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NFactor 2 - new game engine for 360

B

bloke

Member
Presented on CEDEC 2005, and developed by Inis (Ossu! Tatakae! Ouendan! DS).
Demostration movie was shown on conference.

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http://www.famitsu.com/game/news/2005/08/31/103,1125492984,42806,0,0.html
 
For those who care: my very limited Japanese says that that the last half of the last slide is about how they allocated the hardware threads on the X360...

Thread 0: main game loop
Thread 1/0: rendering thread (I guess that sometimes thread 0 finishes early and they can do some rendering on thread 0? someone who knows Japanese better than I can translate :))
Thread 2: physics simulation
Thread 3: Hair simulation
Thread 4: Audio
 
TheGamingGuru said:
Nice...i want to see a kick ass next gen platformer running on x360's bleeeeeeeding edge gpu. Poly's dripping everywhere..yeah baby
Click to expand...

It doesn't seem to have anymore polys then your average PS2 game.
 
Andy787 said:
Are we whitnessing Blinx 3 in the making?
Click to expand...
Actually these guys have two cool games behind them (Ossu! Tatakae! Ouendan! DS and Gitarooman PS2) so whetever they're making for 360 probably won't be on Blinx suckage level.
 
cyberheater said:
It doesn't seem to have anymore polys then your average PS2 game.
Click to expand...
Polys aren't everything to graphics and if you think this looks no better than a ps2 game then I don't know what to say.
 
dorio said:
Polys aren't everything to graphics and if you think this looks no better than a ps2 game then I don't know what to say.
Click to expand...
Might as well call Element out on his comment while you're at it.

Face it, we either need to see clearer/bigger pics or the thing in motion

I want to see these hair physics in motion, honestly
b.gif
 
dorio said:
Polys aren't everything to graphics and if you think this looks no better than a ps2 game then I don't know what to say.
Click to expand...
It's simply the size of the pics. I can see some impressive visuals in there, but if one were to simply glance at those small shots, you could mistake that for Jak and Daxter or something.
 
Shogmaster said:
Only 5 out of the 6 CPU threads utilised....

I guess better than most 1st time efforts.
Click to expand...

...maybe the sixth thread is unavailable?

What I find interesting is that the tasks they've moved off into other threads are all pretty much things that require lots of floating point power - things that CELL and its SPE's are good at, and the Xbox 360 CPU less good at. In some ways, this kind of vindicates some of Sony's design decisions, IMHO...
 
quadriplegicjon said:
yay!! tiny pics!!

is that characters head just a blob of light?
Click to expand...

yup. now you see why it takes its own thread
 
Argyle said:
...maybe the sixth thread is unavailable?

What I find interesting is that the tasks they've moved off into other threads are all pretty much things that require lots of floating point power - things that CELL and its SPE's are good at, and the Xbox 360 CPU less good at. In some ways, this kind of vindicates some of Sony's design decisions, IMHO...
Click to expand...
Wasn't the original design IBM pitched gonna essentially be a 4 PPE chip? Toshiba came with a design using SPUs, and Cell was the happy medium. I think this was mentioned a month ago or so. Anyway, this is certainly vindication for both companies IMO. Both chips have been getting bagged on by PC devs for being difficult to work with, but the decisions have obviously resulted in considerable fp power beyond what they would have gotten going with bigger OOOE cores. But yeah, Cell seems better suited for this stuff, which was pretty obvious from the start. I assume it's why Cell is being promoted by IBM, whereas Xenon is more of a vendor part. Then again, Xenon wasn't the main focus of the 360's architecture. PEACE.
 
Here are actual pics of the engine demo, totally screwed by GameWatch strange compression methods, not that it looks that great anyway.
And the fellow in demo looks more uglier than Blinx and all the Kameo monsters put together. :lol
As for the engine it seems it's inhouse one, guess actual Inis X360 game based on this is to be expected.

ini03.jpg

ini05.jpg

ini07.jpg

ini09.jpg

ini13.jpg

ini15.jpg

ini33.jpg

ini37.jpg

ini42.jpg

ini57.jpg

ini58.jpg


Interview with developers + explanations + rest of the pics here http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/3dinis.htm
 
Does anyone else think this would make a good Silent Hill/Resident Evil boss? Or at least a new Conker parody level.
 
Yummy tech, yucky art.

Will it go the Blinx or the Psychonaughts way?

Bad game vs Good game

Shit sales on both sides, though.
 
Wow, the lighting is fantastic! I am thrilled to see a game taking advantage of the benefits of high definition range lighting.

ini03.jpg


The actual geometric detail isn't particularly impressive (like, barely beyond what the Jak and Daxter engine could do on PS2), but it works.

The lighting and textures are pretty solid as well. Could look fantastic in motion.
 
one at Beyond3D posted a very good run through the info revealed in the PC Watch Impress article:

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/3dinis.htm

+ The engine, nFactor2, is an in-house engine by Inis that utilizes multicore processor and SM3.0 GPU.

+ FP10 (7e3) HDR + tone mapping
(pupil simulation by dynamic tone mapping)
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini04.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini05.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini06.htm
(HDR bloom/glare)
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini07.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini08.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini09.htm

+ Normal maps, parallax maps (details created by Zbrush)
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini13.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini14.htm

+ Light-Space Perspective Shadow Maps (LSPSM)
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini32.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini33.htm

+ The shader was written in assembly at first but was converted to HLSL which resulted in some preformance gain. The performance of creating soft penumbra for LSPSM could be doubled thanks to dynamic branching supported by PixelShader 3.0
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini34.htm

+ 2x AA is applied to scene rendering without penalty thanks to eDRAM

+ Physics engine is NovodeX suitable for multicore

+ Hair physics is an original implementation by Inis, which is running on CPU and GPU.
(hair and accessary driven by physics)
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini41.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini42.htm
(more physics demo)
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini43.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini44.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini45.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini46.htm

Besides, Inis revealed the rendering pipeline of nFactor2.
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini47.htm
Its average polygon count per scene is 150,000. As Vertex Shader works in the first 5 passes, apparently GPU processes about 750,000 polygons/frame, so it's still Pixel Shader intensive.

+ Pass 1/2 - Shadowmap
(rendered by LSPSM into FP24, D3DFMT_D24FS8 depth buffer)
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini48.htm

+ Pass 3 - Z buffer prepass
(Deferred Rendering, which is fast in Xenos thanks to depth buffer resident in eDRAM)
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini49.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini50.htm

+ Pass 4 - Shadow color
According to the developer, this pass was originally included in the pass 5, but was separated due to sub-par performance. He suggested texture cache was hindered by shadow rendering pass. 5x5 Gaussian filter for soft shadow might have destroyed the locality of texture cache in color rendering. Nishikawa speculates that Xenos has relatively small number of transistors because of removal of some cache memory while having more registers for multithreading, so Xbox360 may require Xenos-specific optimization unlike cache-rich NVIDIA GPU.
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini51.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini50.htm

+ Pass 5 - Color, lighting
Diffuse, normal map, environmental map, gloss mapping etc. Lighting by all light sources in a scene is done in this pass.
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini52.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini50.htm

+ Pass 6 - 11 - Luminance instrument
Scanning HDR-rendered frames to get average luminance. It has relatively small GPU load as it's only framebuffer processing by Pixel Shader.

+ Pass 12 - 19 - Bloom/Glare
Adding blur to places with higher luminance than average in a low-res buffer, then blend with rendering target
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini54.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini50.htm

+ Pass 20 - Tonemapping
pupil simulation (dynamic exposure adjustment)
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini55.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini50.htm

+ Pass 21 - Depth of Field
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini56.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini57.htm
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20050929/ini58.htm

The rest is about the breakdown of threads which was covered before in this thread.
One new revelation is, in an experimental version of the demo it had used 5 HW threads, but in the demo shown at the presentation uses 4 HW threads with Thread 0 running both main game loop and rendering engine.
Click to expand...
 
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