toggle clive

hell yeah dude

hello, I'm a generic medieval fantasy peasant. Don't mind me, just sweeping this dirt path with a broom

clive finalfantasy just punting an entire wolf into the fucking sunset

Dude I am going insane every time this floating fire thing shows up

It has absolutely PERFECT soft area shadows, cast by both skinned meshes and dynamic cloth geo

how the fuck did they do this

(sorry about the black level; capturing HDR is Hard)

Best guess I can come up with is: really detailed SDFs pinned to the bones (like unreal's capsule shadows but more intricate), and then a separate really expensive raytrace or screenspace march for the cloth geo

I don't have a good intuition for how far you can push RTX stuff on consoles, but I don't THINK you can fullscreen raytrace anything that hardcore? At least not without a shitton of temporal tricks, and I can't see ANY ghosting or fizzing. It honestly looks analytic

Just remembered the game has a photo mode, so I can move the camera around

- It's definitely not screenspace; everything casts from offscreen

- There's some EXTREMELY subtle fizzing; it's barely noticeable even in the worst case, but it does seem to be SOMEWHAT stochastic

The only weakness I can find is it never actually goes fully SHARP. There's a minimum penumbra size, and it's fairly wide. You can see the boot here doesn't have sharp contact shadows

I dunno MAYBE they just fuckin yolo raytraced it, but you'd get sharp contact shadows from that

also it doesn't change with camera distance/fov, so it's not tracing into a super low-res buffer

I think SDF is the most likely option? The wide penumbra would hide the discrepancies between the mesh and SDFs. Doing the cloth with SDFs would be really hard but probably not impossible? It's a fairly simple Videogame Half-Cape so at least the topology is manageable

in any case: good lord dude

hope they do some gdc/siggraph talks or something

ahhh shit it works Perfectly on static geo too. There's no way they SDF'd the whole level at that high a resolution

this is gonna be bugging me for months

ehh maybe I'm overthinking this and it's just PCSS with a really huge radius

That would support all the behaviors I can see here. It's Expensive (particularly on an omnidirectional light) but games have shipped with it before, and I can't think of anything that would rule it out

quickest way to check if it's PCSS (or a similar filtered shadowmap technique) is to see what happens to the penumbra when hard and soft shadows overlap

unfortunately the orb follows the player so there's no way to set that up

man this is like the Brownest jrpg since the merciful death of the xbox 360

even the UI is beige

OKAY I'm pretty much convinced the shadows are PCSS, or a closely related "use shadowmapping but do a bunch really complicated depth-aware filtering to blur the result" technique

Evidence:

- Sharp shadows overlapping soft ones get slightly Weird (the shadow of clive's head doesn't normally look that harsh)

- Toggling the game between "graphics" and "framerate" modes drops to a lower-res shadow map, and reduces the filter radius and tap count

also, it's really hard to see in screenshots, but there's actually at least two shadow casters. The sun is casting up and to the left here, and we're standing in full shadow. But there's a second, much wider-radius shadow that's occluding the bounced sky light

For a while I was thinking they had some kind of crazy complex directional-occlusion technique that can partially obscure baked lightprobes or something

but on further study I think it's just a hand-placed caster with a large area. Less novel tech, more skilled lighting artists

okay the funniest FF16 lore detail is that getting a tattoo removed somehow has a 50% fatality rate

i dunno man you could probably just cover it up. put like a keyblade on there. or the coheed and cambria triangle thing

love too receive 10 Pinches of Magicked Ash [I possess 916 Pinches of Magicked Ash and every item I could craft with them is worse than what the main quest gives you for free]

I haven't been maintaining A JRPG Thread about ff16 because *gestures broadly at The Internet* but every hour I play of it makes me more unhappy lol

I'm the guy who LIKES bad jrpgs but this game is technically flawless and completely devoid of ambition

Jill has literal god powers and every single time she could potentially do something cool, the writers find some way to remove her from the plot

now I'm at a scene where the protagonist just straight up tells her to leave so he can fight a boss by himself

dravozd rendezvous

okay for a game that's this obsessed with game-of-thrones style politics it's extremely funny that the (seemingly) final act starts with "oh yeah by the way, there's also The Evil Kingdom. We haven't really talked about it before now but it's where all the Evil lives."

the adventures of Clive Finalfantasy and his brother, Hotter Rupert Grint

somebody actually calls him out for repeatedly doing this, which is the most self awareness the game has ever displayed, but then it's resolved twelve seconds later when he explains that it was the correct decision

lmao this guy is mortally wounded and asks you to finish him off, and then the side quest UI pops up like "Would you like to euthanize this man? You will gain twelve hundred coins and thirty Renown Points"

oh okay he did actually give me a Quest; the dialog was just misleading lol

gotta admit that is a fuckin LOT of polygons

(it's not actually that dark IRL; I haven't figured out how to capture HDR without screwing up the tonemapping)

(technically my capture card SHOULD support HDR but I can't find a way to enable it without breaking all of my other SDR profiles in OBS. Plus even if can capture it accurately we're still like decades away from Websites correctly handling hdr images lol)

you can use photo mode to zoom in without altering the LoDs and it really is mostly actual geometry

alright i finished final fantasy 16

the fact that it took me this long to actually bother playing the end is perhaps an indictment lol

I cannot fucking believe they literally namedropped The Videogame Final Fantasy TWICE in the ending cutscenes

my review of Final Fantasy 16 is you should play Tales of Arise instead

Creative Business Unit Three really saw this picture and thought it was real and also a good way to conclude a story