Gaming Guise have you seen Iron fall? [60fps, graphic whore edition?)

[LightyKD]

Reminds me of Shadowgun

 

[fafaffy]

It's pretty cool how they did all this but:
1. Seems like a generic shooter
2. Assembly? That leaves a lot of iffy remarks. Hopefully this may lead to a new 3DS exploit, I'm not sure how easy it is to catch errors in assembly languages compared to higher up languages.

 

[FAST6191]

It's pretty cool how they did all this but:
1. Seems like a generic shooter
2. Assembly? That leaves a lot of iffy remarks. Hopefully this may lead to a new 3DS exploit, I'm not sure how easy it is to catch errors in assembly languages compared to higher up languages.

1. Yeah but as it is a tech demo of sorts that is quite forgiveable. Get someone to play artist and someone to play level designer and things might change.

2. I am not sure I would place it as that much harder than C/C++* though much like vanilla C/C++ the bounds, type and other checking is more of a manual thing than an automatic one, similarly a lot of hacks come more from developers not quite understanding C type languages. It would most likely also be a userland exploit rather than a kernel level one and the good stuff is in the kernel (though the DSi probably counts the 3ds at least has heard of the idea of separation of code and kernel).
If it is straight assembly though the trouble will come in that it most likely will not be easily extensible (probably why they made so many features from the start) and probably not the easiest to interface with (though I imagine they knew this and worked to minimise it).

*arguably still the dominant languages for the 3ds -- though such things are still up for debate, personally I have not much in the way of 3ds dev job offers requiring anything else, none of the language makers are shouting it from the rooftops and what little I have seen so far points at C/C++ with a lot of scripting and such like but that is common in all games these days. The commercial DS world (never mind the homebrew) did have some quite high level languages and several games used things like lua but it was still a mix of C family and assembly.

 

[Guild McCommunist]

b-but muh 60FPS

if you're so much of a graphics whore you care about 60FPS you should actually consider quitting gaming.

I bet you all think The Hobbit looked "great" because it was 48FPS.

 

[Veiva]

Hey, that's no fair! I'm pretty sure The Hobbit ran at 60 FPS!

 

[Guild McCommunist]

Hey, that's no fair! I'm pretty sure The Hobbit ran at 60 FPS!

I see what was done here.

 

[Xexyz]

I see what was done here.

That scared me for 5 seconds!

 

[Psionic Roshambo]

Impressive tech demo, but will the company license it out to other companies?

I would like to see that engine under the hood of a better game.

 

[Coto]

I don't need to be explained what printf does. In any case, even the best compiler doesn't know all the outside circumstances that arise during execution of the code. It can guess, but it can guess wrong. This happens more often than you'd think. A compiler can't optimize a matrix multiplication beyond basic collection of intrinsics, but it can't do much more than that. It takes hand-written assembly to ensure that a matrix multiplication is as fast as can be. I doubt Nintendo's SDK even provides matrix multiplication methods, either, to further this example. Game engines tend to roll their own, regardless.

And regardless of Nintendo's optimization abilities of their compiler, it's not going to know that a cache miss here as a result of an extra instruction is going to slow down this tight loop by over half. This is where a profiler and a good eye comes in. And what happens when the compiler generates suboptimal code? You have to write it yourself.

In any case, I do agree with your last statement.

Yes, pretty much RARE developed their own reality engine microcode on the n64.

Compilers goes for generic and "safe" profiles. which leaves useful resources, unused.

 

[DiscostewSM]

If you're referring to the skinning stress test, notice how all those "enemies" are moving at the exact same time, meaning their movement is likely controlled by one and the same script. They don't have independent A.I, they're not actual NPC's, they're animated models. I wouldn't equate that to a large number of enemies on-screen since enemies require you to run A.I for them independently.

It's easy to spot that they are running off the same script, but I can see that they aren't just copying the position/orientation/etc of one and offsetting the rest, nor are they all at the same animation time index as the rest. It looks more like they each have their own inputs to the script.

The main concern I have about that test isn't about whether it can handle multiple independent AI scripts, but the script they demonstrated isn't anywhere complex enough for game purposes.

 

[Psionic Roshambo]

Yes, pretty much RARE developed their own reality engine microcode on the n64.

Compilers goes for generic and "safe" profiles. which leaves useful resources, unused.

That and didn't Lucas Arts do the same thing for the N64?

If you have the resources and the talent you can sometimes beat the dev kits.

Edit: I think Factor 5 (Lucas Arts) was what I was thinking of with the Star Wars stuff.

 

[DaniPoo]

This has more advances graphics than pokemon X and Y. and it runs at 60fps while pokemon is having a hard time keeping the fps smooth..
Im not saying that I dont like pokemon X and Y. But I dont understand the reason why it lags and why they dropped the 3D effect in the overworld.
Was it too hard to optimize the 3d engine for gamefreak?

 

[Gahars]

This has more advances graphics than pokemon X and Y.

Truly a technological achievement.

"This is one small step for man... One giant step for pokeymankind."

 

[KingVamp]

Reminds me of this tech demo.

 

[TripleSMoon]

Dual-screen rendering at 60FPS in 3D (top-screen) while pushing some fancy effects.

It's pretty impressive, all it needs is some actual art-direction.

This is essentially how I feel. The visuals and tech are certainly impressive (does it hit 60 fps in 3D? I notice the tech video doesn't specify), but the game itself looks bland as hell. I think I've had enough of effortless Gears of War clones after Shadowgun on smartphones.

Why is it whenever some of these developers make something incredibly impressive on a lower-powered device, all art direction and original gameplay goes out the window? I mean, I understand that optimizing the game for that system probably takes an INCREDIBLE amount of time, but still. And I'm not saying it has to not be a 3PS/FPS either. They can still make it a shooter that at least doesn't look like a blatant clone of one particular shooter.

 

[omgpwn666]

That's impressive for the cost of the 3DS.

 

[Arras]

b-but muh 60FPS

if you're so much of a graphics whore you care about 60FPS you should actually consider quitting gaming.

I bet you all think The Hobbit looked "great" because it was 48FPS.

To be fair 60FPS is very noticeable on games where the camera changes fast or input needs to be registered near instantly (as FPS tends to equal input polling rate). But for many games 30 would be enough, yes.

 

[Veho]

Like others have already said, this does look pretty impressive, but like with most technically impressive games that squeeze 100% out of their respective console, they probably neglected the "it needs to actually be fun" part. But even if it ends up being dull, they will probably sell the engine and we'll be seeing actually good games with similarly impressive visuals some time soon.

if you're so much of a graphics whore you care about 60FPS you should actually consider quitting gaming.

Calm down, grampa, it's not healthy getting upset at your age.

Don't mind Gramps McCommunist, folks, back in his day they had zoetropes and liked them.

 

[Terenigma]

Lets push the limits of the 3DS to make a generic gun game with hide behind things gameplay. Yawn.

It looks ok i guess? I hardly think thats the best they can do tho. Dead or alive and RE:R look better than that and i guess im not a very good judge on FPS but they played damn good for a handheld nintendo system. However, I prefer the games they make that are bright and wonderful. I still think Mario 64 on the DS looks better than some of the 3DS games right now and yeah, if you get down to it then im sure there is more pixles detail or w/e in 3DS games but do people really care about that? especially on a handheld?

 

[Mariko]

Let me elaborate on my stance a little so that I don't sound 100% negative. The fact that I think using 100% Assembly is foolhardy and completely unnecessary, the tech demo does feature a couple interesting things in completely technical terms, like the high polycount or the use of lighting on the scenes which are genuinely rich.

Clearly, they've tried to use "assembly" as a buzzword. Ironically, and this is something universal and not limited to this particular case, in most cases reactions come from people who don't know the first thing about coding, other than "assembly is way hard". Either way, there's nothing wrong in coding a toolchain from scratch, if that's what you're comfortable with, and these guys clearly are.

All of that aside, it's still a mediocre effort design-wise. I've never been a Halo fan for the same reason. The design was underwhelming, to say the least. Still, IronFall looks like a solid piece of engine, and I loved "C.O.P.", so we'll just have to wait and see how this one turns out.

P.S. - I know that developers will do everything to advertise their product, but precalc physics is where I would have drawn the line. As far as buzzwords go, that is.