of makes them feel more like wizards than game developers.
Say what you want about The Order 1886 but no other game of that gen held up as well in some aspect, it still better than many current gen games.
I really need subtitles for this video, it's impossible to follow at times.
However, there are no reflections on mirrors
You guys could've worded that title differently lol
I tried my utmost to like it but the snail's pace at which this moves combined with that mind palace mechanic...man I just can't stomach it.
I played the game on the Series S and I'm very surprised to hear from all the outlets that it plays and looks great on that platform. I think the game is very constrained there and the platform is not a good fit for such a visually impressive game. I enjoyed enough to suffer through the absymal texture resolution of the mind room, the very distracting and persisting temporal artifacts, and the 20+ crashes I had to endure towards the end of the game.
I hope to get a new video card soon and play it again and finally enjoy it properly.
The games presentation is phenomenal, HOWEVER... It still has many issues game mechanic wise. Such as floating collisions and invisible boxes, sticky UI elements and even a few issues with enemy AI getting stuck. All minor things, but during a hectic boss fight it leads to literally getting soft locked and dying in a reset loop multiple times on hard mode (ironic considering narrative of the game itself).
Alex, why didn't you ask them to record their speech on a separate microphone in their studio to then put together a quality sound for the viewers afterwards instead of that horrible sound from Zoom call I guess
Did the ever fix the messed up shadows?
it is visually great, but the game was lacking in so many departments.
the visual glitches and artifacts did not help it's case at all.
not quite able to understand why this is so highly rated.
advertizement
This game truly is the champion of light
Such a good video @Digital Foundry, thank you !
The next step should be to release a physical special edition in the way in which Larian did with Baldurs Gate 3.There are so many which are wating for a physical release in order to play the game.
I'd honestly prefer if they wait until all the DLC releases before we see physical copies
physical wont erease the wokeness though
@@MetalDeathHeadDid you play the game? Or are you just being a silly goose and calling something you don't like "woke"? Or, is it because they included a black women as a lead?
Audio quality sucks sadly
If only they could clean up the fsr on console. The game looks great but there is so much aliasing on man made objects and it really takes away from the overall image.
Please get a physical release out there!
compressed baked lighting textures, yep like jpg/png whichever is smaller, you get the edges and gradients nicely in small space, use some format that is directly compatible with the gpu texture compression, or just dont care, you can do LOD style loading of the baked light maps, the closer the more detail like textures. compressed images takes care of the disk space, make sure the compression is very agressive like 1/1000 or more of the original uncompressed image light map size. yep you can get high detail baked light maps with smart compressing strategy (where it counts, like jpeg compression of detail, very aggressive compression to make the final surface light maps small but appropriately detailed, yep jpeg does essential image component analysis, also similarity of small triangle surface baked lighting nearby will make the compression better). take your time. there is no hurry.
I don't want to watch this until I've played through the entire game in case I "spoil" some of the effects for myself, but realising Control was using seamless switches from real-time to video and mixing both with some fancy filters was so cool. Games that have coders with a demo-scene background always stand out quite quickly imo, I swear there's someone at Machine Games who consulted on games like Wolfenstein The New Order and RE7 and can't help but wonder if they were either in or closely associated with Triton after working so long on Into The Shadows and then going on to make Butcher Bay. Whoever they are their abscence shows once they leave, not so much in RE8 but 100% in Wolfenstein 2. Alan Wake 2 desperately needs to be played with "proper" HDR, I definitely didn't buy a new LG TV for it, that was just a coincidence..
Fantastic -- can't wait to watch!
I take back what I’ve said before. The developers did a great job. Our consoles just can’t handle the greatness. Looking forward to either seeing improvements on the PS5 Pro or I may finally purchase a GPU (4000 series) once the 5000 series launches this year.
Remedy, you rock!
I do have a VRR tv but it seems they’ve really cleaned up the PS5 version. First time I was very disappointed with performance to the point I felt I’d picked the wrong version.
Great interview Alex, well done!
Just finished part one! I LOVED IT and i forgot that REMEDY made Max Payne which happens to be my number one game back in the day! Cannot watch this yet for spoilers so i'll be back. Bye for now :D
Man the rending on the Koskela Brothers is getting scarily realistic.
Not just visuals on gameplay side this was a masterpiece as well and thats why its my game of year
It's the best looking game I've ever played to date! What they're saying goes way over my head though 😂