News Meet the Team #6- Ben Parry (Graphics Programmer)

Cody · Aug 29, 2013

A great writer, was Kurt Vonnegut - which brings to mind an old song!

Slawkenbergius · Aug 29, 2013

So with the lighting, if I'm at a spacestation orbiting a sulphurous coloured moon, itself orbiting a bubblegum pink gas giant, does that mean we get some nice coloured lighting, mixed in with the white light from the star?

Dull Bladerunner · Aug 30, 2013

Hi Ben,
Are you going to use atmospheric scattering to render planetary atmosphere (initially, looking at the planet from space). As per these examples?

http://developer.nvidia.com/content/gpu-gems-2-chapter-16-accurate-atmospheric-scattering

Maxeren · Aug 30, 2013

Uuuhh deferred rendering.. played around with that once in XNA.. shinny ligfhts and alot of them, made me think disco

This is not my work below, but this is how deferred rendering of lights looks

Ben Parry · Aug 30, 2013

Yep, that is exactly what every scene in Elite is going to look like. Some people were doubtful about the horses to begin with but they grow on you eventually.

Maxeren · Aug 30, 2013

Ben Parry said:
Yep, that is exactly what every scene in Elite is going to look like. Some people were doubtful about the horses to begin with but they grow on you eventually.

Disco horse!

Hehe.. i love deferred rendering, but yes lights do look a little samy.. hope you can do something about that

Out2lunch · Aug 30, 2013

Ben Parry said:
Yep, that is exactly what every scene in Elite is going to look like. Some people were doubtful about the horses to begin with but they grow on you eventually.

Omg I just laughed so loudly that everyone has slightly moved away from me in the tube train giving me some very funny looks.

Great way to finally get a seat on my hour long commute

Oss133 · Aug 30, 2013

Ben Parry said:
Yep, that is exactly what every scene in Elite is going to look like. Some people were doubtful about the horses to begin with but they grow on you eventually.

Big LOL

Juniper · Aug 30, 2013

Ben Parry said:
Juniper: It's all about the Earthshine. One reason sci-fi films often look nicer than games is that they can get away with using a traditional three-point lighting setup that breaks down when you have a player moving the camera about, or can just generally pick a flattering angle. The more legitimate major light sources we can get in, the more angles we'll have that look nice, so it would be a crime to ignore that kind of an opportunity.

That's... just... jaw-droppingly lovely.

Disco horses ftw. With camelshine.

jabokai · Aug 30, 2013

Ben Parry said:
The only procedural thing I can think of is that I’ve created (or at least half-finished) a system for slowly building up dirt and weathering based on the ship’s geometry.

Can we have barnacles?

Cheers. :smilie:

StefanOS · Aug 30, 2013

Hello Ben! Nice interview!

1 question: ED is in the same field like the soon coming X-Rebirth and Star Citizen (SC) in 2015. Especially SC is pushing the polygon counts in unbelievable high numbers, hundred of thousands for each ship, player character, and millions for capital ships, the promotion videos look amazing. How do you see this evolution generally as graphic programmer, and what is the FD / ED approach in this matter???

Slawkenbergius · Aug 30, 2013

Ben Parry said:
Yep, that is exactly what every scene in Elite is going to look like. Some people were doubtful about the horses to begin with but they grow on you eventually.

Oh, it's a horse! I'm half asleep and thought it was the ship from Firefly.

Maxeren · Aug 30, 2013

Yeah thats one of the rare tradeable void creatures.. the disco horse

Ben Parry · Aug 30, 2013

StefanosA said:
Hello Ben! Nice interview!

1 question: ED is in the same field like the soon coming X-Rebirth and Star Citizen (SC) in 2015. Especially SC is pushing the polygon counts in unbelievable high numbers, hundred of thousands for each ship, player character, and millions for capital ships, the promotion videos look amazing. How do you see this evolution generally as graphic programmer, and what is the FD / ED approach in this matter???

I'm all for spending poly budget on stuff, but I'm also for spending that GPU power elsewhere if it'll give you better results - it's not immediately obvious but if you start using so many triangles that they're less than a pixel big, you pay a big performance cost for pixels you're not even using as the GPU is designed for parallel work.
In short: we'll doubtless find something to spend all the GPU resources on

Tinman · Aug 30, 2013

Ben Parry said:
I'm all for spending poly budget on stuff, but I'm also for spending that GPU power elsewhere if it'll give you better results - it's not immediately obvious but if you start using so many triangles that they're less than a pixel big, you pay a big performance cost for pixels you're not even using as the GPU is designed for parallel work.
In short: we'll doubtless find something to spend all the GPU resources on

I also assume that you are going to take into consideration future expansions to some degree? Having lots of polys on the ships and stations is "easy" as long as the rest of the environment is just a big skybox. Later down the line when terrain, vegitation, animal life and whole cityscapes are implemented there is going to be quite a bit more strain put on the GPU I reckon! Yes, I realize that LOD systems are going to play a big part here, but still...

Also, I'm a bit sceptical about the extreme level of detail that SC is going for on their models since most of the time you won't see that anyway. Sure it looks nice while you walk around the ship up close, but in a dogfight?

Maxeren · Aug 30, 2013

Tinman said:
I also assume that you are going to take into consideration future expansions to some degree? Having lots of polys on the ships and stations is "easy" as long as the rest of the environment is just a big skybox. Later down the line when terrain, vegitation, animal life and whole cityscapes are implemented there is going to be quite a bit more strain put on the GPU I reckon! Yes, I realize that LOD systems are going to play a big part here, but still...

Also, I'm a bit sceptical about the extreme level of detail that SC is going for on their models since most of the time you won't see that anyway. Sure it looks nice while you walk around the ship up close, but in a dogfight?

Bet they will have some fairly advanced LOD systems in there too..

jabokai · Aug 30, 2013

Tinman said:
Also, I'm a bit sceptical about the extreme level of detail that SC is going for on their models since most of the time you won't see that anyway. Sure it looks nice while you walk around the ship up close, but in a dogfight?

Isn't that "millions of polygons" a little bit of a PR "look at our numbers" type thing? I assume those polys are created with dynamic tessellation so you'd only see that many when it was in your face anyway. Perhaps I'm wrong and each ship really is infinitely crafted!

stephen_usher · Aug 30, 2013

Juniper said:
Disco horses ftw. With camelshine.

Camels too? Is Jeff Minter in the dev team?

StefanOS · Aug 30, 2013

Ben Parry said:
I'm all for spending poly budget on stuff, but I'm also for spending that GPU power elsewhere if it'll give you better results - it's not immediately obvious but if you start using so many triangles that they're less than a pixel big, you pay a big performance cost for pixels you're not even using as the GPU is designed for parallel work.
In short: we'll doubtless find something to spend all the GPU resources on

Are the many polygons pushing only the GPU to the limits? What about the CPU? Perhaps you can tell us what part the CPU is handling and what part the GPU...

Oss133 · Aug 30, 2013

stephen_usher said:
Camels too?

Misread that and thought I had wandered into the wrong forum.