12 ms·

Deus Ex – Alpha Terrain

185 points by mariuz 3y ago

smcl 3y ago
Was wracking my brains trying to figure out the location here. There's not too many in DX:MD - Prague, Dubai, Switzerland and London - but I didn't recall encountering a scene like this in the only one that fit the terrain (Dubai). Turns out this is actually from an expansion called "A Criminal Past" set in Arizona that I wasn't aware of - https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/Penley_T._Housefather_Correctional_Facility https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/Penley_T._Housefather_Correct... I enjoyed the game, interesting depiction of future Prague too. There's some slightly iffy voice acting and interesting pronunciations (pronouncing Václav as "Vaklav" instead of "Vatslav"), which is interesting since there's clearly some Czechs involved (see "Picus") :D edit: I should explain the "picus" thing for non-DX and/or non-Czechs. There is a media company in the latter two Deus Ex games called "Picus". This is close to a rude word in Czech: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/p%C3%AD%C4%8Dus https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/p%C3%AD%C4%8Dus. Also fun fact, I was told "čus, píčus!" (pron choos, peechoos, first word is a loanword from German "tschus") meaning roughly "hey, ya fucker!" was how you say "cheers" when I first arrived here. It can be how you say cheers, but only to good friends who you know enjoy talking like that :)
- hallux 3y ago
  There are also a few moments where Alex's voice actor pronounces the a in Prague like the a in brag. A Criminal Past is a decent expansion by the way! I recently re-installed the game just to play through the expansion again.
  - smcl 3y ago
    Hm both the 'a' in "Prague" and "brag" are the same for me, might be an accent thing. I'll give it a whirl, I promised myself no new games until I finish Elden Ring but maybe I can bend the rules a bit, after all it's a DLC not a "game" ;)
- sho_hn 3y ago
  I played DX:MD just before Cyberpunk, and it made Cyberpunk feel so dead and barren in comparison. The levels of interactivity and exploration in MD's Prague were crazy off the charts in direct comparison. Discovering an entire underground little civilization in the sewers and tunnels I could have equally just easily missed etc. really made me feel like I was discovering things just for me. Cyberpunk instead felt like clinically crossing off items on the map/quest tracker todo list; aside from the fantastic visuals, just looking around on your own offered basically no rewards at all in the game. Similar feelings around NPC interaction and AI. Add the fact that Cyberpunk's "hand-holding you through the environment" approach feels more and more lacklustre and grindy as the game develops, as they clearly ran out of resources to do all of the custom animations and setups they have in the first couple of hours to at least make it feel big and cinematic. The emergent/more sim-heavy/sandboxy approach of the DX games is more even there, and things tend to feel deeper rather than shallower over time, I think.
  - smcl 3y ago
    I played them the other way round (well Cyberpunk, then Human Revolution and then Mankind) and had the same feeling. Cyberpunk is enormous but relatively hollow in comparison to both in my opinion.
    - 9dev 3y ago
      On the other hand, DX has such intricate details precisely because it isn’t enormous, but rather constrained (still big, don’t get me wrong, but definitely way smaller). You can feel how someone poured attention to every nook and cranny, something just not possible on the scale of Cyberpunk. On the other hand, there’s Red Dead 2…
      - _cenw 3y ago
        RDR2 is the most confused game I've ever played. They have this great open world and a lot of systems and "immersion" that very clearly years of work have went into, yet very few of those systems interact with each other (or the main plot) in interesting ways and the story is still the typical tired half cutscenes + half linear, highly choreographed gameplay with little room for creativity (no deviating from the exact text on the bottom) that Rockstar has been using mostly unchanged since at least GTA IV.
- simonschreibt 3y ago
  Yes :) The extra levels are quite nice! But the original locations are very cool as well. Need to play it again! <3
  - smcl 3y ago
    Nice to see you here! I really enjoyed the article :)
    - simonschreibt 3y ago
      thank you! <3 that's great to hear!
- Barrin92 3y ago
  >interesting depiction of future Prague one major success of the franchise is its depiction of a future that feels genuinely forward oriented. I think they dubbed their art direction 'cyber renaissance' (HR in the remaster comes with a great developer narration) and it genuinely manages to seem novel. There's also a lot of very smart world-building and writing in the ebooks scattered around the game. From tensions in Australia caused by wildfires and draughts to the antagonists backstory in MD featuring Ukrainian separatism in Belgorod it seemed eerily relevant at times having replayed it last summer.
shdon 3y ago
To be honest, I find that in most of the screenshots, this is not an improvement, but it looks worse. For the box in the first comparison videos, I definitely prefer the sharp edge. For a few things like the dust storm, the foggy circle, or even the accumulated dirt around the base of the large rock in the hero image, it does look good. For pretty much everything else shown in the article, it feels unnatural and overdone.
- polytely 3y ago
  I agree that it looks bad close-up, but then if you think about the gameplay in that area, you are mostly just walking around and talking to other inmates and not doing much sneaking there, so you aren't up close with the edges at ground level, because you are mostly upright. I remember that area feeling very sandy while I was playing it so I guess the goal was achieved.
- ElongatedMusket 3y ago
  It definitely looks worse and unnatural, because in real life we don't see rocks or trees gradually morph into the ground on a gradient (unless we're on drugs). Where it looks better is in motion, when the harsh rigid angles would otherwise show off their jagged pixels. This blend technique is used where your eyes are hopefully not focused. If only seen in your periphory, the effect is quite nicely done.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  I've never liked the sharp object transitions typical of video games, but yes, I think that this technique only really works in specific circumstances. I think it'd help a lot of the terrain geometry were distorted such that it looks like it's physically interacting with the object it's blending with (e.g. sand resting against the side of the object). If that were added to this technique I think it'd be a lot more convincing.
- karmakaze 3y ago
  When I first looked at the images, I had the same reaction that they don't look realistic. Thinking about it in context though, I think they would be more suitable. The goal of these renderings isn't specifically to have properties that are realistic. The main goal should be for them to make the world seem natural and provide context. In that sense they are better than the sharp renderings which are a bit distracting. In a way I would consider them a bit impressionistic to give the player the right impression more so than an accurate frame-by-frame renderings. The true test should be playing the game with different renderings and deciding which one feels better.
taneq 3y ago
I’m not sure about doing this with arbitrary objects… but it should be mandatory for particle dust/fog/smoke effects.
tempodox 3y ago
For anyone wondering, the images are from the Penley T. Housefather Prison, in the greatest DLC of any game ever (“Criminal Past” in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided).
- nailer 3y ago
  Upmodded pre-emptively on the assumption you'll do a followup explaining your justification. But I disagree. I think the best DLC was Minerva's Den, a Bioshock DLC about a man becoming obsessed with his work to the point he destroys his family, which is relevant to anyone that's career-minded and particularly to founders.
  - Yoric 3y ago
    I personally enjoyed Criminal Past, if only because its final image finally justified the entire story of DX:MD. Before playing through this story, I had enjoyed DX:MD with the big caveat that there was a huge gaping plot hole. Not anymore :)
    - ehnto 3y ago
      Agreed, I still felt DX:MD's finale was underwhelming but at least it made sense. Potential spoilers: I felt DX:MD needed a grander conspiracy for it's main storyline, and I thought they had that with the Orchid story beats, but then nothing came of that and the finale felt a bit disconnected. I suspect it ended too soon.
  - smileybarry 3y ago
    Minerva's Den was one of the best expansions I've ever played, and it's a shame it's hidden as BioShock 2 DLC. (Since it's a fully standalone story with an entirely separate protagonist) Selling it optionally as standalone DLC that you can launch separately (like Deus Ex: Human Revolution's "The Missing Link") would've been great. But it was released in a time where patch certification, clumsy digital stores, and "Games For Windows - LIVE" existed and standalone/cheap digital releases weren't common.
mLuby 3y ago
What I see in that first image is the two rocks are the same shape, just rotated and scaled.
- Marcan 3y ago
  Good observation. We reuse a lot of the same assets in video games.
ummonk 3y ago
Am I the only one who thinks the translucent blurring looks bad?
- unholiness 3y ago
  It looks bad when you look at it, but unlike a harsh polygonal border, it doesn't call attention to itself when you're not looking at it.
  - ummonk 3y ago
    Huh for me the blurriness draws my eyes to it even when I’m not looking at it.
squarefoot 3y ago
I never played Deus Ex, so I'm judging solely by the published videos and frames. The effect seems quite bad and unnatural to me. In the 1st side by side comparison, for example, the block blends with the terrain in a way that it shows its corners reflection on the terrain. Shouldn't be there some hierarchies coded so that the sand blends with the block base without looking like the block is penetrating into the terrain? Also, the 2nd video example shows some evident perspective errors wrt parallax. If this is the alternative, I would choose any day the basic hard-intersection version.
- epolanski 3y ago
  As everything in engineering it comes down to trade offs. It looks "bad" and "unnatural" mostly because you're given screenshots and gifs at specific angles that make the blending effect the focus and thus more obvious, but during gameplay the overall effect is positive and you wouldn't notice: https://youtu.be/aAmXuQmsAAg?t=787 https://youtu.be/aAmXuQmsAAg?t=787
  - Gravityloss 3y ago
    Isn't the real world actually so that there's a black border in the "seams" between real objects, from ambient occlusion and shadows.
  - simonschreibt 3y ago
    haha, that's true. in fact, sometimes i wonder if we game devs spend too much time into details which maybe, nobody notices at the end :D
    - gs17 3y ago
      I wouldn't worry about that, the small details that really sell something as real are easy to not consciously notice.
      - Aeolun 3y ago
        Until you flip them on/off, and suddenly the difference is night and day.
boosteri 3y ago
Ok but what's with that fence? Looking at that makes my eyes hurt. Is than an artefact of the video compression or the game itself?
thih9 3y ago
I think I prefer the results from the other approaches listed in the examples, e.g. material blending: https://orikmcfly.artstation.com/projects/9zRna https://orikmcfly.artstation.com/projects/9zRna
EliasWatson 3y ago
I think you could produce the same effect without worrying about overdraw/sorting and without translucent materials: 1. Render the terrain to a separate buffer 2. Copy the terrain's depth buffer to the main depth buffer 3. Render all non-terrain objects normally 4. Smoothly blend the terrain buffer into the main buffer based on depth This sounds similar to the method used in BotW, but allows for depth culling since the terrain is rendered first. I'm not familiar enough with Unreal Engine shaders to attempt making it there, but I made a demo in ShaderToy: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ct3SDN https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ct3SDN
netbioserror 3y ago
I really want exactly this feature in Blender, it's sorely missing some sort of blending method between intersecting/clipping objects. The best use is always, of course, terrain up against buildings.
winrid 3y ago
I wonder how hard this would be to add to IdTech3?

185 points by mariuz 3y ago

smcl 3y ago

Was wracking my brains trying to figure out the location here. There's not too many in DX:MD - Prague, Dubai, Switzerland and London - but I didn't recall encountering a scene like this in the only one that fit the terrain (Dubai). Turns out this is actually from an expansion called "A Criminal Past" set in Arizona that I wasn't aware of - https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/Penley_T._Housefather_Correctional_Facility https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/Penley_T._Housefather_Correct... I enjoyed the game, interesting depiction of future Prague too. There's some slightly iffy voice acting and interesting pronunciations (pronouncing Václav as "Vaklav" instead of "Vatslav"), which is interesting since there's clearly some Czechs involved (see "Picus") :D edit: I should explain the "picus" thing for non-DX and/or non-Czechs. There is a media company in the latter two Deus Ex games called "Picus". This is close to a rude word in Czech: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/p%C3%AD%C4%8Dus https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/p%C3%AD%C4%8Dus. Also fun fact, I was told "čus, píčus!" (pron choos, peechoos, first word is a loanword from German "tschus") meaning roughly "hey, ya fucker!" was how you say "cheers" when I first arrived here. It can be how you say cheers, but only to good friends who you know enjoy talking like that :)

hallux 3y ago
There are also a few moments where Alex's voice actor pronounces the a in Prague like the a in brag. A Criminal Past is a decent expansion by the way! I recently re-installed the game just to play through the expansion again.
- smcl 3y ago
  Hm both the 'a' in "Prague" and "brag" are the same for me, might be an accent thing. I'll give it a whirl, I promised myself no new games until I finish Elden Ring but maybe I can bend the rules a bit, after all it's a DLC not a "game" ;)
sho_hn 3y ago
I played DX:MD just before Cyberpunk, and it made Cyberpunk feel so dead and barren in comparison. The levels of interactivity and exploration in MD's Prague were crazy off the charts in direct comparison. Discovering an entire underground little civilization in the sewers and tunnels I could have equally just easily missed etc. really made me feel like I was discovering things just for me. Cyberpunk instead felt like clinically crossing off items on the map/quest tracker todo list; aside from the fantastic visuals, just looking around on your own offered basically no rewards at all in the game. Similar feelings around NPC interaction and AI. Add the fact that Cyberpunk's "hand-holding you through the environment" approach feels more and more lacklustre and grindy as the game develops, as they clearly ran out of resources to do all of the custom animations and setups they have in the first couple of hours to at least make it feel big and cinematic. The emergent/more sim-heavy/sandboxy approach of the DX games is more even there, and things tend to feel deeper rather than shallower over time, I think.
- smcl 3y ago
  I played them the other way round (well Cyberpunk, then Human Revolution and then Mankind) and had the same feeling. Cyberpunk is enormous but relatively hollow in comparison to both in my opinion.
  - 9dev 3y ago
    On the other hand, DX has such intricate details precisely because it isn’t enormous, but rather constrained (still big, don’t get me wrong, but definitely way smaller). You can feel how someone poured attention to every nook and cranny, something just not possible on the scale of Cyberpunk. On the other hand, there’s Red Dead 2…
    - _cenw 3y ago
      RDR2 is the most confused game I've ever played. They have this great open world and a lot of systems and "immersion" that very clearly years of work have went into, yet very few of those systems interact with each other (or the main plot) in interesting ways and the story is still the typical tired half cutscenes + half linear, highly choreographed gameplay with little room for creativity (no deviating from the exact text on the bottom) that Rockstar has been using mostly unchanged since at least GTA IV.
simonschreibt 3y ago
Yes :) The extra levels are quite nice! But the original locations are very cool as well. Need to play it again! <3
- smcl 3y ago
  Nice to see you here! I really enjoyed the article :)
  - simonschreibt 3y ago
    thank you! <3 that's great to hear!
Barrin92 3y ago
>interesting depiction of future Prague one major success of the franchise is its depiction of a future that feels genuinely forward oriented. I think they dubbed their art direction 'cyber renaissance' (HR in the remaster comes with a great developer narration) and it genuinely manages to seem novel. There's also a lot of very smart world-building and writing in the ebooks scattered around the game. From tensions in Australia caused by wildfires and draughts to the antagonists backstory in MD featuring Ukrainian separatism in Belgorod it seemed eerily relevant at times having replayed it last summer.

shdon 3y ago

To be honest, I find that in most of the screenshots, this is not an improvement, but it looks worse. For the box in the first comparison videos, I definitely prefer the sharp edge. For a few things like the dust storm, the foggy circle, or even the accumulated dirt around the base of the large rock in the hero image, it does look good. For pretty much everything else shown in the article, it feels unnatural and overdone.

polytely 3y ago
I agree that it looks bad close-up, but then if you think about the gameplay in that area, you are mostly just walking around and talking to other inmates and not doing much sneaking there, so you aren't up close with the edges at ground level, because you are mostly upright. I remember that area feeling very sandy while I was playing it so I guess the goal was achieved.
ElongatedMusket 3y ago
It definitely looks worse and unnatural, because in real life we don't see rocks or trees gradually morph into the ground on a gradient (unless we're on drugs). Where it looks better is in motion, when the harsh rigid angles would otherwise show off their jagged pixels. This blend technique is used where your eyes are hopefully not focused. If only seen in your periphory, the effect is quite nicely done.
kitsunesoba 3y ago
I've never liked the sharp object transitions typical of video games, but yes, I think that this technique only really works in specific circumstances. I think it'd help a lot of the terrain geometry were distorted such that it looks like it's physically interacting with the object it's blending with (e.g. sand resting against the side of the object). If that were added to this technique I think it'd be a lot more convincing.
karmakaze 3y ago
When I first looked at the images, I had the same reaction that they don't look realistic. Thinking about it in context though, I think they would be more suitable. The goal of these renderings isn't specifically to have properties that are realistic. The main goal should be for them to make the world seem natural and provide context. In that sense they are better than the sharp renderings which are a bit distracting. In a way I would consider them a bit impressionistic to give the player the right impression more so than an accurate frame-by-frame renderings. The true test should be playing the game with different renderings and deciding which one feels better.

taneq 3y ago

I’m not sure about doing this with arbitrary objects… but it should be mandatory for particle dust/fog/smoke effects.

tempodox 3y ago

For anyone wondering, the images are from the Penley T. Housefather Prison, in the greatest DLC of any game ever (“Criminal Past” in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided).

nailer 3y ago
Upmodded pre-emptively on the assumption you'll do a followup explaining your justification. But I disagree. I think the best DLC was Minerva's Den, a Bioshock DLC about a man becoming obsessed with his work to the point he destroys his family, which is relevant to anyone that's career-minded and particularly to founders.
- Yoric 3y ago
  I personally enjoyed Criminal Past, if only because its final image finally justified the entire story of DX:MD. Before playing through this story, I had enjoyed DX:MD with the big caveat that there was a huge gaping plot hole. Not anymore :)
  - ehnto 3y ago
    Agreed, I still felt DX:MD's finale was underwhelming but at least it made sense. Potential spoilers: I felt DX:MD needed a grander conspiracy for it's main storyline, and I thought they had that with the Orchid story beats, but then nothing came of that and the finale felt a bit disconnected. I suspect it ended too soon.
- smileybarry 3y ago
  Minerva's Den was one of the best expansions I've ever played, and it's a shame it's hidden as BioShock 2 DLC. (Since it's a fully standalone story with an entirely separate protagonist) Selling it optionally as standalone DLC that you can launch separately (like Deus Ex: Human Revolution's "The Missing Link") would've been great. But it was released in a time where patch certification, clumsy digital stores, and "Games For Windows - LIVE" existed and standalone/cheap digital releases weren't common.

mLuby 3y ago

What I see in that first image is the two rocks are the same shape, just rotated and scaled.

Marcan 3y ago
Good observation. We reuse a lot of the same assets in video games.

ummonk 3y ago

Am I the only one who thinks the translucent blurring looks bad?

unholiness 3y ago
It looks bad when you look at it, but unlike a harsh polygonal border, it doesn't call attention to itself when you're not looking at it.
- ummonk 3y ago
  Huh for me the blurriness draws my eyes to it even when I’m not looking at it.

squarefoot 3y ago

I never played Deus Ex, so I'm judging solely by the published videos and frames. The effect seems quite bad and unnatural to me. In the 1st side by side comparison, for example, the block blends with the terrain in a way that it shows its corners reflection on the terrain. Shouldn't be there some hierarchies coded so that the sand blends with the block base without looking like the block is penetrating into the terrain? Also, the 2nd video example shows some evident perspective errors wrt parallax. If this is the alternative, I would choose any day the basic hard-intersection version.

epolanski 3y ago
As everything in engineering it comes down to trade offs. It looks "bad" and "unnatural" mostly because you're given screenshots and gifs at specific angles that make the blending effect the focus and thus more obvious, but during gameplay the overall effect is positive and you wouldn't notice: https://youtu.be/aAmXuQmsAAg?t=787 https://youtu.be/aAmXuQmsAAg?t=787
- Gravityloss 3y ago
  Isn't the real world actually so that there's a black border in the "seams" between real objects, from ambient occlusion and shadows.
- simonschreibt 3y ago
  haha, that's true. in fact, sometimes i wonder if we game devs spend too much time into details which maybe, nobody notices at the end :D
  - gs17 3y ago
    I wouldn't worry about that, the small details that really sell something as real are easy to not consciously notice.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      Until you flip them on/off, and suddenly the difference is night and day.

boosteri 3y ago

Ok but what's with that fence? Looking at that makes my eyes hurt. Is than an artefact of the video compression or the game itself?

thih9 3y ago

I think I prefer the results from the other approaches listed in the examples, e.g. material blending: https://orikmcfly.artstation.com/projects/9zRna https://orikmcfly.artstation.com/projects/9zRna

EliasWatson 3y ago

I think you could produce the same effect without worrying about overdraw/sorting and without translucent materials: 1. Render the terrain to a separate buffer 2. Copy the terrain's depth buffer to the main depth buffer 3. Render all non-terrain objects normally 4. Smoothly blend the terrain buffer into the main buffer based on depth This sounds similar to the method used in BotW, but allows for depth culling since the terrain is rendered first. I'm not familiar enough with Unreal Engine shaders to attempt making it there, but I made a demo in ShaderToy: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ct3SDN https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ct3SDN

netbioserror 3y ago

I really want exactly this feature in Blender, it's sorely missing some sort of blending method between intersecting/clipping objects. The best use is always, of course, terrain up against buildings.

winrid 3y ago

I wonder how hard this would be to add to IdTech3?