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The Rendering of Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

96 points by noch 9y ago

psyc 9y ago
I’m a graphics engine developer and I almost always play AAA games with an eye towards analyzing the rendering engine. SoM might be the first game that was so much fun to play, that I never even noticed the rendering. After reading this write up I’m going to have to play it again.
kbenson 9y ago
> The game itself was a great surprise, and the fact that it was a spin-off within the storyline of the Lord of the Rings universe was quite unusual and it’s something I enjoyed. Hopefully it becomes less unusual. Works (whether they be literature or media) with well developed plots tend to make poor video games when they attempt to translate that plot. I suspect it's a combination of the type of movie that generally garners video game conversions (action-y) and the type of games those most often lead to (also action-y) being hard to deliver a plot like that. A spinoff with a mostly new plot that can be tailored to what a video game can do best will generally result in a superior experience, IMO.
- Terr_ 9y ago
  It's just unfortunate that the plot/timing/details aren't consistent with the books.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- on_and_off 9y ago
  True, and also some campiness helps video games. Most AAA centers around killing ennemies and it is hard to write a good story around genocidal characters without an enormous ludo-narrative dissonance.
looki 9y ago
I'm interested what this deep G buffer for the order-independent transparency would entail.
corysama 9y ago
If you like this, you'll like the many graphics studies of http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/ http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/ and you might appreciate https://www.reddit.com/r/videogamescience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videogamescience/
christofosho 9y ago
Wow. This is a lot to take in! Thank you for this, it gives me a gateway into things I can research to expand my knowledge on the subject of graphics.
arithma 9y ago
Why aren't game graphics developers not the most well paid engineers? This stuff is magically awesome!
- santaclaus 9y ago
  Because ads and/or iPhones make waaaaaay more money
santaclaus 9y ago
I love these types of breakdowns! It would be really cool to see breakdowns in other portions of a game engine, too: physics, character animation, managing the massive assets, lots of potential goodies.
andybak 9y ago
> An interesting example here is Talion’s cape, which is sent to the GPU as a point cloud Wow. Interesting. I'm assuming it's not "just" a point cloud. My experience with 3D scanning and photogrammatry seems to indicate that mesh construction of an arbitrary point cloud is not the kind of thing you would try doing in real time (try "overnight"). So unless there's some magic here then at the very least the point ordering allows a huge short cut to be taken. Or is it more than that? i.e. there's a healthy chunk of metadata about the desired topology?

96 points by noch 9y ago

psyc 9y ago

I’m a graphics engine developer and I almost always play AAA games with an eye towards analyzing the rendering engine. SoM might be the first game that was so much fun to play, that I never even noticed the rendering. After reading this write up I’m going to have to play it again.

kbenson 9y ago

> The game itself was a great surprise, and the fact that it was a spin-off within the storyline of the Lord of the Rings universe was quite unusual and it’s something I enjoyed. Hopefully it becomes less unusual. Works (whether they be literature or media) with well developed plots tend to make poor video games when they attempt to translate that plot. I suspect it's a combination of the type of movie that generally garners video game conversions (action-y) and the type of games those most often lead to (also action-y) being hard to deliver a plot like that. A spinoff with a mostly new plot that can be tailored to what a video game can do best will generally result in a superior experience, IMO.

Terr_ 9y ago
It's just unfortunate that the plot/timing/details aren't consistent with the books.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
on_and_off 9y ago
True, and also some campiness helps video games. Most AAA centers around killing ennemies and it is hard to write a good story around genocidal characters without an enormous ludo-narrative dissonance.

looki 9y ago

I'm interested what this deep G buffer for the order-independent transparency would entail.

corysama 9y ago

If you like this, you'll like the many graphics studies of http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/ http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/ and you might appreciate https://www.reddit.com/r/videogamescience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videogamescience/

christofosho 9y ago

Wow. This is a lot to take in! Thank you for this, it gives me a gateway into things I can research to expand my knowledge on the subject of graphics.

arithma 9y ago

Why aren't game graphics developers not the most well paid engineers? This stuff is magically awesome!

santaclaus 9y ago
Because ads and/or iPhones make waaaaaay more money

santaclaus 9y ago

I love these types of breakdowns! It would be really cool to see breakdowns in other portions of a game engine, too: physics, character animation, managing the massive assets, lots of potential goodies.

andybak 9y ago

> An interesting example here is Talion’s cape, which is sent to the GPU as a point cloud Wow. Interesting. I'm assuming it's not "just" a point cloud. My experience with 3D scanning and photogrammatry seems to indicate that mesh construction of an arbitrary point cloud is not the kind of thing you would try doing in real time (try "overnight"). So unless there's some magic here then at the very least the point ordering allows a huge short cut to be taken. Or is it more than that? i.e. there's a healthy chunk of metadata about the desired topology?