Batman Arkham Knight, how do they do it?

Blond

New trailer on board guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_vqzYOvgvc

Seriously, those Rocksteady guys, they seem to be amongst the top in mastering the unreal engine! Everything looks super sweet, from the visuals, the animation and the gameplay too!

But to achieve those sorts of visuals while still being super clean (stable fps, low aliasing, discrete LOD and such), I wonder what type of optimization these guys do!

ImSlightlyBored

can I "like" posts on here?

TAN

First and foremost I suspect they are using some kind of texture compression like the one Quixel provides.
Basically drop the size of your texture %90 percent with a loseless format and everything will be faster.

Secondly I think that keeping the amount of particle effects showed on the screen at any one time helps immencely.

Third keeping the number of AI enemies limted really helps CPU. Especially in UE in general.

I guess the whole game takes place at night ? Then hiring a renderfarm to get the necessary quality light bakes in the engine shouldn't be a problem for such a big company.

Hmm let me see ? Again using only hard-surface shader maybe help instead of using... lets say a high quality subsurface scattering shader on every character. Have you noticed the hostage guy in haz-mat suit batman rescued ? His face looks like plastic almost. I also couldn't see but they might have also refrain from using S-POM (Silhutte Parallax Occlusion Mapping) which is an expensive shader by itself.


Well, these are my takes.

PixelMasher

might just be rumors but I heard after that awesome e3 demo from this year, someone who knows some rocksteady folk said that the game was barely or not running on the new consoles at that point. it looks fantastic though and hopefully it runs well. love the batmobile, zooming into the calipers and such. pretty rad.

BeardyDan

Looks amazing, can't wait

SuperFranky

It's most surely a PC footage, so who knows how the game truly runs on PS4 and Xbox One. It doesn't look all that impressive to me, I dunno, looks like a cross gen game.

JFletcher

Gotham/Arkham during the day is probably a magical place, the sun shining bright, children frolicking in the streets... What wretched curse has afflicted this poor city that it may only exist during the night?

Maybe that's why there are so many criminals.

SuperFranky

JFletcher wrote: »

Gotham/Arkham during the day is probably a magical place, the sun shining bright, children frolicking in the streets... What wretched curse has afflicted this poor city that it may only exist during the night?

Maybe that's why there are so many criminals.

I would be a criminal too if I had to live in a city with no sunlight.

weee

saw the trailer, impressed, its got a sweet cinematic feeling in it, UE3 is truly a great engine to dig around.

ps i hope its all real in game engine not some post processed dodgy 'touches'.

Ged

That is also some truly spectacular camera animation work! I hope it feels that awesome to beat up the thugs!

Steve Schulze

JFletcher wrote: »

Gotham/Arkham during the day is probably a magical place, the sun shining bright, children frolicking in the streets... What wretched curse has afflicted this poor city that it may only exist during the night?

sziada

Is it Unreal 3 or 4?

Blond

irr

BeardyDan

It's Unreal 3. The fact that people think it's 4 is a testament to how good Rocksteady's engineers are:

http://kotaku.com/batman-arkham-knight-wont-have-multiplayer-will-hav-1536502499

"According to GI, the game uses a "juiced-up version of Rocksteady's custom modified Unreal engine," which could mean a number of things but seems like it'll still use Unreal engine 3, not Unreal 4."

Mask_Salesman

Yeah it has that Unreal 3 look trolololo...

It's lookin nice

weee

wrong reply sorry