Graphics Update... BGolus and Varrak cleanup rampage

Subsurface scattering would look fantastic on the ice planets, but damn, I imagine it would be really expensive.

More posts like these, please! This is great content!

Also, quick question. Any plans to increase the brightness/bloom of some effects? Are effects being worked on at all now, or are you two still solidifying the pipeline for now?

Soon in this case means we will shoot for next week after PAX, but if we run into anything yucky we don't want to foist off on our customers we will iterate until it is ready.

Finally.

'nuff siad, eh?

SSAO is a term that means Screen Space Ambient Occlusion. There are various techniques for implementing SSAO, HBAO, SDAO SSDO, HDAO, VAO, SAO, they're all acronyms for techniques to implement SSAO.

HBAO (Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion) has been the go to technique for high quality SSAO for a few years now, but it's extremely expensive. Usually the various ambient occlusion techniques are done at half or quarter resolutions because they're so slow. HDAO (High Definition Ambient Occlusion) is a technique that AMD came up with for use with compute shaders, but HBAO is often still faster and better quality than HDAO.

SAO (Scalable Ambient Obscurance) is a relatively new technique that combines a lot of smart ideas to allow for quality that's fairly close to HBAO (but not quite), but much, much faster, and a considerable better quality level than the average SSAO. Most of the time SSAO techniques are run at half or even quarter resolutions to be fast enough to be usable, but SAO is designed to be able to run at full resolution. We'll likely have lower quality settings to run it at a lower resolution for the lower end as well.

Also, the example images that Varrak is showing off are probably much darker than the final settings will be. Generally the pre-baked AO is good for finer details, and the post AO is generally going to be softer and less precise.

A number of studios have actually been moving away from SSAO techniques towards fully 3d techniques (like Sim City 4 which uses voxel AO, or Saints Row 4 and Remember Me which use volume shapes), but those aren't viable for us with the number of objects we have on screen we want to have AO so SSAO techniques are going to be better for us.

Thanks meta. This kind of post is great especially for those waiting to practice for tournaments.

Speaking of which, SDAO is a neat trick. Do you thing an SDSAO mod would be feasible? I'd love to attempt such a thing... If I knew the least bit about shaders.

Subsurface scattering would be awesome, but it's not a high priority effect, and would require pretty significant changes to the rendering system to accommodate.

SDAO was was me typoing SSDO, is that what you are thinking of too? If so not really, no. SSDO (or DSSDO for us) works in tandem with the lighting system modifying the rendering of the lighting directly. We're implementing SSAO mainly to handle the back side of the planet which doesn't actually have any lights for SSDO to work with.

how do you even keep track of all these acronyms?

Will this fix the issue where planets with a lot of trees or other features will often 'flash' all the shadows/textures in between a strange off color and the normal color? I'm on Mac and don't play any earth planets with trees do to this as it gets really distracting.

Obviously by my typo, I don't.
Doesn't help that SAO is used for both "Scalable Ambient Obscurance" and "Separable Approximation of Ambient Occlusion"... because SAoAO was too much to say.
There's also many different ambient occlusion techniques called VAO, and not all of them are screen space.
And then like I said before SSAO can refer to the original Crytek method, or the multitude of techniques that use the same concept of using depth to approximate ambient occlusion.

No, shadow acne is a very specific artifact that looks like bands or checkerboard patterns on the sides of shadowed objects. Please make a post about the issue you're experiencing in the bug forum, preferably with screenshots.

Is "shadow acne" the shadow artifact at 0:40 in this video and through out the game ? (Old beta video)

I've heard that Ambient Occlusion is a hard performance-killer in the most games, what's about PA?
Will the performance get badder or have you improved the performance in parallel, so that we have no loss of performance?

Awesome, the lack of ambient occlusion has been really annoying me.. it is amazing how much of a difference it makes. Should make buildings look more "natural" too, especially where they come into contact with the ground.

Thanks for the posts and answers, extremly interesting !

ha ha. I can't help but laugh when i imagine you reading your post out loud at the Uber office and everyone going "wait, you speak chinese?" (but from like, a really bad cheesy chinese imitation movie)

I've made that typo before myself! That's definitely what I was thinking of. Also seen here.

Also, if Nvidia's precedent is anything to go by, Separable Approximate Ambient Occlusion would be SXAO. /joke

Great post guys, I've been hoping for AO a while now. More terrain contrast could improve the aesthetic so much

Also nice that you also fixed those shadow issues (I thought those were just a performance compromise)
edit: I realize it was actually a performance trade off, but I guess you found a cheaper method of retaining the quality.

Finally, its really appreciated that you took the time to share these lower-level insights with us. Any chance stuff like this will end up in the documentary, or is that kept more high-level?