nowhat
Member
I recently started replaying HZD, and even though the game is almost three years old by now, I'm still blown away by how gorgeous the game can look. Sure, some of the minor NPCs can have iffy facial models and animations, but it's not like the engine is incapable of creating good looking human characters (see: Death Stranding), just that clearly it wasn't the focus in HZD (and most of the minor NPC conversations are 100% automated, hence the robotic feel). But I'd argue when it comes to the environments (outside water rendering, that DS absolutely nails), HZD looks better. Sure, it's technologically impressive that DS can have seemingly infinite amount of tiny pebbles on the ground extending as far as you can see, and that the world is so barren surely is an artistic decision. But it doesn't quite compare to the lush (and varied) environments in HZD, the world feels so much more alive (which it of course is, when comparing the game worlds).
So how does Guerrilla pull it off? What makes Decima tick? While we may never know all of the details, thanks to GDC talks we do know quite a bit. At the heart of Decima is the GPU-based procedural placement system:
The word "procedural" has a bad rap, but undeservedly so, procedural generation can be very useful. Here, it means that not only things like vegetation are placed procedurally (and in real-time), but also things like wildlife and even ambient sounds, and all of this is done with negligible GPU overhead. The videos of how this works are really fascinating. Two key takeaways from the talk: first, "locally stable", in this context, means the procedural generation creates the same results for any given place. It's random, but it's "the same random" for all (this is of course a requirement, because it must work with manually placed assets too). And while I'm not 100% certain Death Stranding uses that dynamic road-placing functionality (so that paths are generated in the world if enough people walk through same places), it's kinda obvious it does, innit?
But just placing vegetation somewhere isn't enough, the vegetation must also act convincingly:
The speaker in that video is clearly uncomfortable in his position, but I'd still recommend watching it. Interesting tidbits in the QA session too. The team wanted all of the vegetation to react to humans/machines, but this was not possible given hardware constraints/general rendering budget, so this is why the vegetation mostly reacts only to wind. The talk also references the weather system a bit (that creates the wind) - basically, each location and its elevation allows for only certain types of clouds to form, which in turn creates different weather conditions. It's a rough approximation of course (real weather simulations are in the realm of supercomputers), but it's impressive tech nevertheless.
Having a great-looking engine in itself isn't enough though, if it's a pain to work with (*cough*Frostbite*cough*), this is where the tools come into play:
All in all, that Guerrilla was able to transform their linear FPS engine into what is now known as Decima is really impressive. And at this point, the engine and tools seem very mature. I'm so looking forward to HZD 2, it will be a stunner for sure.
So how does Guerrilla pull it off? What makes Decima tick? While we may never know all of the details, thanks to GDC talks we do know quite a bit. At the heart of Decima is the GPU-based procedural placement system:
The word "procedural" has a bad rap, but undeservedly so, procedural generation can be very useful. Here, it means that not only things like vegetation are placed procedurally (and in real-time), but also things like wildlife and even ambient sounds, and all of this is done with negligible GPU overhead. The videos of how this works are really fascinating. Two key takeaways from the talk: first, "locally stable", in this context, means the procedural generation creates the same results for any given place. It's random, but it's "the same random" for all (this is of course a requirement, because it must work with manually placed assets too). And while I'm not 100% certain Death Stranding uses that dynamic road-placing functionality (so that paths are generated in the world if enough people walk through same places), it's kinda obvious it does, innit?
But just placing vegetation somewhere isn't enough, the vegetation must also act convincingly:
The speaker in that video is clearly uncomfortable in his position, but I'd still recommend watching it. Interesting tidbits in the QA session too. The team wanted all of the vegetation to react to humans/machines, but this was not possible given hardware constraints/general rendering budget, so this is why the vegetation mostly reacts only to wind. The talk also references the weather system a bit (that creates the wind) - basically, each location and its elevation allows for only certain types of clouds to form, which in turn creates different weather conditions. It's a rough approximation of course (real weather simulations are in the realm of supercomputers), but it's impressive tech nevertheless.
Having a great-looking engine in itself isn't enough though, if it's a pain to work with (*cough*Frostbite*cough*), this is where the tools come into play:
All in all, that Guerrilla was able to transform their linear FPS engine into what is now known as Decima is really impressive. And at this point, the engine and tools seem very mature. I'm so looking forward to HZD 2, it will be a stunner for sure.
