STiFU

Here is to hoping for a Silent Hill 2 Remaster!!

I mean, regardless of the rules, you are still supposed to socially isolate, instead of throwing a big party, but I don't want to start another Corona-discussion So, my woman and I have spent the evening in front of the TV and went to bed at half past 12, because our little one would awake at 7 am, regardless of whether we partied or not.

Happy new year, everybody! It's been the most boring new year's eve ever!

My graphics card doesn't even enable its fan until it's 50°C warm. Because of that, when the GPU is idle, it cycles periodically between 40°C and 50°C. I would actually prefer if the fan kept rotating at low speed all the time, as the occasional spin-up can be a bit distracting when working. I wonder if I could somehow configure that behavior? I've read reviews that my GPU was 60°C under heavy load. I could only reproduce that with opening the case and putting in on my table (rather than closed and inside my PC-cabinet). Considering the GPU enters thermal throttling at 83°C, I think my current 67°C is fine. Edit: Apparently you can control fan speed via programs like MSI Afterburner. Now, if only I could find the terms and conditions of warranty for my graphics card, I would know what I am actually allowed to do with it.

As this only happened with CP at first, I thought it was just a software issue. Lately, these crashes and bluescreens also happend with another game, however, which I found really suspicious. Turns out, the new graphics card has a significantly higher heat output, which made the whole system overheat. Luckily, I was able to resolve this issue with two case fans and removing the door of my PC-cabinet. I just performed a two-hour test in CP on maxed settings (with DLSS) and it didn't crash with the GPU running at 67°C. As a bonus, this also increased my performance quite a bit, as the GPU would previously go into thremal throttling at 83°C. So basically, I would finally be ready to start playing CP now, hadn't I just started another game because CP wouldn't run.

Ok, that sounds a lot less negative now. I can live with that! Then again, you're always very critical, so I should be used to that! As for the monologue, there is actually an explanation for that. It is a spoiler, 'though, so only continue reading once you heard of "Polaris" in the game:

You have approximate quest pointers where you need to go, but no ingame compass, which is good as it encourages you to actually pay attention to your surroundings. That being said, the single-layer map can be sometimes hard to read in those multi-layered areas, especially so because you cannot zoom in the map. Still, you'll find your way around somehow. Anyway, my personal experience with the game and the game's 85% on metacritic say that it is in fact NOT a good idea NOT to buy it...

Ok, yeah, the facial animations are not the best, especially not, if you use any other language than english. So, switch to english, and it is acceptable at least. Not next-gen, but still good for previous-gen standards. I really don't know what you mean about character movement animations. Especially flying looks and feels awesome. And just regular running etc. works quite well. Not AssCreed-well, but well enough. Also, I would argue that gameplay is pretty solid, so it doesn't really stand out in a bad way, as you put it. As far as the writing is concerned, I guess this is a very subjective matter. The storytelling is vague and weird (in a good way), which instantly got me hooked. The whole story about the Hiss (a weird infection creating the enemies in the game) could possibly be categorized as cosmic horror: it is weird, it is hard to fathom what the Hiss actually is. To me, that is totally interesting. I liked how the protagonist always talks to herself, which will be explained later in the game. The storytelling is in no way comparable to Alan Wake, which really was weak. The only thing that might be a little facepalm-worthy are how everyday object become "enchanted" by the Hiss, but it works well within the bounds of this game. Something else they did good is athmosphere. You always hear the infected whispering. There is almost no soundtrack aside from ambient sounds, which creates a lonely and weird atmosphere and makes those few moments with actual soundtrack really stand out. The soundtrack works especially well in a near-finale scene (ashtray labyrinth), which also featured one of the most exciting leveldesign moments of the last 5 years in my oppinion.

I just wanted to chime in again and say that Control is way more than just a system seller. I finished the game now and the finale was just utterly brilliant as far as the story arc and the level design is concerned. The gameplay is fun and evolves over the course of the game. The sound got quite some punch (use headphones on high volume!), which pairs just perfectly with those stunning raytraced graphics and all that debris and weird visual effects flying around. The only negative point I have on this game are the incredibly bad DLCs, which are really not much more than fetch quests and some post-game challenge. If you want to play this game, I recommend getting the base game rather than the ultimate edition, as those DLCs really dilute the experience.

Ok, that's actually the first time I hear something negative about it. Many of my friends said it was awesome. I don't know though whether they finished it or not. Still, for free, one could have a look, right?

Uhh, finally a game on Epic I don't own yet and had long on my wishlist: Darkest Dungeon!

Today, Inside is free on Epic. It's really good: A rather small game for a long sunday afternoon with a nice grotesque and dark atmosphere! It's a ton better than Limbo, the previous game by those devs.

Last I heard, they had a working very small prototype. I now started digging for that company again and found it: SeeReal. To my surprise, the website is up again and they have recent entries on it, so it seems like, they didn't go bankrupt afterall! https://www.seereal.com/technology/ They even seem to have entered a partnership with Volkswagen. This is very exciting news!! They gave a talk about their holographic headmounted display at the 2018 SPIE Photonics Europe. I'll try and see if I can find that talk somehwere to see whether they made any progress.

Here is the same video, but for Cyberpunk. As you can already tell by the thumbnail of that video: Raytracing is not only about having proper reflections. Seeing these side-by-side comparisons, I really cannot imagine going back to playing without raytracing in either CP or Control.

I left academia three years ago and started working in the industry, so I might've missed some of the most recent developments (especially related to VR as I absolutely cannot stomach it), but I will gladly listen to that talk. So, the concepts shown up until minute 50:00 all pretty much existed for quite some time. However, it was nice to see some working prototypes of them, especially the liquid crystal varifocal lens (dynamically adjustable focal length without using moving parts). Afterwards, the focal surface was introduced, which was totally new to me and looks really exciting to be honest. Using a spatial light modulator to implement what is essentially per-pixel varying focal-length is an ingenious idea!! At my previous institute, we had only used SLMs in the context of holography based 2d-image-projection, which really serves no purpose at all except seeing if it works or not. The captured results of the focal-surface looked somewhat off to me, 'though. I can't really put my finger on what it is, but the blur etc. didn't look right. Possibly non-linear distortions because multiple wavelengths pass through the spatial light modulator, which is really only designed for one singular wavelength? If it is that, it could easily be solved by using one SLM per color-component and using laser-light as an illuminator. If it is not, I hope they get it sorted, as the idea seems really promising. I am not even sure one would still need eye-tracking with good focal-surfaces. You are correct in your assessment that eye-tracking is extremely error-prone. For my experiements, I had to go to extreme lengths to get eye-tracking working properly for my first approach. I ended up carefully modeling all possible 3d-viewing eye-movements in a kalman filter to get rid of major tracking-noise and augmented that with a realtime stereo-3d-disparity estimation (which I implemented in CUDA) to be able to tell what point in 3d-space the user most likely looked at. It worked fairly well, but might still not be accurate enough for vergence-driven accomodation control. Considering the problems with eye-tracking, I still think that holography is the most promising approach. Researches have long demonstrated that it is possible to create actual holpgraphic displays, but the problem is the computational side of things. It is incredibly costly to calculate a hologram in real-time. That company in Dresden I mentioned earlier had a brilliant idea to solve this problem. If you want to construct the full optical wavefront of a point in 3d-space, the resulting hologram occupies every pixel of your display. So, to render a full scene, you'd pretty much need to render a full frame (of extremely high resolution) for each 3d-point in your scene and all those sub-holograms are then super-imposed atop of each other to form the final result. However, what if you don't need the full optical wavefront? Afterall, the wavefront only has to be accurate where the pupils of the viewer are located. If you only calculate the sub-holograms for a very narrow range of angles, they actually only span a significantly reduced number of pixels locally, reducing the computational complexity by a HUGE margin. Yes, you would still need a pupil detection, but that is extremely more robust than eye-tracking. That company (can't remember its name right now) actually had a working (albeit small) prototype as well. I never learned why they closed. So there you have it, my opinion on Facebook's new technology. Thanks for sharing that nice talk. I also gave a talk at Electronic Imaging in San Francisco in 2016 and had some nice holidays exploring the westcoast afterwards. So, seeing something from Eletronic Imaging always gives me some nice warm nostalgia. Edit: After writing up this summary, I realize how much I miss doing research and writing about it. Maybe I should return to the academic world eventually.

You can wait a long time for that. I've written a whole PhD-thesis on this matter! There were some ideas to use lenses with adjustable focus-length, but that approach is rather impractical. There were some advances in real-time holographic displays by a research facility in Dresden, but that company eventually lost its funding, which is a huge bummer, because on the one hand, their approach was really promising, and on the other, holography is the only way the accomodation-vergence-conflict can truly be solved. I did not hear of any other instances to further research realtime holography after that apparently. I my thesis, I developed two methods that tried to reduce the conflict in real-time. I used an eye-tracker to detect where the user is looking and slowly shifted those contents back to the display where the conflict does not exist. Obviously, this approach has its limitations and experiemental results did not show a significant improvement. In approach 1, I slowly shifted convergence. In approach 2, I dropped the idea of eye tracking and solely investigated how shifting convergence can be improved. When applying a convergence shift, you implicitly also get a distortion of depth. So in this approach, I countered this distortion of depth by a dynamic adjustment of the camera-baseline (i.e. the distance between the virtual eyes). This approach yielded significant improvement over the regular method, but was way too complex to be adopted by the filming industry. (Fun fact: the image content I used in this experiment was generated by a modified version of Doom 3 BFG. ) As it currently stands, you have to rely on content producers that they design the content such that the AV-conflict is minimized. This of course is incredibly difficult with games where stuff regular flies out of the screen towards the viewer, which is the most critical thing to do as far as visual fatigue is concerned. By the way, accomodation-vergence-conflict is the correct term for this, as accomodation already means focus-adjustment, while vergence relates to the convergence of the eyes on a point of interest. Further reading: https://eldorado.tu-dortmund.de/bitstream/2003/36031/1/Dissertation.pdf

I mean, they got Witcher 3 on the Switch, which seemed like a near impossible task, but they pulled it off. So they should be very capable to get CP to run and look properly on the PS4. Although, I am sure it won't look as good as God of War or TLOU2 in the end.

Not all graphical features have to translate into gameplay! It's fine if some just look good!! That being said, I can imagine it being utilized for physics based puzzle games or a platformer in the style of Shadow Puppeteer, just with mirrors instead of shadows. Anyway, regarding Control, the game offers tons of time to admire the views: In between fight scenes, you spent a lot of time navigating and looting. Aside from reflections, the lighting and shadowing is also improved, but the improvement here are just nuances that are hard to detect without being able to toggle the feature on and off. All I can say is, it looks utterly beautiful sometimes.

Yeah, I was going to wait a little longer myself, but I got this new graphics card recently, so obviously I wanted to go try it out in Cyberpunk! Anyway, considering the Raytracing performance in Cyberpunk is not very good with my 3060 Ti, I started checking out a few other games with raytracing, namely Ghostrunner and Control. Ghostrunner: The Raytracing performance is also really bad and aside from some off-screen reflections, I really didn't see a notable gain from Raytracing, so I disabled it again. As a game, Ghostrunner is really fun, 'though. Definitely recommended! Control: Here I get all around good performance with raytracing enabled and it just looks stunning. Such a beautiful game!! And the story telling is also really good, so I'll definitely finish this one! I recently had a discussion with a friend and he said that there were no major breakthroughs in graphics since Crysis with SSAO etc. I argued that the latest major breakthrough is the rise of screenspace and raytraced reflections. Control, Doom Eternal and Cyberpunk are perfect examples of that. Everything feels that much more geometrically connected in that world with those reflections all around. Love it!

I also recently played it and I actually kinda liked it. The visuals were incredible in some scenes and well, the action is just over the top. The finales of each of the four Acts were 100% epic! But other than that, the gameplay really did not carry too much. It's basically like Resident Evil 6. Gameplay is kind of stupid, but the action is stupidly over the top, which one can enjoy... or not!

I wholeheartedly trust in CDPR that they will fix all issues and turn this game into the brilliant game it is supposed to be. So I won't get a refund for it and I would ask anyone to show some support and just believe in them! The game just shouldn't have been released this early, that's all.

Most crash dumps say something about gpu crash related to dx12. Not sure if that mod would help with that. Error reason: Assert Expression: <Unknown> Message: Gpu Crash for unknown reasons! Callstack here is probably irrelevant. Check if Breadcrumbs or Aftermath logged anything useful. File: e:\r6.patch0hotfix2\dev\src\common\gpuapi\src\dx12\gpuapidx12error.cpp(40) Then there are also some dumps with Access Violations and null-pointer exceptions even. I think I'll just wait, no big deal. I was just curious to look at the game with the new GPU. I've seen it now, looks amazing and it will still look amazing in a month or two, so no harm done! What GPU are you running the game on by the way?

Game's crashing on me every 5 minutes at the moment, including the occasional bluescreen. I am on a 3060 Ti, which might just be too new, I recon! It was released on december 3rd, so the drivers might not yet be the best. I am going to give the game another shot next year. In its current state, it is really not enjoyable. I already started to enjoy it quite a bit, 'though!! So I am a bit bummed out about not being able to continue the game. I am also quite curious how flexible the storyline actually is.

Cities Skylines is free on Epic today. It's the best city-building game since Sim City 2000!

FYI: Ubisoft is giving away something each day, too. Today is Starlink, which I got for the Switch. It get repetitive after 20 hours or so, but until then, it is quite fun. https://www.indiegamebundles.com/ubisofts-happy-holidays-2020-free-games-and-content/