so I picked up AC Origins after all and THE SHADOWS HAVE FAKE DIFFRACTION I DON'T EVEN CARE ABOUT GAMEPLAY ANYMORE

Tiny spaces between leaf shadows are basically pinhole cameras and form little blurry circles of light bc of the shape of the sun

this happens in real life

it's also happening in this videogame for basically no reason except pure showing off and I am EXTREMELY EXCITED

Thinking a bit, I'm p sure all you have to do is run an expensive-ass bokeh blur over an otherwise ordinary shadow map. Just need a stupidly high resolution for it to look good

would never have thought to even try this though dang

Neat trick: The burning logs (not the central flame) is a big ol particle billboard, but it seems to be doing some cool screenspace depth masking so it's only visible ABOVE the upper edges of the geometry

You can see how the billboard interacts with the depth buffer while staying aligned with the camera

Suspect it works on the same principle as the BotW rain splashes: basically wide-radius edge detection on the zbuffer to select texels close to large depth changes

seems to also involve some more traditional soft-particle blending too.... it's *possible* I'm overthinking this and you could do the same thing with just carefully-tuned parameters on soft particles, but I don't think that's all that's going on here

So they turned assassin's creed into an action RPG. However, I pushed the control stick towards a platform and my character jumped sideways off of a cliff and died, so rest assured that the core Assassin's Creed gameplay experience remains intact

I've played this game for three days and the ubisoft launcher has helpfully informed me that I have singlehandedly murdered five hundred and twenty nine men

I'm actually enjoying Origins' gameplay a lot, surprisingly. Last AC I played was Brotherhood, which felt super stale, and then every big western AAA game for the next 8 years was basically a mediocre assassin's creed remix

fascinating that while spider-man's still climbing towers to reveal map icons, an actual Assassin's Creed game has successfully identified and fixed most of the genre's biggest problems

They replaced the far cry binoculars with an eagle with a neat targeting system so it's more active than just pointing at stuff, towers still have a purpose but instead of revealing the map they upgrade the eagle, so they're optional and therefore much more compelling

they replaced the batman combat system with the dark souls combat system, which is great because that's literally just straight-up Better

they added diablo loot, which is... ehhh, but it gives you a reason to go treasure-hunting and is thus a huge improvement over feathers lol

Like typical infinibudget open-world games it's essentially a salad of well-trodden mechanics with some subtle incremental advances, but as lots of other games in this genre have shown, that still requires a TON of design skill and it's rare to see it executed this well

Assassin's Creed: Origins (2017)

It is endlessly hilarious that the game series about sneaking into mansions to assassinate evil rich dudes somehow ended up with *naval warfare* being one of its signature features

I don't have any technical insights here but I've never even seen a game try to do brown murky river water like this before, let alone pull it off this well

is that a threat

oH NOOOOO

I'M SO SORRY TINY MANS I THOUGHT YOU WERE STATIC

so I found a sidequest where you meet a woman on a cliff about to kill herself bc her husband died. Protag talks her down from it and it leads to a fairly poignant discussion of how people process and live with grief

she then shouts "LEOPARDS!" and six (6) leopards attack. You must now execute six leopards to complete the quest

it was as if the entirety of AAA videogames writing condensed into a single perfect jewel

Remember parallax offset mapping? Apparently tesselation's fast enough we just make every rock in a dirt road out of actual geometry now. Save the frag shader performance for more important tasks

I guess POM did fit in a pretty weird niche when you think about it. It's hilariously expensive; only useful where verts are limited but you've got a ton of shading headroom. Guess the math worked on on 360-era hardware before we started doing basically everything in screenspace

LOW
POLY
BIRD
HYPE

there's only one thing I love more than incredibly high-poly rocks and that's incredibly low-poly birds

launching my new podcast BIRD LODS

I'm still playing AC Origins and everything positive I said about the game design still stands but also it's like twice as long as it has any reason to be and it's reaching the point where I just genuinely feel bad for all the dudes I'm murdering

like they're not even evil or anything they're just dudes with swords that exist so the player can hurt them

L M A O

that started out as an actually good game and turned into a hilariously stupid and boring game in the last few hours

I recommend the first part of it

It has a lot of very good core systems but then it makes you endlessly repeat them for like 15 hours longer than they can actually support

also what starts as a fairly restrained plot with a genuinely compelling protagonist just... completely derails and runs out of money and tries to be twelve different things at once with no explanation and finally just concludes with "WOW ASSASSINATING PEOPLE SURE IS BADASS!!"