You don't have to bother, this is a fake post about something that doesn't exist. These kinds of viral "good feels" posts with zero sources have been going around a lot lately, there's many accounts dedicated to creating and boosting them, especially on Twitter but now also here.
But then they'll look at 2ms vs 4ms and say "it's 50% faster!". Hardware reviewers do this all the time, especially when they compare relative perf from absolute time vs rate measurements and it drives me up the wall. There's no winning.
I don't want to put the guy on blast, but scrolling down this timeline I don't see how anyone can come to the conclusion that this was the slop generator team.
bsky.app/profile/luke...
Where did you read "GenAI team"? The term "AI" has been used in games for decades, it does not inherently have anything to do with the current trend. Somebody has to program your NPC behaviors, your strategy game opponent, your procedural content generation tools, etc. This was that team.
Why would people working on real game technology and denouncing genAI being laid off be a good thing?
The head of this team has been publicly outspoken against LLMs and generative AI, which is probably *why* they now got axed. This is not good.
I get that it looks like a photo at first glance and the whole "sexier women and whiter men" being popular is also expected of course (sigh), but I really don't understand how AI has become such a mind virus that people will vehemently defend this shit.
I'm *baffled* that there are devs who like this. Graphics ppl proudly post nigh-indistinguishable comparisons of their tech, they've literally been pixel peeping their entire career and now suddenly nonsensical lighting coming from nowhere is amazing?
And honestly, if it wasn't trained on model photoshoots, why is it also adding makeup to all the faces? Clearly this isn't just "guesses what a better lighting algorithm could look like".
But yeah I guess I don't know for sure what it's trained on, it just reminds me so much of professional overdone photo edits and wholesale AI generated "photos".
But I see this in the background of the RE9 street scene as well for example. There's always seemingly a fill light appearing behind / to the side of the camera when they turn on DLSS 5, so that everything is perfectly lit from the front. You can even see it reflected in the eyes in some shots.
Normal guy with normal lighting, his hat casts a shadow across his face, his collar a shadow on his neck and clothes.
DLSS 5 Yassified guy made to look more white, his entire face is perfectly lit from the front, almost all shadow is removed from the picture apart from small scale AO.
The whole non-directionality of the lighting reminds me *very* much of indoor studio photos, it's especially obvious in the faces of course, like this one where it removed the shadow from the clothes entirely (and made the guy white) because there's a magic floodlight behind the camera with DLSS 5.
Yeah, the model knows nothing about the lighting. It gets a color buffer and motion vectors and pretends you have lights setup out of frame for a studio photoshoot, because it's presumably trained on professional photos and maybe highly edited film. Shadows aren't allowed, apart from localized AO.
It's not a good game, but nobody can say they didn't at least try to make something cool. A memorable game one way or another. I'm still massively impressed by their cutscene and camera direction, it's so dynamic and high effort even if over the top and goofy sometimes.
Screenshot of the graphics debugging tool RenderDoc showing the scene from the video above. You can see a large particle quad with two textures being applied to it, one is the shadow from the fan above, the other is a generic ball of smoke.
More particles mimicking volumetric lighting through a ceiling window. One may notice the shape of the "shadow" on the particles doesn't particularly fit the scene here, it's a shared texture with the scene from the next screenshot, presumably to save memory.
More fake volumetric lighting through a window on the side of a structure.
Search lights illuminating the "air" in front of them by emitting particles that are then shadowed by a projected texture to form a perfect cone shape matching the spot light. The overlapping particles plus the light's flare sprite create a nice bloom effect.
Here's a RenderDoc shot with the projected shadow/light and a generic smoke particle, plus some more examples. The last one smoothly "trims" the particles into a perfect cone shape matching the spot light cone. Also works surprisingly well as a bloom effect, there's no post processing here.
A while ago I was surprised to find some obscure game from 2003 (Chaser) to have *really* great fake volumetric lighting by using static textures projected onto particles. Projectors weren't entirely new, but I don't remember *any* sort of lighting on particles being common back then.
Also to the original point: LLMs would help exactly nothing with any of this. A lot of it is not documented and it would be impossible for a machine to infer this much context and connections just from code. Even if I wasn't already against using it, it would be practically useless for this codebase
Also we have a spy class that can disguise itself as any other character in the game by effectively changing its soldier preset but then undoing some of the changes, which is a super awesome mechanic but you can imagine how this is yet another nightmare stacked on top.
TLDR: Games were a mistake.
So then people go and add hacks to individual scripts on the soldier itself to re-check on creation which zones they are currently inside, which then crashes because it's calling back into other scripts which weren't created yet so it needs a timer, etc...
Different soldiers can also have different gameplay scripts attached, some of them quite complex, so scripts need to be recreated from scratch on change. Unfortunately that means if you're in a zone that attaches a script to you when you enter, that script is detached when you change characters.
Any time you add functionality to the soldier class you need to make sure it's initialized correctly both on the initial creation of the object and on respawn/character change. We once had a bug where if you died or changed characters you could no longer damage yourself with your own explosions.
However you can also buy different types of soldier presets during gameplay, so it does need to reinitialize quite a lot more stuff. This also means in many places you cannot distinguish in code whether a player respawned after a death or bought a new character class.
This reminds me of fun things in W3D: The "soldier" objects owned by players are never destroyed until disconnect, which for example means that you can't respawn until the death animation has fully played out since respawning is teleporting your existing soldier that is currently in "death" state.
Yeah I'm not sure, but maybe it can't automatically find i in A because it could also be dependent on T or something. The fun part is where if you also have a global variable named i and you don't qualify A::i then it will increment that global instead, except if you are in MSVC permissive mode.
There's a long explanation of this behavior and what kind of issues you can encounter with it here: devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/two-...
MSVC still defaults to permissive/non-standard mode, where templates are only checked/compiled when instantiated. If you add /permissive- to the command line it will also complain, because then templates are syntax checked at the point of definition, which is the indended standard behavior.
Killing or knocking out or avoiding enemies was a true choice in DX, but in DXHR everything *must* be wholly systemized and every action within that system *must* have an immediate reward, making you think about that instead of the action itself. Same with pretty much every other mechanic.
You *can* make good games that way and I certainly enjoy systems-oriented games, but I miss a more world/goal oriented design in some ways. IIRC the original Deus Ex mostly gave you rewards for meeting goals, not the individual actions that lead to them, so you actually felt free in your choices.
I'm not a designer but I've been thinking this a lot lately, where especially newer games are entirely action/system oriented in their rewards and the overall design and how it turns everything into an instant-gratification numbers game and reduces the world to pretty set-dressing over those systems
Screenshot from Deus Ex Remastered, showing pitch black walls right next to overly bright lighting.
What is lighting? Also the original lipsync was bugged so we slapped slow interpolation on it and made it look like a bad cartoon animated for another language instead.
