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

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Philip Coutts

Volunteer Moderator
Philip Coutts
Tinman said:
Wait a minute! What if Elite has already been released and we are all playing it with a Oculus Rift Mk15!? :eek:

*starts checking for a plug at the back of the head*
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If this is the new Elite it's rubbish! I spend far too much time at work, far too realistic.....;)
 

Ben Parry

Ben Parry
Ian Phillips said:
Oooh. Like in a newsletter about Stations? This week?
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Though I sit two desks away from Ashley, I have literally no idea what's being published to you guys and when. I just assumed that at some point someone's going to want to talk about stations because they're a thing.
 

Dave Leestir

Dave Leestir
Premature optimisation?

Ben Parry said:
...despite sin/cos etc not being operations to use lightly...
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I'm interested... do you exclusively use real sin / cos functions, or have you got some lookup tables too?
I haven't seen any current benchmarks comparing the performance of the 2 approaches - I would expect lookups to be quicker (naively) but maybe FPUs (and GPUs?) have moved on as technology has advanced?


ps thanks for expanding on your monitor / book combinations - it's something I think is essential to get right when you're coding.
 

Greg Ryder

G
Dave Leestir said:
do you exclusively use real sin / cos functions, or have you got some lookup tables too?
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The overhead of reading from memory is pretty high these days, so it's pretty unusual to see a lookup table for something as simple as a sin / cos function.

Complex functions are still encoded into lookup textures (noise functions etc), or sometimes ones under art control (e.g. how light intensity falls off with viewing direction is a common one).
 

Oss133

Oss133
@BenParry

I just noticed the spacecraft in your sig. Is that a station or a ship? If it's a ship and you are loading it with cargo, do you put the milk in first or last? No pressure but please know that if you get this wrong I will lose all faith in FD to do this game justice.

Just askin'
 

Ben Parry

Ben Parry
oss133 said:
@BenParry

I just noticed the spacecraft in your sig. Is that a station or a ship? If it's a ship and you are loading it with cargo, do you put the milk in first or last? No pressure but please know that if you get this wrong I will lose all faith in FD to do this game justice.

Just askin'
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Controversially I do not have the patience for hot drinks. I don't even own a kettle.
(above statements are personal opinions and do not represent the position of Frontier Developments)
 

Oss133

Oss133
Ben Parry said:
Controversially I do not have the patience for hot drinks. I don't even own a kettle.
(above statements are personal opinions and do not represent the position of Frontier Developments)
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Nicely dodged. Of course, the answer was C. You never put milk in there. I still want one though.
 

JensSchmidt

JensSchmidt
Rendering

Hej Ben, thought I bring this old thread back to life with a couple of questions for you :)

a) I don't think I have seen any reflections (unless you count high lights) anywhere in the game yet, for example; environment map reflections like stars in another spaceships canopy or ray traced ones like the space station body reflected in the glass roof of the habitat area of same station, is that something that you are considering implementing, I don't think it's the most important of things but I am curious?

b) I really miss dynamic exposure (hdr), I think it would add both visual and gameplay value, "I've lost him in the sun, i've lost him in the sun". What are your thought on this?

Christian Shüler wrote an article where he also mentions this http://www.thetenthplanet.de/archives/4062

(To complement this in-game it would be awesome to be able to dim the lights in the cockpit (or maybe your computer does it for you; 'Dimming lights.') and see the night sky slowly light up by millions of stars.)

c) In an interview (could not find it now) David Braben mentioned something about ED lasting many years because of rendering settings so heavy and beautiful that they are not usable at the point of release, now, in Beta1.04, with all setting on max I can actually play the game on my 4 year old computer (good job by the way) so what is the eye candy to come?

d) As a follow-up on 'lasting for years' in the previous question I would like to ask if you have seen the Brigade engine (most likely considering your job) and what you think about the plausibility of path tracing in a space game like elite, to me it seems like a perfect fit (lots of static meshes) and it's the future of rendering no doubt :)

Brigade 3.0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y

Path tracing works well when rendering for Oculus too as you don't have to render any unused pixels ;)
Yes I'm promoting it, yes we might have to wait 3 more GPU generations but wouldn't it be worth it. Imho, considering what people like (eye candy sells) having this as an option would make a huge marketing boost.

Anyway, back to the questions :)

e) I don't know if it's just me but I can't see any shadows nor any ambient occlusion in the hangar, am I hallucinating?

Hope I didn't come across as too whiny, I love the game :)
 
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Pomerlaw

Pomerlaw
JensSchmidt said:
e) I don't know if it's just me but I can't see any shadows nor any ambient occlusion in the hangar, am I hallucinating?

Hope I didn't come across as too whiny, I love the game :)
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You are not, I've already observe that only from pictures and videos (I don't have beta access).

Anyway, nice list of questions!
 

Tettric

T
Not knowing much about the inner workings of and roles in development teams I'd like to know:

A) Do you handle Anti-aliasing for ED?

B) Regardless of whether you do or not, what do you think of current AA techniques (in particular FXAA as it has caught some flak for filtering images rather than object edges and therefore muddling textures occasionally)

I'm studying Computing in college and learning to use Blender (an open source toolkit for CGI) in my free time. While I'm not close to doing anything really impressive yet, this kind of stuff really peaks my interest!

Thanks in advance for any response!

:D
 
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Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
Sorry if it has been discussed already:

How are you planning the game’s procedural generation in respect to future updates (AKA landing on planets)?

Some things are set in stone, for instance there’s no reason that later updates would change the continental layout of a planet, but it was decided a while ago that it’s acceptable for a later release to change things for the better – for instance we’re not going to try to perfectly anticipate how a later release will lay out cities when we’re placing city lights for this release
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In addition to the pic of the week this also seems to confirm city lights for next update?

EDIT: argh I just realized this interview is from august 2013 not 2014!
 
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Greg Ryder

G
Hopefully Ben is off doing something beyond just coding as it's Friday night.

Interesting read on Christian Shüler blog, nice to see some thought out points - thanks for the link. I'll throw in a few quick answers

We handle AA in software (mainly due to our deferred lighting). We have a couple of options that we let people choose. We might bolt on more in the future, but it'll be later in the day as it's a "low tech risk" to add more, compared to some other work. FXAA is very soft and it does smush interiors of polys, though it also fights some specular aliasing gremlins. There are definitely better out there, but it's quick and we had a version of it already.

I'd be a rich man if I got some money for every time I heard ray tracing was the future of real-time graphics. Lets just say we're not there yet (IMHO) :) We've done some big changes to our specular model / tonemap, look out for these in the next build.

Dynamic Exposure (thank you for not calling it HDR :)) is something we go forward and back over. The short answer, is it just doesn't work as you want it to without making the game look ugly most of the time for a few special moments.

Internal shadows, in the works.

Greg
 
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