Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet we're here at GDC 2016 and I'm joined by Crytek Frank Fitts who is a creative director working on CryEngine which is what we're talking about today right Brian gen5 yeah yeah and before we get to that all this GDC 2016 coverage is brought to you by raw Fury's a goner platformer game you can check that out links the description below so CryEngine 5 we saw this at a press conference yesterday that's right can you give a brief overview of technologically what's sort of the interesting thing that people can look forward to oh yeah we CryEngine 5 was a new release for us in many ways reset on a lot of technical features there's a long list of improvements we've done including support for DX 12 that's probably the highest on the list and we also have completely rewritten the renderer actually to do the proper job with DX 12 we refactored the whole front end and the core renderer to support the X 12 properly and we're seeing some amazing speed and performance improvements as a result so that's pretty cool right so this isn't just a wrapper then it's no it's not it's a direct implementation you know the the renderer is set up to take advantage of DX well we're actually going through it now step-by-step and realizing where that power can pay off but for the kind of games that CryEngine is traditionally known for our large open worlds with lots of foliage and you know thousands of draw calls as they say it we're seeing a substantial speed-up and of course it's a really good for VR as well because you have to sustain high frame rates and in stereoscopic 3d yeah the I guess the target minimum is what 90 FPS exactly and it's it's 90 FPS left and right eye so it's effectively 180 frames per second so with DirectX 12 we're talking about sort of refactoring an entire engine why is why is that important why can't you just do rappers well because the rapper introduces overhead and there's a cost they're just making a translation through pointers and also what directx12 does is give you direct access and literally to the GPU Hardware you know direct x11 did a lot of lining up and sequencing and scheduling of tasks automatically and in you know for games that are not bound by GPU requirements it's okay but if you're trying to use all the horsepower that's there in the GPU having direct access and control to those things yourself because you know how your game works as a game developer you can customize it much more easily right so we were also talking about particle effects oh yeah that's obviously a big thing with CryEngine what's new on particle effect with the CryEngine 5 well we have something called particle effects that's just our internal name for the new particle system which is actually includes a new editor that allows you to create the effects and author the shaders for them but the shaders and the particle effects and their dynamics are all now executing on the GPU so that again gives you a a massive speed-up we can do particles that look more like fluid simulations and we can do screen space collisions so particles can look like they're not just passing through the world they're interacting with things so fluid simulation is an interesting one yes it's traditionally at least in our experience sort of looking at games a lot of it in the past has been done with sprites or sort of 2d images that yeah cheated so how is how is the interaction in terms of particles with other particles or well no you can't do too much particle to particle interaction because the truth that fluid simulation would simulate it like a finite element model or a mesh or there would actually be each particle would be aware of all the particles around it and that's too expensive to do in real time we actually can do that and then cache the results and play them back but in in most cases the it's not really a fluid simulation but it looks like it because we can have complicated turbulence that allows them to flow like they're like a liquid would right what about things aside from particles so obviously there's dx12 optimization that's big anything else that people should be aware of for new effects yeah there's lots of other things we have we have extended our audio translation layer which is very cool the ATL as we call it allows you to pick different audio middleware we have STL mixer which is our own internal mixing solution but we also now support W wise and ethmoid so people are creating games can pick whichever toolset they're familiar with and audio has always been a big component of the power of Christ because you can make the sounds follow the objects and they fade off with distance and Doppler effects things like that and in VR it's really even more important because you have this sense that the world is all around you and have it really feel like it's passing behind your head it's not only hard to do but it's really important if you don't do it it doesn't feel like you're really there gamers certainly experienced the surround us or the spatial awareness yes given by audio why do developers have to do for us to be able to appreciate that what's how how manual is it how automated is it yeah it's a it's an art form I probably you know you have a limited number of objects that you can do what we call spatialization on which means it it tracks where they are and how fast they're moving toward you and whether they're behind your head and we do all kinds of fancy attenuation things with them there's a limited number of objects that's of like 32 maybe before it becomes too extensive so you might think of that you've got like the background noise this the musical score and the dialogue that's always in front of you and then up to 32 different things like ships going by or explosions that can be placed in 3d space so it's a balancing act you know that's more of an art than a technology so this did remind me though CPU threading has always been big for CryEngine in terms of actually being able to use a lot of threads what's the load like on CPUs these days how does it spawn I previously spoke to chris Roberts from Imperium games and he was talking about how with the version they were using it sort of spawns thread for game logic for AI yeah how do things work now it's more or less the same we have some ideas for advanced threading but basically the classic way to do is to sign one thread to the audio one to physics one to the all the different operations and then that's maybe not ideal if one of them is underutilized versus the others but I'm not really an expert on threading so so CryEngine the big news that we didn't talk about it to pay what you want model now and that's I believe the minimum is zero zero we don't actually pay you to use it there's no negative value so if you are interested in playing around with it just for fun or as a developer there's it's it's linked in the article that is in the description below so you can find all of that yeah and then dx12 stuff we've got a big news announcement coming up from Nvidia today that we're posting on the site and some of that is pretty interesting as well that relates to a lot of this stuff here oh yeah and also it sounds like we're started wrapping up here I don't want to let you get away without mentioning that all of these new features most of them are have a big impact on VR of course and now we have we have oculus rift support and PlayStation VR HTC vive and OSD are all all in there and we didn't even get into the new user interface and how much easy we completely rewrote the user interface as well it's now QT base for people who are interested and that's more modular rearranged where the icons are to make them the workflows more intuitive and it's also user extensible you can configure the interface the way you want people find the the vast array of things you can do with CryEngine somewhat intimidating so being able to organize it into a way that makes it make more sense we hope it's going to help everyone very cool so big advancements for CryEngine links in the description below yeah and thank you again for joining me my pleasure we'll see you all next time