Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs Discussion Topic Part 1

[MyRedNeptune]

Hmm, I had overlapping spotlights in a pretty busy scene and it ran fine. Maybe that's my machine, but I think it's pretty average.

[Alex Ros]

Off-Topic

Spoiler below!

Yes of course it's about the machine. For example mine is only 2 Gb RAM and 512 Mb VIDEO, that's surely an aged machine. But at the HPL wiki the Frictional themselves are writing that shadow-casting lights is one of most demanding features. And on my aged machine I really feel it. I can up texture budgets twice and triple times than it's in original Amnesia and at the same time double and even triple the polycount - framerate drops only a few. I just experimented with these things for a lot while I've been learning the capabilities of the engine. But when it comes to shadow-casting - I am having momentary and very big drop in FPS.

[Kein]

I think Amnesia: The Dark Descent's beauty is blinding.

Me too. I loved TDDs visual style, despite it's flaws. I thought the texture work was pretty good for a fairly low budget indie game. Sure there wasn't alot of texture variation, but the textures themselves looked great, and the use of them to create Brennenburg Castle was amazing, due to the great level design. Brennenburg Castle was far more believable than most super duper graphical games, imo. That said, AMFP seems to have alot more texture and enviroment variety.

Yeah, sometimes it is design, visual-style and aesthetic and consistency/combination of these aspects that makes game appealing despite lacking ultra-hi-res textures and nifty features of rendering engine. Amnesia was quite nicely build and honestly wasn't desperate for additional "polygons" (metaphor here) to look good.

[Istrebitel]

Actually textures, graphics and stuff like that is all fine. What isn't fine is that Amnesia's engine has a flaw common to many other engines - that is, "distance fog".

What this means is that instead of not drawing distant objects at all, some color is used, and objects on the border of the drawn distance are displayed like going into a fog of that color. For some ODD reason, this color is not black in dark levels (like, unlit rooms or underground passages etc!

What this yeilds is that when you stand in a completely unlit underground corridor:
- you can see an object a meter ahead of you (illuminated by latern),
- you cannot see an object 10 meters ahead of you (latern light doesnt reach that far),
- and then you can see an object X meters ahead of you, at the border of the view distance, because you see that object drawn pitch black (not illuminated) but its outlines disappearing into non-black fog

This is for example very evident in the second Amnesia level, where you find the latern - in the tunnel from the door to the room with the latern.

Sometimes this is even worse - you can see ALL objects if they are in a tunnel long enough for distant non-black fog to render - because objects are pitch black, but in the distance tunnel goes into grayish fog, and you see black object outlines on gray background!

This is THE biggest immersion breaker for me really, and this has nothing to deal with graphics quality at all - you can have bad or good textures, but stuff like this just screws up everything for me when I'm supposed to not know what's there, but I clearly see it.

[xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Hm... actually I never noticed that effect. Maybe your gamma/ screen brightness is too high? When I was in a dark level (like the prison) I could not see anything in the distance.

[Istrebitel]

Well, no matter whether my gamma/brighness is too high or not, objects in distance should be unseparable from the background. If monster standing in a distant dark hallway is not lit, it should have same black color on all its surface, and distant unrendeded "void" should have the same color as well. Whatever gamma or brightness, they should have same color (although that color may look as grey on your screen now because you tweaked those values).

[Bridge]

I noticed it too but it wasn't an immersion breaker for me. In fact, I find that you generally can see silhouettes through fog especially if they are moving, but Istrebitel is right that the effect was too pronounced and you definitely could see objects you weren't supposed to. It just didn't bother me at all, I think it produces quite a cool effect.

[maarten12100]

I would like to see a better engine but there will only be a few tweaks to the engine so don't get your hopes up.
As I am a fan of building extreme overpowerd workstations max al the SSAO. (more than 4x is a total waste of processing power though)

[xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

If monster standing in a distant dark hallway is not lit, it should havesame black color on all its surface, and distant unrendeded "void" should have the same color as well.

I remember reading in an interview, that they used a special shader for the monsters, specifically so that they would never be invisible in the dark. Basically, they used your idea first and found out during testing that it didn't work very well. Players ran into the monsters and got killed (which is not really the point of the Amnesia-style horror) or they didn't notice them at all. So when for example a monster dramatically shambled across a corridor in the distance, they just couldn't see it and all drama was lost.

I can't say what works better since I didn't test both versions myself...but yeah - at least that feature is definitely in there on purpose.

[Macgyverthehero]

If monster standing in a distant dark hallway is not lit, it should havesame black color on all its surface, and distant unrendeded "void" should have the same color as well.

I remember reading in an interview, that they used a special shader for the monsters, specifically so that they would never be invisible in the dark. Basically, they used your idea first and found out during testing that it didn't work very well. Players ran into the monsters and got killed (which is not really the point of the Amnesia-style horror) or they didn't notice them at all. So when for example a monster dramatically shambled across a corridor in the distance, they just couldn't see it and all drama was lost.

I can't say what works better since I didn't test both versions myself...but yeah - at least that feature is definitely in there on purpose.

I think if they did not have that special shader you mentioned they would have been much scarier.

But the monster's from ATTD are scary enough as it is.