8 ms·
A new approach to local multiplayer / splitscreen perspective with raytracing
- UtahDave 3y agoThis is a really cool idea!
- meatmanek 3y agoIt's interesting, for sure. I find the warping more distracting than it seems valuable, though. I can't seem to get any useful information out of the warped part of the screen, so IMO it's not any better than a plain dividing line, and just wastes space.
- jjj123 3y agoI think the warping was just an example of something that can only be done with ray tracing. It could just be a straight line or whatever.
- adr1an 3y agoMaybe such a line could indicate distance mapped in a color scale (e.g. viridis)
- merlincorey 3y agoThe information provided by the warped part of the screen is the directionality of it similar to Renegade Ops' Dynamic Splitting as discussed in the article.
- bentcorner 3y agoMaybe OP could integrate similar gameplay ideas from the other games. E.g., the "squished" space can be traversed more quickly by game objects since it occupies less screen space. Not sure if you can actually create a whole game out of that mechanic, but it's a start.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoI think the demo is lacking myself, what does it look like if the two players are further apart? Is more of the in between space represented in the split line? The other jarring thing is that it seemed like a binary on/off thing, whereas it looks like it would be possible to make it a smooth and slow transition depending on the distance between players, make it a bit more surreal.
- mr_briggs 3y agoThe warping in the tech demo is definitely more distracting than a simple dividing line, but it's exciting to see the potential for genuinely seamless transitions between single and split screen gameplay! In what might be a bit of a cursed, uninformed thought - but I'd like to see what happens if each player's perspective could be altered individually. Would it be possible for players to have unique camera perspectives when split, and then reorient to the same perspective when within a given distance to transition to single screen? From memory (as I have been unable to find a demo video), the LEGO series had some interesting approaches to dealing with this. IIRC LEGO Marvel Super Heroes gave players control of their camera when in the open world, so in Dynamic Splitscreen mode there was a little fade transition when recombining cameras to single screen. Pretty sure there was a little delay too so it wouldn't recombine unnecessarily, and it was typically a more annoying point of the splitscreen as the dividing line would pivot more dramatically - something the raytraced approach would definitely improve!
- djtango 3y agoI've always wondered why games didn't implement that but now that I think about it, I can't imagine a neat solution (in 30 seconds) Imagine a 3rd person action game. A and B split up and have two perspectives. They end up facing in opposite directions, how do you reconcile the camera views? Maybe you can have some heuristic that only does it if their perspectives are "close enough" but what value does it bring? For some kind of topdown/isometric type game I could see how that might work. EDIT: actually read the article after getting curious. All of this is covered, extremely cool article. Don't quite understand ray tracing enough to understanding exactly why it is faster. Is it because rasterisation starts from the camera but ray tracing starts from the light source? so you can amortise more calculations if you start from a light source rather than individual perspectives?
- oz_1123 3y agoI found this part not well covered in the article too. But to your question, ray tracing starts fromt the camera. Typically you define the direction of a ray for each pixel, and that ray will bounce around to calculate a final color, and that color will be rendered as the color for that pixel. My assumption is that the shared scene and shaders might play a role here, although the direction of the rays will still vary.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoThe mode that games don't make anymore because they want you to pay double, the split screen.
- o11c 3y agoThere's also the fact that keyboard input sucks: * if you have multiple users on the same physical keyboard, you're very likely to run into the problem where the hardware won't actually register the keypresses simultaneously (some hardware even generates keypress events for keys you didn't actually press!). * if you plug in multiple keyboards, most input event APIs drop the source index, and hotplug is even less supported. Also this is likely to break single-user-like use cases and sometimes hardware macros.
- Atotalnoob 3y agoThere is Nkey rollover in a lot of keyboards
- crote 3y agoN-key rollover is pretty standard for higher-priced gaming keyboards, but it's still far from universal. For example, the average laptop keyboard or membrane keyboard is unlikely to have it - and that's exactly what people will be playing casual splitscreen games on.
- lifthrasiir 3y agoClarification: it's standard for gaming keyboards, which tend to be more expensive. It's not like that cheaper gaming keyboards don't have it (even ~30 USD keyboard has one, if it's advertised as a gaming keyboard).
- Hikikomori 3y agoThey're pretty cheap these days.
- andrewmcwatters 3y ago
- Buttons840 3y agoI love the sound in that short video of the game. I want to buy it, but I can't find it. I tried doing a Google search for "Sphere Spectacle video game 2019", but nothing. Is the game released? Is Google just completely failing here (quite remarkable if so)?
- vicnov 3y agoYoutube comments refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Madness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Madness , but whatever is used in the demo is clearly a much newer version of the game.
- sundvor 3y agoRight there with you, very satisfying to listen to - and looked very nice and clean - so I was immediately ready to buy it or at least sign up for notifications so that I'd get reminded when it comes out (if that was to be the case). Was a big fan of the original back in the C64/Amiga days.
- gU9x3u8XmQNG 3y agoAs noted be another commenter; the game is eerily similar to Marble Madness, a game I have on the old Amiga somewhere in the shed. The similarity is uncanny, especially part of the demo video here. It has a pretty awesome soundtrack, imho.. I cannot find anything re this Sphere Spectacle, however.
- Jyaif 3y agoAs per the linked content, the game is not released. It is in fact the first released footage of it: "In case you’re wondering about the game: what you’re seeing (for the first time) is Sphere Spectacle."
- kapep 3y agoDid Youtube just remove the music? I only hear the sound of marbles rolling, without any music.
- babypuncher 3y ago
- samstave 3y agoThis is dope as heck. A cool game mechanic would be, when the screen warps the players near eachother if they could exchange items, or attack the other - or kite a monster through the warp at the other player... especially cool if you had to travel far away on the map from the other player to grab the monster to fling at your opponent (without being killed by monster) (or maybe you have to get to a BFG first and frag 'em... through running in opposite directions to your bfg base, ang fighting monsters, and flinging then through the warp until you reach the bfg, which is the only thing which can shoot through the warp... your side arm is a gun and a tractor whip with a heavy cool down to entangle a monster to throw through the warp, so use it strategically. whomever gets to their bfg firt - now play it on a large square screen, with four players, one per quadrant running to the bfg and flinging monsters through the warps - the center picks a player at random when flung into.
- samstave 3y agoThere are so many Co-op / PVP scenarios I can think with this screen warping mechanic... Puzzles that require you to go different directions, to gather components for the puzzle, but you have to first find the warp-thrower to transfer resources, which you have to gather and transfer to your warp partner to solve the puzzle, but you need that BFG to throw resources to the other. Multiplayer maps where your maps are vastly different, but you have certain "tiles" that are all shared... when two of you run into the same tile - you are warped in multi.... and then you either have to fight or work together. Some tiles can be "ok we are warped together: what are our goals? "Fight eachother|team against other guy|find a resource| trade| etc" This mechanic can be so widely used.... I LOVE IT (BTW - I AM one of two of the guys that built the gaming marketing for Intel for proving that a <$1,000 Celeron Machine could satisfactorily play games such as DOOM, Descent, UO, etc.... I know a little bit about gaming. My cohort at intel is an EVP at gaming companies you have all impacted by) (I went tech, networking, medical, etc - he was all in on gaming)
- tedunangst 3y agoI think you could accomplish a similar effect by adjusting the MVP matrix for objects farther from the player. It looks like fairly normal ortho projection near the sphere. Gradually zoom out as you render squares farther away. Vaguely related, if you haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqUv2JO2BCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqUv2JO2BCs
- MattRix 3y agoIt’s a neat idea. I think I’d prefer the effect if it transitioned more gradually rather than quickly changing to “split mode”. For the right kind of game I could definitely see this working. In fact you could make a whole game based around this kind of effect, with space being squashed and stretched in different areas etc.
- tedunangst 3y agoI think it's challenging to transition slowly. You're close enough to need no split, and then you're far apart and need to split, and the contents of the split are determined by the distance.
- MattRix 3y agoIn the video you can see that there’s a transition time, but it’s maybe more obvious in the second run that’s halfway through the video. The player tweens from being near the end of the screen to directly in the center of their slice. Just slowing down that transition alone would help a lot. I think instead of doing it with a specific tween time (which it seems to be doing now), that tween itself could be based on the distance as well, then you wouldn’t end up with the two “modes” feeling it currently has. If it also allowed the players some more freedom to move within their slice after the split, and perhaps some level of zoom out before the split, it would end up being much more smooth and fluid.
- apitman 3y agoThe world needs more split screen games.
- nnevatie 3y agoI think you could do this simpler in screen-space. I don't think the effect communicates the interpolation of the actual camera parameters very well. Then there's the question: does it add or reduce from the gameplay? I think the latter in this case - a clearer way could be simply finding a screen-space line and using that as the split in 2D.
- educaysean 3y agoHow does it look if the vision is not a 360 degree circle but rather cone shaped? I wonder if dynamic or mutating perspective "shapes" could also make for a more natural use case as well.
- thekevan 3y agoI totally thought this was going to be a new way to do split screen viewing.
- explorigin 3y agoRight, TTgames has been doing this for years with their Lego games.
- polyvisual 3y agoInteresting take on split screen! In the demo, when the screen splits at about 4 seconds, I felt a bit nauseous, almost like a very light seasickness.
- ideamotor 3y agoLooks cool. That game looks exactly like Marble Madness: https://youtu.be/CvlbZwoWMgA?si=hvMw32fsfOB2lNht https://youtu.be/CvlbZwoWMgA?si=hvMw32fsfOB2lNht.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tetris11 3y agoGTA:SA had an interesting take on two-player perspective: it would keep the two players always in the same screen up to a limit, and then it would just follow one player. The cool part was that when the two players were within the range limit, the camera automatically adjusted its pitch to try to keep the players in the same perspective. It was surprisingly smooth.
- cubefox 3y agoWas it random which of the two players it followed? Sounds a bit frustrating for the second player.
- tetris11 3y agoIt followed the first player only, as well as any attention from the police. The second player had a mainly backup role of keeping the first player alive as they both attracted attention. Playing with my brother, it was pretty fun taking turns
- koonsolo 3y agoThis reminds me of Micro Machines: you fall off camera, you lose :D.
- addandsubtract 3y agoInstead of the warping effect, I'd like to see the game extract the pathways and overlay them with one another. I think that could be the USP for a game like this, that is only based on simple geometry, using an isometric camera. The green pill could see their floor tiles outlined/highlighted in green, and the red pill could see theirs in red. Once they're close enough again, the geometry and colors would merge again.
- ClassyJacket 3y agoI thought this was going to be about gaining efficienc by re-using rays when both players fields of view overlap...
- poisonborz 3y agoThis may work in a small visually simple level like this, but imagine this in a complex 3D world like Renegade Ops, with a bit more distance you'd get a horrid distracting pixel soup.
- nonbirithm 3y agoThe Adventures of Cookie & Cream had dynamic splitscreen based on progress through the level, and that was released in 2000. Plus I believe there was an (uncommon?) feature where two players could share a single controller to control each character (two shoulder buttons and an analog stick). (Even with an Action Replay I remember that game being frustrating as hell.)
- smusamashah 3y agoCan someone explain what is special about this? Author gave some history then started telling about new technique and only says this for explanation > Rather than having entirely distinct and clearly delineated perspectives for each player, dynamically adjust the camera(s) at a pixel level. > The most interesting part is what happens in the “no-man’s land” between, where space appears squished as the camera parameters are interpolated. What does it mean by adjusting camera at pixel level? What is happening in the wrapped area and what does that effect have to do with raytracing? Does this technique bring any performance improvements now that two camera views are being rendered.
- themoonisachees 3y agoThe point is that apart from VR-specific APIs, raster rendering isn't really performant in split-screen. Rendering using ray tracing means you will spend as much time as you would have for singleplayer (still not faster than raster but the point is it's just as fast).
- stevage 3y agoI like the analysis of the different options. But seeing their demo of their proposed idea - well, I think I'd much rather just have a hard split between them. The oozy-woozy compression of space just feels a bit...gross, without any particular benefit. And ultimately, it's still just a split-screen - just one where each of the screens is smaller. There is also one more option I think I have seen, which is that when the two players are far apart, the camera zooms out. And you can also limit the players in how far apart from each other they can be.
- anotheryou 3y agoyes but it's ugly and serves no purpose