saintjules
Gold Member
At GDC 2025, developer Pearl Abyss showcased Crimson Desert's in-house BlackSpace Engine, which is the Engine used in the upcoming open-world action-adventure game.
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At GDC 2025, developer Pearl Abyss showcased Crimson Desert's in-house BlackSpace Engine, which is the Engine used in the upcoming open-world action-adventure game.
Source 2 water effects are way ahead.The water effects are the best Ive ever seen.
why does every game that showcases some wind have to be Gail force hurricane wind? Witcher 3 did this also and I hated that. You know sometimes wind is just a light breeze
This is to PS5 what Cyberpunk was to PS4 (ok, maybe not that bad)Console will suffer with this one.
I updated my comment with a video for dumbos like youGood joke.
Another Ps5 pro victory in terms of graphics and performance incoming?![]()
Question is, are these features even on the PS5 or just PC only.Looks legitimately jaw dropping.
Funny how it took us 4+ years from the start of PS5 to actually get games which look like a true generational leap over the PS4.
Will be PC only for certain.Question is, are these features even on the PS5 or just PC only.
Good joke.
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Not saying I agree with you that Source 2 is better - haven't looked closely at this showcase - but a lot of times, people see Source/Source 2 and think Counter-Strike running at 1080p.I updated my comment with a video for dumbasses like you![]()
Perhaps. Source 2 definitely has the best water physics out there, whoever says otherwise obviously hasn't looked at how good water is in CS2. I'm yet to see anything come close.Not saying I agree with you that Source 2 is better - haven't looked closely at this showcase - but a lot of times, people see Source/Source 2 and think Counter-Strike running at 1080p.
Meh.
First demo; nice draw distance, decent day/night transition, really basic weather system. Notable failing entirely rigid scene geometry. Zero movement in the trees / foliage suggesting its a lumen-style tesselation trick.
Second demo; nice wave system and shaders. Again, very limited dynamics in the scene suggesting it could be baked.
Third-demo: Ray-cast shadows inside a small-ish room. Not especially impressive without seeing frame-time cost. Shadow edges didn't look great either.
All round nice work, bur hardly revolutionary or especially impressive demos.
I wish other games had this “basic weather system”.
It means this will run well on my Playstation 6 in 2030.Friendly reminder that Black Desert on release ran like shit on nasa hardware so think of that what you will.
If it looks close to that on a 2080 then hats off to the devs.Pearl Abyss' New BlackSpace Engine Makes Crimson Desert Look So Realistic It's Scary
When Pearl Abyss invited me for an inside look at its new BlackSpace engine last week, I felt like I was in over my head. I’ve done countless game previews over the last six years here at TheGamer, but I’ve never been invited to preview a game engine.
The only engine I’ve ever worked in personally is Twine, which is purely text-based, so it’s hard for me to understand a lot of the technical feats the studio has achieved with this engine, let alone explain them all here. I know just enough about how games are made to get myself in trouble, but I do know what games look like.
I have a pretty keen eye when it comes to graphics, and all of the visual defects that plague games that chase realism - even the really expensive, cutting-edge ones. Low frame rates, bad textures, screen tears, aliasing, pop-in - all of those annoying little flaws that catch your attention and pull you out of the experience. I can’t tell you how Pearl Abyss did it, but I can tell you that somehow, BlackSpace has managed to eliminate all of those things.
From draw distance to dynamic lighting, all the way down to hair and water physics, I’ve never seen anything like this in any game before. There’s not much I can say about Crimson Desert itself, but I can tell you I’m completely sold on it based on the BlackSpace engine alone.
BlackSpace Solves Some Of The Oldest Graphical Problems In Games
During the live demo, reps from Pearl Abyss walked me through a long list of features that are unique to the BlackSpace engine while demonstrating examples of those features in-game.
It began with protagonist Kliff standing on a floating structure and looking out across Pywell. As the camera slowly rotated and I took in the breathtaking landscape, I had my first of many moments of utter disbelief: I can see miles and miles of detailed, playable space in every direction with no pop-in whatsoever. Even as Kliff dives from the structures and rapidly approaches the ground below, everything appears to be fully rendered in perfect detail. We’re talking about seemingly infinite draw distance. This wasn’t a video; I could see the entire world all at once in real time.
In reality, the entire world isn’t actually fully rendered in perfect detail. Reps from Pearl Abyss explain BlackSpace uses a number of sophisticated tools with very complicated names like hierarchical level subdivision, hierarchical proxy load, and imposter rendering to accommodate seamless loading and distance rendering. In layman’s terms, BlackSpace is prioritizing the rendering of what you see based on your distance from objects, replacing distant objects with convincing imposter images, and seamlessly loading and updating all of it, all the time, instantly.
As the demo went on, I saw more and more unbelievable things. A combat encounter in an enemy camp turned into a flurry of particles: flaming embers, broken shards of wood from destructible structures, magical effects pouring out of weapons - all of combining into a flurry of onscreen objects that never once caused any noticeable dip in frame rate or performance in any way. I saw the way the wind moved through every blade of grass and over every tree dynamically as the demonstrators intentionally changed the direction of it to show how the world reacts dynamically to weather.
This also includes rain, which pools and splashes naturally, and dampens Kliff’s clothes. Water was a particularly impressive highlight, and I was especially taken by the engine’s FFT Ocean Simulation and Shallow Water Simulation, which can realistically simulate the tides moving in and out, and accurately recreate water moving over and around obstructions on the shore and in creeks.
There were so many more things that astounded me in the demo, from realistic atmospheric scattering of light to the accumulation of volumetric clouds (fog that reacts as people and objects move through it) but I’ll share one more feature we can all relate to: fabric and hair collision. Not only does Kliff’s hair behave with realistic physics, but it also has actual collision with his clothes, and his clothes with his other clothes, and his clothes with his horse. Nothing intersects, everything moves or compresses or shifts around perfectly as though they were all real objects. My oldest and strongest pet peeve, something even a technical marvel like Red Dead Redemption 2 couldn’t overcome, completely solved by the BlackSpace Engine.
Are There Wizards Working At Pearl Abyss?
Perhaps the most impressive thing about all of these technical marvels is that you don’t need to have a super computer with a $2,000 video card to experience it. Crimson Desert’s recommended PC specs are incredibly modest: RTX 2080, 16GB RAM, Ryzen 5 5600 - a mid-range gaming PC from 2021 would meet these requirements, no problem. It’s already hard to believe Crimson Desert will look this advanced, but even on fairly low-end hardware? How is that possible?
Pearl Abyss’ reps tell me it's all about having a purpose-built game engine. BlackSpace was created to make incredibly detailed open world games, and the studio built this engine not just for Crimson Desert, but also for its other announced games DokeV and Plan 8 as well. Other engines are built to make any kind of game a developer needs it for, so while they may help create great looking games with good performance, they’re necessarily bogged down by all the tools and features the game doesn’t need. Pearl Abyss says that in building BlackSpace specifically for its open world games, it can tailor the engine to be exactly what the studio needs it to be, which is what allowed it to achieve these incredible results.
Graphics aren’t everything in a game, and even BlackSpace’s application of physics may not necessarily impress everyone. Even if you don’t care about little things like pop-ins or your character's hair passing through the collar of their shirt, the real magic of BlackSpace is in the way all of its tools work together to create a more immersive, realistic world. You don’t have to perceive these features to experience them, so even if terms like hierarchical level subdivision don’t impress you, I guarantee that experiencing BlackSpace for yourself will.
Source: https://www.thegamer.com/pearl-abys...s-crimson-desert-look-so-realistic-its-scary/
Why? So dumb to bash on an engine like this especially one capable of delivering some of the best visuals in the industry. Why wouldn't you focus your efforts on the inexperienced and shitty devs responsible for bad UE5 games instead? Nanite and Lumen are insanely good tech...we have games like Hellblade 2, Silent Hill 2 and Black myth wukong and stuff like the Witcher 4 and the next Gears on the way that are going to push the bar higher. This seems like a sheep like trend to hate on this engine.The less UE, the better