The Woods ~ Chapter 2 ~ [Horror Game] [Alan Wake with Driving]

Yes she's in the game, thought it would be a good place to end the video

 

Ok we have been getting some reasonable frame rates out of the iPod 4g around 20-25 fps. There will be less vegetation though and it's unlikely that the live recorder will appear. Driving and dead space style interaction display is fine.

As a quick question what would iPad 3 users prefer. Lower res and more graphic features or retina display res?

 

Just a quick update, all is going well and we hope to post a few ipod touch 4g screens here over the weekend.

Trying not to give too much away at the moment with videos although there will be a final trailer in march with the hope of submitting to apple before the end of march.

 

Well the boss of epic games said this when the iPad 2 came out.

"This [the iPad 2] is now more powerful than the first-generation Xbox. This is probably more powerful than a PlayStation 2 or a PlayStation 1 for sure. This is on the road to that, if it's not already."

It was actually considered a bit controversial at the time but I do agree that the iPad 2 is close to the power of a ps 2. But bear in mind the iPad 2 has been quoted as being 7 times more powerful than the iPod touch 4g. So getting a ps2 game to have a decent frame rate on a 4gen iPod is not easy.

This is why the ios version of RE4 looks so much worse than the ps2 version.

Also the woods 2 is over one expansive area that you have to have a car to get around. There are also no loading times. RE4 has very small environments with many loads and has no advanced lighting effects. And we have to support dynamic complexity so it looks good on a iPad 4. If we were only working on the iPod 4g we would have made the game completely differently having small areas and loads of loading screens.


I can understand why on paper it looks like a no brainier programming on an iPod 4g but like JBRUU said there is a big difference in dedicated hardware.

 

Thank you for your continued interest in The Woods.

I understand that it must be quite confusing and frustrating that some games run better than others on the IPod 4g.
If you had a greater understanding of hardware architecture and games development this would not be so much of a mystery to you but I will try and point out some of the areas of why the MC4 people have been able to get reasonable fame rates.

I actually installed MC4 one of the test ipods we have just to get an idea of what you were talking about.

(dont want to take anything away from the great work the MC4 people have done but there are some real reasons that its not so simple to get great frame rates on an ipod g4).

The very first thing that a graphics programmer would realise is that MC4 (on the ipod) has absolutely no lighting. I know sounds strange but there are no lights in the game what so ever. Each object does not even have vertex lighting applied. All the lighting is baked and added on like a texture. Each object only has to have two simple textures applied to it at run time (there is a bit of dynamic lightprobes on your gun). Ok well if they can make MC4 look that good without lights then why dont we just remove lighting from The Woods. Well one of the most fundament parts of a horror game is the player torch. I think you would have to agree that its the touch and the dynamic lighting that sells horror games, it would be pointless without it. Every single object in our game supports at least one Per Pixel light source and 8 vertex lights sources. Adding a per-pixel light effectively doubles your draw calls. There are also additional bumb mapping techniques that we are really reluctant to remove. If they added real lighting and bumb maps to MC4 it would simply die on the ipod 4g.

The second reason is the environments in MC4 are still very small, while they may look big the actually playable areas are very small. if you could drive through them you could cross them in one minute. Ok well why don't we make our environment totally linear and split it up into tiny chunks with load screens? well that means we would have to remove the vehicle support, you cant keep putting up load screens at every corner.

So if our developers were really lazy like you think and totally inept we would just give ipod 4g users a linear non open world horror game with no real lighting and no vehicles. Thankfully we are trying to balance the necessary features of the game with frame rate to give the best over all user experience which is something most developers don't even bother with for the ipod 4g.

 

Well i too get very angry at apples ridiculas policy of not allowing devs the ability to properly restrict what devices are supported. Apples seems to screw devs and customers for no reason. I've even got into arguments with the support team on it. But that is an issue with apple not devs.

While people quote that the iPod 4g has only half the ram of the iPhone 4 it's actually a lot worse. You see an iOS device just running the operating system takes about 100mb of that memory so if you take that into account effectively an iPod touch has 150mb free and an iPhone has 350mb. Basically the iPhone has almost 3 times the usable memory of an iPod 4g. And it actually gets worse if the user has anything running in the background. In reality if you use more than 100mb of memory it's likely you game will crash and 4g users sure do like there 1* reviews. the biggest memory killers are textures and sound. 3d models are very low memory. I'm sure Bastian has loads of hd textures.



If you look closely at real racing 3 you will see that 20+ cars actually don't have shadows only the two cars in front do, the ones in the distance are just blob shadows. Also they shadows only cast on the ground and not other cars. A skybox reflection is very cheap it's just one extra cube map texture.

I'm having to deal with all the complexity of driving and a fps game. You carnt get out and start shooting those trees in the distance. Do you think that if you got out of your car and walked up to tha stadium in th distance it would look any good.

 

Well at the very least your keeping my thread bumped to the top so i thank you for that.

Those buildings in the distance on real racing three are not "high poly" you carnt go in them and walk upstairs and start interacting with the computers. they would not look as good close up as they do at a distance.

I just explained to you that real racing three does not have dynamic shadows on 20+ objects at once it does not do this on an ipad 4 never mind an ipod 4g. not sure why you think if they could not do it then we should be able todo on every single object in the screen. We do use some of the similar "tricks" like dynamic blob shadows on dynamic objects.
not sure why you picked that silent hill video on the psp it looked awful, there are much better examples on the net of silent hill.
As ive explained before we have a large open world environment with no loading. silent hill has much smaller environments and loads and loads of loading. ive already explained that due to the inclusion of vehicles loading screens would be an issue.
Not sure why you think the textures and models are so low res?
You can actually see individual logs that make up the roof.



Tato is doing great work on FM but again there are still loading times but now you seem to be comparing us to games that have not even come out! and you have never played.

There is no magic optimise button if we were only developing for the ipod 4g we would have made a totally different game. The difference between the ipod 4g and the ipad 4 is staggering its like 20 times more powerful and making a game that looks great on both is incredible difficult and something none of those ps 2 developers ever had to deal with.
Making open world games is not easy. So instead of finding games on completely different dedicated gaming platforms that are completely different styles of games try and find a good comparison.

Ok so here is your challenge. Find an fps game on IOS (that's actually out) that's open world with no loads which supports a dynamic per pixel light (overall surfaces) which allows you properly drive a fully physical car on the ipod 4g.

If you can do that then you may have a point !

 

sorry for the lack of updates, we have made some great visual improvements over the last two weeks and will post a video next thursday/friday. This will be the last tech demo video before the final trailers come out.

thanks for being patient.