I've been following this game for a while now and it's supposed to be released in October, can't wait to play it. Anyone else looking forward to it?
http://theevilwithin.com/en-gb
Yeah it looks pretty good. Like Silent Hill freaky. Hope the action and combat system are better then the SH series. Although the new SH looks good too.
I get the PR e-mails because of EarthQuake (http://earthquake.fuzzylogicinc.com) but it's not the type of game I'm interested in. It looks not but I won't be playing it.
So, it's out now. How is it? (first hand experience please)
Reviews say it's all the same as RAGE (initial issues I suppose), but no review mentioned texture quality, new features, etc.
A lot of mixed reviews coming out. Plenty of complaints in regards to a few design decisions that are grating PC players. The 2.35:1 aspect ratio and default 30FPS lock seems to be the major bone of contention amongst Steam reviews.
The games media reviews are also pretty mixed. It looks like if you're a Resident Evil/Silent Hill fan then you'll most likely enjoy this, game a lot. I'm looking forward to getting my hands dirty, as I'm a big fan of Shinji Mikami's work as well as Survival horror in general (Resident Evil 2, 4 and Silent Hill 2, 4 are in my personal top 10 games ever).
I'm just waiting for it to unlock on Steam before I get into it. You can bet I'll report back once I've had a go.
Just got to play the first 2 hours of the game and all I can say is "WOW !"...
I must admit that after Rage and Wolfenstein I pretty much buried any hope that something visually competitive could emerge from idtech5 versus the other big players in the industry (UE4, Cryengine and Unity)...
But at least for me "The Evil Within" turned out to be visually a completely different caliber...
Everything runs dynamic (softshadows, shaders and other gfx effects) and to my surprise at a very rapid performance, namely solid 60 FPS (once you unlock the 30 FPS lock)...
I observed complex physical cloth behavior, advanced liquids simulation and a very controlled "dark & gritty" rendering style which most other engines fail to achieve to that degree.
I actually can't believe that I am writing this, but currently I come to the conclusion that this build of idtech5 is able to blow even Cryengine and UE4 visually out of the water.
Having source-access to this build (preferably with a multiplayer enabled codebase) would be a thing beyond imagination, but at the same time one realizes, that this type of asset-rendering-quality at that quantity and consistency, could hardly ever be achieved by indie & hobby developers and so naturally it also to a degree frightened/demoralized me as I was playing it, gazing at those beautifully rendered environments...
@oneofthe8devilz: why not just start with idTech 5 by modding Rage? :)
Saw the small bits of gameplay a while ago. The real thing that got me excited was that it looked like a lot of the lighting and shadows were real time, but the fotage was too short. What your telling me is exactly what I wanted to hear, thanks
So far I'm very impressed with the visuals but I keep running into walls with traps blowing me up. Interactions could use a bit of a lift.
Sounds good. What's the combat like? Hopefully not slow and clumsy like the SH franchise. I want something like Resident Evil 5 but with a lot more emphasis on melee combat.
You said the performance is good. You mind sharing what settings and what kind of rig? Also hows the texture detail close up compared to rage and wolf respectivly? Do you or enemies use a flashlight or lamp of anykind to show off the dynamic shadows? Are there any transitions from enclosed areas to open areas and how's the lighting feel in comparison to eachother?
I know my post is a little brief and sparse in questions but I Gtg back to work
Quote from: Sir Blackington on October 22, 2014, 03:14:41 AM
You mind sharing what settings and what kind of rig?
Maxed out settings @ 1080p with (SMAA) Anti-Aliasing synced to 60 FPS
OS: Win7 X64 Ultimate
CPU: Intel Core I7
RAM: 12 GB RAM
GPU: Nvidia 770 GTX
Quote from: Sir Blackington on October 22, 2014, 03:14:41 AM
Also hows the texture detail close up compared to rage and wolf respectively?
Texture detail and resolution is better than in Rage, but generally a little lower compared to the competition (I guess due to mega-texturing). But every shader-surface so far reacts dynamically to light-sources (normalmap and specular pass and shadowing) which to me is far more important than a super high (but static) shader/texture resolution.
Quote from: Sir Blackington on October 22, 2014, 03:14:41 AM
Do you or enemies use a flashlight or lamp of any kind to show off the dynamic shadows?
You have an oil-lamp that you can light up at will and you can pick up burning torches. Enemies and friendly AI also can pick up and carry burning torches with all those lights casting proper dynamic soft-shadows. Additionally, the entire world is setup with dynamically casting lights such as swinging lamps, camp fires, torches, candles... I paid close attention to the usual problems with dynamic soft-shadow-mapped pointlights and all issues with shadow map resolution and bias have been solved elegantly, IMO to a better degree than in UE3,UE4 and Cryengine and Unity. It becomes quickly obvious that the engine programmers at
Tango Gameworks knew what they were doing. It usually takes only minutes for me to spot flaws in the unified rendering of a new released title, but with the Evil within I am still searching...
Quote from: Sir Blackington on October 22, 2014, 03:14:41 AM
Are there any transitions from enclosed areas to open areas and how's the lighting feel in comparison to eachother?
There are plenty of indoor/outdoor transitions and the scale of shadow casting lights can be quite significant... to a degree where I start to wonder how they keep the performance stable with so many shadow casting lights during the transitions... I also noticed a subtle but effective LOD system... The lighting between the indoor/outdoor transitions is consistent without any noticeable hackery/workarounds/trade-offs which makes the world appear very homogeneous...
If I get the time I will record some scenes that showcase the lighting and paste a link here...
Alright, I took the time to record a quick video...
I focused on showcasing the engine rather than delivering gameplay focused footage to avoid spoilers...
Other effects I came across worth mentioning:
Screen Space Reflections
(http://www.scared-pixel-studios.com/public/images/the.evil.within/screen_space_reflections_p.jpg)
Subsurface Scattering for Human skin (especially noticeable during thunder lightning)
(http://www.scared-pixel-studios.com/public/images/the.evil.within/subsurface_scattering_p.jpg)
Alphatested Soft-Shadow-Mapping (I know this is already an industry standard, but I have been missing that in idtech engines for years)
(http://www.scared-pixel-studios.com/public/images/the.evil.within/alphatested_soft_shadow_mapping_p.jpg)
Finally I can say that we have at last reached a quality of real-time rendering that I always hoped we would achieve, namely basic CGI-Movie quality (whoever screams photo-realism IMO might as well look out of the window, it certainly would reduce his power and hardware-expenses bill)
The last thing left would be the community to get source access to the codebase and assets (which will most certainly never happen, taking the disastrous management into account that Zenimax has showcased during the original id software staff departure...
I replied much earlier but it didn't post for some reason. To summerize:
Wow, excelent responses. you hit what I was curious about for so long right on the head.
Also your rig is far from being low or even mid range so I woukld have trouble thinking of much that would run poorly on it.
Your also right about not immefiatly seeing any noticeable transition between indoor/ point lit areas to outdoor with more what could be indirect lighting. I was expecting to see something that looked more like mostly baked, realtime lighting inside and then switch to baking in most of the indirect lighting outside, but its just so hard to tell what they did.
Anyone else have theories based on that video posted?
Also, am I wrong in guessing that this is all still foward rendered? It doesn't seem like there would be huge motivation to go to the trouble of going deferred in a game like this where there are seemingly few light sources, usually not oveerlapping much.
Still suffers from texture pop in and it has some rather gamebreaking bugs in places that i hope the devs will get sorted, besides that its quite fun to play allthough
brutally difficult at times. A few things to note that i find could be better, axes are a oneshot weapon of mass destruction Oo i could literally kill even bosses in one shot
with this which is a bit unrealistic. Besides that you only get that one shot with an axe. The char runs like he has one of those iron balls from prison tied to both his legs +
his stamina is somewhat non existant. Ammo is scarce even though the game is bristling with tons of knives axes and other goodies that could save your life you cannot pick them up.
game breaking bugs.
camera sometimes goes whack after a cutscene so that no matter which way you run you will run into a wall causing your death if you are chased by some big ugly.
This happens to me in chapter 8 after the cutscene with the huge amalgam monster :( i literally had to get a save from another user to get past this part so it seems not everyone has this issue.
Besides that it looks great in places :)
this "screenspace reflection" effect picture you posted could be achieved without screen space reflection in D3, as well as the water in the video, unless it's done in several different surfaces at the same time, where then you need something else than what is present in D3.
Quote from: BielBdeLuna on November 08, 2014, 08:50:30 AM
this "screenspace reflection" effect picture you posted could be achieved without screen space reflection in D3, as well as the water in the video, unless it's done in several different surfaces at the same time, where then you need something else than what is present in D3.
In Doom 3 mirrors are performance hungry, and if you have 2 in the same room - the game comes to halt. Screenspace reflections are faster, and you can have many of them in the same scene all over the place.
Btw, I tried The Evil Within myself, since free demo was released.
I am not a big fan of games like that, where you have to crawl around you are very limited with what you can do to the enemies (not to mention it's time consuming type of game), but I kinda liked it. It's not scary like bunch of reviews say (unless playing after smoking pot and in 3D glasses :P ), but it's not too bad, especially outdoors. I like foliage and the atmosphere of abandon'ness.
It runs pretty fast on my rig, that is _old_. I bet AMD owners yet again were in for a surprise :P Nvidia runs everything just fine! I know THF has AMD, I wonder if it runs well for him.
Graphics wise - I think Megatextures are overrated. Especially in The Evil Within. I get RAGE with its vistas, but in games like Wolf TNO and The Evil Within (where everything happens mostly indoors or on limited view distance outdoors) there is no difference between standard approach with decals, and idTech 5 megatextures. Especially if there are good tools to place decals easily.
So it is pretty, a way less blurry than Wolf TNO and runs faster than Wolf TNO. However, idTech 5 has no future in the present, IMO.
Quote from: revelator on November 08, 2014, 07:08:56 AM
Still suffers from texture pop in
What drives me nuts about this is that Epic engines (haven't played a Crytec game in a while) do the same thing but I never see it mentioned. BS: Infinite drove me nuts because it's level of detail was well under Rage and I still had texture pop. :/
Quote from: motorsep on November 08, 2014, 10:56:17 AM
I know THF has AMD, I wonder if it runs well for him.
didn't know there was a demo until you posted, so I'll give it a shot. I'm not a fan of these kinds of games either.
EDIT: My CPU could very well be underpowered for this game. I'm got a Phenom from '08. :)
Totally agree with u friar on the texture pop in on ue3 games. Titles like chivalry, red orchestra, tribes ascend, rise of the triad, hell I could keep going, is VERY apparent but you never hear anyone complaining in those situations. Also play mechwarrior online which is cryengine and do t really remember that being an issue off the top of my head. The changing lod on the terrain surfaces blocking my lasers though...
Also played the alpha of evolved for a very short period of time, texture pop in was fine (ce4 apparently)
I think there is ID Software phobia is going on.. As soon as any idTech 5 game comes out, you can finds threads and threads of bashing for any reason.
On my PC, which is _old_, I don't seem to notice texture pops even in 64bit RAGE. In The Evil Within I didn't even notice pops. Wolf TNO seems to have more texture pop than RAGE does. Still, if one simply plays a game with reasonable setting based on his/her PC power, the pop isn't any worse than in UE3 games.
I think gamers picked ID Software to blame all the issues on, even though issues are common to most of the current gen engines.
Admittedly rage did run poorly with lots of pop in on my hd 7770 before I tweaked the crap out of the game. Stick in my weak nvidia 630 and toss on texture transcoding, no tweaks and it ran flawlessly.
Btw how are they doing the texture transcode for this game when using amd cards now? I remember rage pretty well maxing out my cpu struggling to get it done, just now with the evil within, it was asleep and no pop in.
AMD Phenom 9600
AMD HD 7850
6 gb RAM
Win 8.1-64
Played part of the first level, no texture popping. I'm impressed by the visuals on a machine like mine.
Quote from: Sir Blackington on November 08, 2014, 06:04:18 PM
... toss on texture transcoding....
Toss out you mean?
For GPU transcoding to work, you need fast bus, fast RAM and fast CPU
I thought that was only if you were going to do it on the cpu. When I enable the option on my nvidia card, isn't it working on the cpu at that point?
QuoteHow GPU Transcoding Works
CUDA is NVIDIA's parallel computing architecture. It enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of the graphics card to perform tasks that would take significantly longer on a CPU. In Rage, id Software uses a compressed texture format to hold tens of gigabytes of assets in 12GB of files in the game's virtualtextures directory. Each time a texture is required in-game it is uncompressed via DXT, a texture compression algorithm originally developed by S3 Graphics, a company known for its Savage GPUs in the late 90s.
As this process requires a significant amount of computational power, and is used every second as the player moves around the world, the CUDA GPU Transcoding feature offloads much of the work from the CPU to ensure that is completed as quickly as possible in an attempt to prevent texture streaming and pop-in issues. As the GPU has to also render the in-game graphics, the CPU is left with 25-40% of the calculations, which as you'll see later can be tweaked to further improve streaming performance.
Source: http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/how-to-unlock-rages-high-resolution-textures-with-a-few-simple-tweaks
Huh, so I seem to have that wrong, ill have to read more about it on the link you posted, thanks motorsep.
Also, if you tried the demo motor, what kind of vid card did you play it on? You said it ran fine. How much do you think the tight fov is helping the performance?
My rig is:
AMD Phenom X3 2.2Ghz
8Gb of DDR2 RAM (some lower clock rate)
NVidia GF 670GTX 2Gb DDR5 VRAM
WD HDD Black series 7200rpm
Win 7 64bit Pro
Wow, real hefty vid card for the cpu there, you find this game runs better then wolf then?
Yep, definitely better. Also, my video card is classified as mid. range nowadays.
Ah yeah the infamous ue3 texture pop in, yeah should have mentioned that as well i just didn't give it a thought with this being made with an id engine :) but there are indeed other engines with that problem (crytek also has it to some extent but not as bad as ue3). I think the reason more notice it in idtech 5 is that the detail level somehow (in a bad way) makes it stand out to much compared to the rest of the environment.
the game runs quite fine on AMD for me :)
my rig is also a bit of a monster ->
asus rampage extreme IV corei7 3820, 16 GB corsair dominator DDR3 1600MHZ, 250GB SSD system harddisk (samsung evo 840) 2x sapphire radeon R9 270X toxic edition in crossfire (pretty midrange card but factory overclocked with some huge coolers and 3 fans, the cards in crossfire easily beat a single R9 290 but you need a monster PSU :S).
Lol when I asked for computer specs, I was hoping someone had a more budget orientated build so we could get an idea of how efficient this version of idtech is compared to previous examples. Not a bunch of people with liquid nitrogen cooled I7's and gpus running on uranium that max out pretty well everything else anyways
No good sir i only use plutonium for those kinda escapades :))
I suspect though that it would run ok even on a more everyday use PC as long as your gfx card is recent and has enough memory 1 -> 2 GB.
My old card had 1GB and was still able to run RAGE quite nicely :) allbeit with a bit lower settings.
I think you need a decent CPU. I saw some grumbling about performance on John Carmack's twitter page and he basically replied "the folks who made The Evil Within rewrote the renderer to use fully dynamic lighting. I told them it would have a big performance hit." I guess the message there is you can have megatexture, dynamic light, or good performance... Pick two
Hmm yeah that might be a bit of a performance bummer >:D
so a core i5 or similar at the least, sadly while AMD is still the king when it comes to pricing, there CPU's cant touch even the moddest intel offerings :S
i hope they get things together again some time as the market needs some healthy competition.
The new LGA 1150 models from intel are monsters even though they cant use the same ammount of ram that the old LGA2011 models could (32 GB vs 64 GB) and only support 3 way crossfire/SLI.
Just for the record, I played the demo on a amd Fx6300 and an r9 280x with no problems. Again, I ask if and exactly how the tighter fov would help performance in an atempt to try and figure out why this game seems to run as good asit does even with the realtimes lights and shadows vs wolf.
I always assumed frustrum culling was tied to the field of view, which would mean that a tighter one would give the cpu a break. Assuming I'm right, with virtual textures, would reducing the fov now reduce the gpus memory usage by a significant amount?
Or maybe it's much simpler than that - Tango has better software developers than ID/Machine games, in their real-time rendering department, and they made better architectural decisions in the engine thus making it run smooth on mid-range PCs ?
Quote from: Sir Blackington on November 10, 2014, 09:08:39 PM
Lol when I asked for computer specs, I was hoping someone had a more budget orientated build so we could get an idea of how efficient this version of idtech is compared to previous examples. Not a bunch of people with liquid nitrogen cooled I7's and gpus running on uranium that max out pretty well everything else anyways
Motorsep and I have near-dinosaurs. :) My CPU is 6 years old! Win 8.1 did make a good performance increase in many things though.
Nice info. So this game is still playable with old computer. But is is scary? I can't stand scary games, heck even i can't finish the first level of Amnesia
Game definatly isn't scary like amnesia was. It doesn't have the slightest clue what tension, subtly or pacing is atm ( not done the demo yet, but so far it threw 2 out of 3 of those straight out he window) apart from that it has many grotesque scenes so just a heads up. Might get fun later on though.
Motorsep, Im sure that a studio who has put the time soley into modifing a fresh, barely touched engine would probably be able to get some performance and visual enhancements just from better, or even just other software developers. What I'm trying to learn is what can we, being end users, define as features that would help give the boost in performance and visuals that the evil within has? Identifing thoze things would be a learning experience for me and possibly someone else who is I retested in these things. If I am correct, it could also apply to many other games on the market and at the very least, it would be I interesting.
Also to you and THF, if it works, it works. Was t that long ago I my main computer had an nvidia 8400gs and I was impressed at how well etqw played considering how it looks.
Not for children but definatly not super scary, disturbing is more a word i would use about it :) and gory very very very gory.
Dead space 1 now that allmost made me shat my pants 8) dead space 2 still had some of it but dead space 3 developed to much into a shooter to really make it scary.
Also been a while since i was in the fortunate situation to have the economy for a beastly PC like the one i have now, sadly sickness made short work of my ability
to secure a stable income so im just happy i had the foresight to buy something that would probably also be useable in the years to come while i had a good job, so i keep it in best working condition cause if it breaks i would not be able to replace it :'(.
Just found out, the evil within is using umbra 3 for culling. I was wondering when one of the other studios working under Bethesda, using an idtech engine, was going to make use of thier middleware. I guess I may have also found part of my answer to the whole performance thing.
And to completly change the subject again, but is lightmapping with megatextures pretty much free resource wise even offline?