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This was built in Dreams on a base PS4. My jaw is on the floor

Praglik

Praglik

Member
Nov 3, 2017
413
SH
panda-zebra said:
"it's point clouds. What we're doing is point clouds... it's point clouds over the surface of a distance field which is volumetric but then is which raymarched using sphere tracing".
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Oh wow, that's way over my pay grade haha.
Animation is probably using a different technique? Animating distance fields is... not an easy task. Maybe they move stuff in shader... I've seen some GDC talks where they use textures to move vertices on screen using shaders, but again if they don't use vertices it's probably something else entirely.
It's super interesting, it's really not everyday we see a game running in a different way than the decades-old triangles/bones/textures combo šŸ˜
 
draculabyte

draculabyte

Video Game and Metal Mashup Shirt Design
Verified
Jun 20, 2019
469
Does the increase in realism have anything to do with using all power in GPU/CPU to create this since there is no AI, logic, effects or movement? As well as a very fixed and far off path. Not sure how the game it self would help make it look better without those things? I haven't played the game at all so I am not sure.
 
kungfuian

kungfuian

Banned
Jan 24, 2018
278
Dreams is an amazing tool in the hands of artists like this. Too bad it won't reach more people.

Keep hearing about PC support so the tools get into more hands, which is a fine idea, but I would go a different route if I were Sony and would have treated this like an OS upgrade feature, maybe integrated Dreams directly onto every PS4 and PSVR in a new 'play, create, share' section. Promote it as a community based social feature like home (but more fun and game based). Then have a small but steady stream of Sony first party devs contributing bite sized content, have official Sony hosted community art jams and game jam challenges for upcoming big games, prizes for best content, etc.

In my opinion this game has the potential to be much more valuable to Sony than to be treated like your standard stand alone game release and I think they are seriously being short sighted the same way they were with LBP. What it really deserves is to have the full PS community behind it; all 110 million of us.

And if you really have to, monetize it down he road.
 
quibbler

quibbler

Member
Nov 11, 2017
124
Saw this creation on Reddit the other day. Quite impressive! I didn't pay attention to the Made in Dreams watermark and actually thought it was real.
 
Mezentine

Mezentine

Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,005
How the fuck did they build that foliage without exploding their physics thermo? I've been trying to solve that problem and its driving me crazy
 
ThisOne

ThisOne

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,942
kungfuian said:
Dreams is an amazing tool in the hands of artists like this. Too bad it won't reach more people.

Keep hearing about PC support so the tools get into more hands, which is a fine idea, but I would go a different route if I were Sony and would have treated this like an OS upgrade feature, maybe integrated Dreams directly onto every PS4 and PSVR in a new 'play, create, share' section. Promote it as a community based social feature like home (but more fun and game based). Then have a small but steady stream of Sony first party devs contributing bite sized content, have official Sony hosted community art jams and game jam challenges for upcoming big games, prizes for best content, etc.

In my opinion this game has the potential to be much more valuable to Sony than to be treated like your standard stand alone game release and I think they are seriously being short sighted the same way they were with LBP. What it really deserves is to have the full PS community behind it; all 110 million of us.

And if you really have to, monetize it down he road.
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I kinda doubt it will happen but having Dreams pre-loaded onto every PS5 seems like a no-brainer to me.
 
Bad_Boy

Bad_Boy

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
3,624
Rodelero said:
The PS5 could offer huge improvements, but it's not clear what MediaMolecule will do at this stage. On the graphics side you'd imagine the PS5 would trivially allow resolution/performance improvements. Whether they'll also do stuff like HDR, what if anything they'd use ray tracing hardware for, is hard to know.

The more interesting side of things is that the increase in RAM would facilitate you to have many more 'things' and the much more unique art data, the improved GPU would allow sculpt data to be evaluated faster (improving loading times), and the increase in CPU power would allow a lot more logic to be encompassed in a scene.

The big question for me though is what they could use the SSD for though, as that's where the biggest hardware jump is. If Dreams could support level streaming (something they'd have to build significant tools around), it would radically expand what kinds of games you could make with high quality visuals.
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That all sounds amazing

I do notice once you zoom in on things they become a bit blurry/muddy, i would think the ps5 would be able to clean that up.
 
Javier23

Javier23

Member
Oct 28, 2017
2,904
Senator Toadstool said:
Is dreams with it if you mostly want to play others creations?
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Depends on what kind of experience you're after. I would say it definitely is. I've put an insane amount of hours browsing other people's creations. It's a lot of fun seeing what other people are up to, but you won't find many lengthy traditional game experiences that are actually that fun to play.
 
mutantmagnet

mutantmagnet

Member
Oct 28, 2017
12,401
justiceiro said:
So that's why they took entire gen to make this game...

But yeah, when I see this, I ask myself if we really need a new gen. This looks just good enough.
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Nah. The texture pop ins says the ps4 is still too limiting.

But Media Molecule should be proud of what they made and Sony should be proud of backing their efforts.
 
SpecDot

SpecDot

Banned
Oct 29, 2017
988
Guys this is fake. Remember how Dunkey put the "Made in Dreams" watermark in his Shenmue III video. Same technique here. It's so obvious.
bruh I was NOT expecting this coming from Dreams
 
Thera

Thera

Banned
Feb 28, 2019
12,876
France
DodgeAnon said:
I'm the opposite! That's what makes it realistic looking to me.
How often in a dense looking Forrest/trail walk do you see plant life swaying about like there's a hurricane blowing through?

Look at that video above your post. The stillness of the Forrest is what makes it so full of life.
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But there is a storm in the video...
And there is a difference between static and "plant life swaying about like there's a hurricane blowing through".
And, yes, deep forest doesn't have swaying because trees are blocking the wind. But here, this is very open.
ThreepQuest64 said:
Sometimes it's really subtle and you would might call it static while in reality it isn't if you watch closely. That video, though, no matter how close you're looking for details, it won't move.
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Yep. At the start of the video, I thought my player was freezing or the video didn't launched.
 
Kinthey

Kinthey

Avenger
Oct 27, 2017
22,527
I guess the playable area is small but holy shit. Reminds me of some Unreal Engine 4 demos
 
Dictator

Dictator

Digital Foundry
Verified
Oct 26, 2017
4,951
Berlin, 'SCHLAND
panda-zebra said:
I thought it uses splats to paint surfaces on point clouds. Without the point clouds, where do you splat? I went back to the video I linked, he said "Dreams is rendering a cloud of point clouds of point clouds" right after he talks about once you're rendering everything with splats, you get certain stuff for free and can take advantage of that. The pipeline flow diagram shows edit list -> compute shader of doom -> signed distance fields -> pre-filtered & clustered point clouds (cloud of cloud of point clouds) -> software renderer (no triangles) atomic unit -> zbuffer/g-buffer/something off screen.

Did the engine change again after this? EDIT, given the link above, yes they did :) To add the "solidness" of the brick engine to stopp stuff being minutely transparent.

EDIT2: That video is really good, annoyed I'd missed it. Alex states later on in it (question at 56:25) "it's point clouds. What we're doing is point clouds... it's point clouds over the surface of a distance field which is volumetric but then is which raymarched using sphere tracing".
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they changed the engine again after their public talks about it, ended up asking Alex on twitter:
things evolved quite a bit since the siggraph preso. the E3 trailer from that era was rendered using the atomic splat renderer mentioned at the end of the talk, and it's still my favourite 'funky tech' wise, however it suffered because everything had microscopic holes! because the tiny pixel splats were stochastic, unless we massively over-splatted, we never quite covered 100% of the surface of a sculpt After TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) has run, this has the effect of making everything minutely transparent. like 99% solid, but 1% transparent... in an HDR setting, that means you can still see thru everything! and so eg if you look really closly at the e3 trailer from 2015, you can see the lights through the buildings in the scifi section (for example) why is this a big problem? because this broke occlusion culling, which we rely on heavily for performance - UGC content poses a unique challenge to engines because you can't tell artists to be 'more optimal' - in a pro setting, you can control your content tightly to suit the engine. in UGC, you can't :) so users will happily make scenes with *enormous* overdraw. giant spanish galleons made of multiple layers of individual planks of wood, with full internal detail / rooms / etc, then viewed from outside and wondering 'why is this simple boat a bit slow'. being a real example during dev. often we see hundreds of layers of opaque stuff, and if we didnt have *really cool* fine grained occlusion culling - for example because, as in the atomic splat engine, everything had microscopic holes - our framerate would die in those cases. happy news - we found a solution and dreams is really really good at dealing with that kind of content now: So, we went to a hybrid approach. solid objects have a 'hull' drawn using a version of 'bricks' engine from the siggraph preso (recap in a mo), that guaruntees watertight solid things are... solid. then we are free to splat 'fluffy' stuff over the top as needed. the fluffy stuff still uses stochastic alpha, safe in the knowledge it is over the top of the solid hull. the solid hull means occlusion culling can work well (which operates at the level of individual bricks, so it's nicely fine grained) - so in the ship case, 99% of the internals are correctly culled away by compute shaders. hooray. as always, sculpting works by building 'edit lists' (add cube, cut cylinder, smooth blend a donut, etc x thousands of edits) that are 'evaluated' by a massive chain of async compute shaders at level load / live-any-time-you-edit-a-sculpt in the background. this spits out a signed distance field (SDF), which is stored in memory in a kind of 'mega-texture' style volume texture, made of 8x8x8 'bricks'. I think of the bricks like some kind if hi-tech 3d volume version of minecraft blocks, if you see what I mean; where every brick is custom and stores both colour and the distance field in an 8x8x8 resolution volume. bricks are only stored near the surface of the model. we also generate bricks at all resolutions, all the way from a single brick covering the whole sculpt, (for the lowest LOD), up to the finest LOD which can be more than a thousand voxels across in each of X,Y,Z, and thus a surface area of over a million voxels -> many many 8x8x8 voxel bricks. to render the bricks, we basically occlusion cull which ones are visible using compute shaders, and then the survivors are drawn one brick at a time (where the LOD system carefully chooses bricks to be a consistent size on the screen - typically a bit more than 8 pixels across, so that 1 voxel ~= 1 pixel - voila perfect LOD!) , and a shader then ray-marches from the edge of the chosen brick to the SDF surface within. so to sum up: dreams has hulls and fluff; hulls are what you see when you see something that looks 'tight' or solid; and the fluff is the painterly stuff. the hulls are rendered using 'raymarching' of a signed distance field (stored in bricks), (rather than splatted as they were before). then we splat fluffy stuff on top, using lots of layers of stochastic alpha to make it ... fluffy :) this all generates a 'classic' g-buffer, and the lighting is all deferred in a fairly vanilla way (GGX specular model). then we do heavy TAA to blend away the stochastic alpha and do the anti-aliasing. we also have voxel cone traced mid-range AO, and some light propagation volume stuff happening for 'cheap omni lights'. the TAA always runs at 1080p (or higher on pro), so the temporally composited final image & ui etc is always full res, however because UGC means that users can make arbitrarily-awful-for-the-engine-scenes, we need to handle the sort of scenes no professional artist would be allowed to create :) if we can't make it in 30hz, the renderer will do dynamic res (pre-TAA only). on the happy flip side, if we can go faster than 30hz, we do! the framerate is completely unlocked, with v-synced flips - but will happliy roam from 30hz up to 60. so small levels will run at 60. (and 'insane' / 'inefficient' / 'arbitrarily bad' levels will go below 30...) last twist - all the game logic (and input processing etc) always runs at 30hz. if the imp, ui, and renderer are managing to go faster than 30, they extrapolate between the most recent 30hz game ticks
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OP
OP

Deleted member 46489

User requested account closure
Banned
Aug 7, 2018
1,979
Dictator said:
they changed the engine again after their public talks about it, ended up asking Alex on twitter:
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Thanks for the post, that's some fascinating stuff. I didn't know Dreams used dynamic res. Wonder if there are any lower limits to the resolution. I guess the thermometer should prevent the users from making stuff that forces the resolution to go too low.
 
Afrikan

Afrikan

Member
Oct 28, 2017
17,117
Not the same as OP, but um... I don't know much about making tunes or sound, but when this guy showed the insides of what makes his creation work... all those wires .. I'm like what in theee fuck.

 
Acquiescence

Acquiescence

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
10,257
Lake Titicaca
Afrikan said:
Not the same as OP, but um... I don't know much about making tunes or sound, but when this guy showed the insides of what makes his creation work... all those wires .. I'm like what in theee fuck.

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Didn't really think it was that big of a deal prior to clicking on the vid, but watching what this mad man has pulled off... wow. That's one of the most impressive things I've seen in Dreams yet. Not surprised that it took him 450 hours to make.
 
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