inFamous Second Son releases this Friday. As you might’ve seen from the trailers, the smoke and neon powers are looking very good indeed. It almost makes you wonder exactly how much goes into them, down to the number, doesn’t it?
Well, thankfully VGLeaks has revealed some incredible stats, detailing the actual numbers behind the technology which create the gameplay mechanics.
Firstly, when Delsin does his smoke dash, he splits up into 11,000 individual particles, each of which is individually textured, even if his jacket is customised, before reforming into one humanoid shape. That’s simply astounding.
Troy Baker’s face is superimposed on Delsin, and that took 75 high-res scanned poses, which then essentially trained the performance capture system. That meant 168 tracked markers on his face, with 22,231 separate vertices without including his eyes, lashes or hat. These are all animated independently, thirty times per second. Delsin’s entire head is built out of 60,000 triangles, with a further 7,500 more for his beanie hat. Tuffcub says they wasted 7,500 triangles. There were also 168 skeleton joints on his face alone.
32 machines were used in the render farm to compute the reflected and ambient lighting, while every single rain drop was considered an individual particle, and there are over 30,000 of these. Furthermore, the Adaptive Ambient System means that each district on the map has its own atmosphere which conforms to the time of day, type of weather and control.
It’s not just the visuals either – there are tons of sounds present, with over 1,024 sound variations on the smoke bolt alone and over 50 individual sounds in a smoke orbital.
To finally show Sucker Punch’s attention to detail, the blocks in the game’s version of Seattle are 100 meters square, which is the same size as an actual Seattle block.
nouveller
Awesome! I haven’t played any of the inFamous games, but after reading up and watching a few trailers, interview etc… It’s look brilliant!
Jimster71
Pre-baked lighting for the environments?
DJ Judas
It’ll be ambient occlusion and reflections for static objects etc.
cc_star
Ohhhh numbers.
Let’s hope the actual game away from the 7,500 triangle beanie hat is better than the first two.
DJ Judas
Pretty impressive, presume they’ve got some heavily varying LOD on that face of his!
I’d be interested to hear what the total time was for baking their lighting. Looking forward to Friday.
Kennykazey
So Delsins hat, just his silly beanie hat, is made up of as many triangles as a full PS2-gen character-model. And his head, just his head, is made up of as many triangles as two full Nathan Drakes? Damn, son!
Kevatron400
I like these comparisons. Do more!
gazzagb
Shame it doesn’t reach the most important number of all, 60fps.
bunimomike
That’s not even remotely important for a single player campaign in the action-adventure genre. The Last of Us was 30FPS and that wasn’t a problem.
Not. One. Bit. :-\
Lyts1985
Surely that was sarcasm on Gazza’s part?
gazzagb
I just don’t understand how new-gen games fail to reach 60fps. Yes, it may look pretty, but I’d much rather have the smoother gameplay any day.
bunimomike
Simply because, at 30 frames per second, they can obviously get quite a bit more out of the hardware and it means we’re treated to that much more of a visual spectacle. Also, keep in mind that 30 frames per second harms no one in a single player action adventure. So, I’m very glad they don’t aim for 60 frames per second with games like this.
Any title (like Second Son) that manages to fix or hover around 30 frames per second is a smooth game to play. Sure, it doesn’t quite have that 60 frames per second feel but it barely makes a difference to the enjoyment of the game. God knows I played Tomb Raider at 35 to 55 frames per second (on the PC) and it was lovely stuff. Never did it feel like it was grinding or detrimental to the gameplay.
gazzagb
It’s just down to personal preference. When playing a (newish) PC game, I’ll happily sacrifice visuals just to bump up the fps to near enough 60.
I’m not saying 30fps is detrimental to a game, I was just stating I wish it was 60fps rather than having a nice looking beanie hat! ;)
homerjnick
Didn’t TSA post an interview about the 60fps issue and the result would have been far less detail…I much prefer 30fps and more detail than 60fps and less detail…
Dan Lee
When it’s broken down like that, suddenly £45ish doesn’t seem too bad a deal
Flightx
You mean you dont want to pay that little bit extra for your very own beanie hat?
beeje13
If i remember correctly, Resogun sported 2,000 particles at most? More and being in an open world is really impressive.
Also, what is not mentioned but is important gameplay wise, framerate drops are non-existent, and there is a good dashing of Anti-aliasing so no jaggged edges.
bunimomike
The busiest level had 200,000 or so cubes. However, the graphics engine they were using was tested on their dev units and they had it hammering nearly half a million.
beeje13
Ok, now I look stupid :O thanks for replying though.
Lyts1985
I love numbers and figures, and this is sounding very technically impressive. I can’t wait for Thursdays review and Fridays release!
boeboe
Dat Cerny.