Maybe I need to take a closer look at this but from my brief glance at the game it seemed like all of the translucent rendering was at non-HD resolution and volumetric effects like the flashlight (nice volumetric shadows, IIRC) also had some noise added to hide banding. Didn't notice the whole game rendering at a lower res though.
I think there are many ex-FC members in Remedy, right?
July 24, 2010 at 1:16 PM
Yesterday I finished Alan Wake. Yes I play games instead of writing bad articles for this blog :)
The ending is a bit tame but I don't want to spoil anything. The thing that I found really amazing tough was listening to the ending music during the credits screen. It really, really surprised me, Alan Wake's soundtrack is excellent all around, but David Bowie? It really didn't feel like a game's ending! Also with some decent speakers it really sounded incredible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFwpBB7xXI
Rendering-wise Alan Wake is a bit of a mixed bag... It's not groundbreaking (anymore), I didn't really play looking at the rendering too much (i.e. trying to reverse engineer things) because the bad AA and the sub-hd framebuffer were really annoying to me. I guess most people don't notice too much the sub-hd rendering but I play all console games on a fairly big projector screen that makes those defects really evident and annoying.
So please, don't cheat! Do as we do, real 720p, 60hz, 4xAA games ;)
I hope that MLAA (and similar techniques) will really save us... Many games are going that way, especially as there's really no good way of doing hardware AA with deferred rendering on current-gen consoles. I still didn't have much time to look into this unfortunately, I hope I will in the future.
p.s. some people are having troubles reaching the original MLAA paper (many links are broken and the one in the Intel's visual computing research homepage is misspelled) so I'll include it here.
"Alan Wake credits"
5 Comments -
Maybe I need to take a closer look at this but from my brief glance at the game it seemed like all of the translucent rendering was at non-HD resolution and volumetric effects like the flashlight (nice volumetric shadows, IIRC) also had some noise added to hide banding. Didn't notice the whole game rendering at a lower res though.
July 20, 2010 at 7:52 AM
Those guys are usually pretty accurate. At least so far all they "guessed" right everything about the games for which I know the tech details.
July 20, 2010 at 1:05 PM
Oops, I forgot the link:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-alanwake-tech-analysis
July 20, 2010 at 1:05 PM
Btw, Henchman/FC is Director of Development for Alan Wake. A former Sysop... :)
July 23, 2010 at 1:20 AM
I think there are many ex-FC members in Remedy, right?
July 24, 2010 at 1:16 PM