Will you guys get into Nvidia's Technology?

General Questions
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Hey guys, I was wondering if you guys would ever get into Nvidia’s Hairworks Technology?

I think it would make a wonderful addition to have on Pets and Players, it makes hair look incredible.
Of course you’d need a somewhat beefy computer to handle it, but if a player can’t handle it, they can always disable it.

I was also wondering if you guys would incorporate Nvidia’s PhysX Technology?

I could see this technology being used to power the water slide, water fountains, and nearly all particle effects.
If you guys ever make it snow, or rain, such as during Christmas, this Technology could supercharge it.
And same as Hairworks, if a player’s computer couldn’t handle it, they could always disable it.

CUDA Could also make water simulations and such run a lot better, at least for those who own a GTX GPU.

Sorry for the long post, I hope I get an answer from the devs.

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I believe that in the last stream, Mac mentioned how these technologies act as a sort of exclusion for people with AMD cards. He doesn’t really want to exclude anyone from the full experience.
Or something like that.

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I fully understand that, I honestly do.

But, (I love both companies, I have an AMD CPU) it’s the player’s fault that they bought a GPU from a company that doesn’t have a lot of amazing innovations like Nvidia

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Shame on them for buying within their budget/not being tech savvy/buying a pre-built/etc.

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I don’t think that’s a healthy attitude to take with advanced technology.Why even try to improve your cards if everybody should be catered to equally? It’s not as if you don’t get to see hair with AMD cards, you’ll just get to see better hair with an Nvidia card. You get what you pay for, nothing wrong there.

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Nvidia’s really shot themselves in the foot with the recent rap that Gameworks has gotten and AMD winning in DX12 benchmarks by a landslide.

I only went with Nvidia for Linux support. Next build, I’m back on team red.

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##Our decision process when it comes to implementing third-party technologies goes roughly like this:

  1. Does it enhance the game in a meaningful way?
  2. Can all of our players benefit from it (multi-platform compatibility)?
  3. Do we have time to implement it?
  4. Does Unreal support it out of the box?
  5. Is it fun ?

We’re running on an incredibly tight schedule. Because of this, we’re being very careful about which features we want/need to implement.

We have a billion-and-one ideas and we have to make informed decisions as to which of those ideas we want to pursue.

The bottom line is: fun comes first.
If it doesn’t add fun to the game, we push it back on our priority list.

Yes, adding rain or snow would be neat, and having real looking hair would be a quality boost.
But Tower Unite is about having fun with friends, so we want to spend our time implementing features which enhance that part of the game.

Graphics and effects are secondary to gameplay, always.

Also as other people have mentioned, implementing NVidia features drives a wedge between the two PC demographics NVidia and AMD.

We don’t want to do that. Our goal is to deliver a consistent experience across all platforms. Adding some of these features could ruin that.

Now I’ll address some of your questions / comments directly:

NVidia PhysX is integrated into Unreal out of the box. It’s the physics engine which drives Unreal 4. PhysX is accelerated by NVidia GPUs but can also run on your CPU if you’re using a different graphics card.

I don’t know how the snow / rain stuff factors in, I’ll have to look into that.

CUDA is a GPU parallelism library. It simply allows you to write multi-threaded code to be computed by the graphics card’s multiple CUDA cores.

It does not do water simulation. We’d have to write that component ourselves (which ain’t easy).

Nah. We’d have to author our own hair simulation data and it doesn’t work well with AMD.

This is possible, but why implement something that only players with beefy machines can use? Seems like a waste of time if you ask me.

Maybe somewhere down the line when these newer technologies become more universally compatible or “beefy computers” become “normal computers” we’ll consider implementing them.

Anyway, I hope this answers questions anyone has about where we stand on NVidia tech. :smile:

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I would honesty not be able to play Tower Unite if this happened… cough cough family junked my pc cough… But still, this would be a cool feature, it is just that I have enough slow-down on Tower Unite at the moment. :wink:

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This terrible feeling that I get is immense when I realize that’s my PC…
[size=11]am currently accepting donations to buy a GTX 980[/size]
[size=9]i am literally crying right now[/size]
EDIT: Also

Could we have a super geeky explanation of what that is? Googling this automatically assumes I know everything possible about coding there is to know, but to be honest I can pride myself on knowing what OOP is and how to use (or do) it

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Just did a quick search and from what I understand, basically it just means that instead of the processor completing one task after another, the different cores of the processor are able to complete multiple tasks simultaneously.

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What that guy said. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I thought that’s what they did anyway… woah.

So wait, what would NVidia’s CUDA be? Just a different way for core processing to be handled? Or does it make it more efficient at actually processing?

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CUDA is just the means of communicating with the stream processor that NVidia cards use for rasterizing and shading in the 3D pipeline.

It’s an API you use to write code that can run on the card itself.

I’ll explain:

Wooshooshooshooshoosh…

When you’re playing 3D games on your PC, a whole buncha stuff happens inside your computer.

First, your processor generates a buncha draw calls. These tell the GPU about what sorta stuff is in the scene and how to display it.

When the GPU gets that data, it renders (make into pixels) the frame (current state of the scene) to a frame buffer (image).

This basically takes place in 5 steps:

  1. World Transformation (move all the triangles around to where they’re supposed to be)
  2. Projection (project the triangles from 3D coordinates onto a flat plane)
  3. Rasterization (fill in pixels inside the triangles in the right places)
  4. Shading (color the pixels according to lighting in the scene + special effects)
  5. Presentation (copy the resulting image to the frame buffer)

During steps 1, 2, and 4 you can manually control the output at that stage in the pipeline using a shader.

Shaders are programs that run on the graphics card during the execution of the pipeline (either per-vertex or per-pixel).

Now this is where the parallelism comes in…

If you’re playing your game at 1920x1080, the graphics card needs to consider 2,073,600 pixels.

This is A LOT of computation to be doing while maintaining a minimum framerate of 60 frames per second (depending on how many crazy effects you got going on).

To solve this, the graphics card will split up the shader programs and run them on multiple processor cores simultaneously.

Once all the cores have finished the end result is combined and presented on screen.

Nowadays graphics cards are basically mini super-computers specifically designed to carry out mathematical operations ( mostly relating to linear algebra [3D stuffs] ) really really fast.

CUDA is a tool NVidia made that lets you take advantage of this power for doing non-graphics things ( like water simulation ).

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this thread reminded me of that one particle @Zak made and showed off on a livestream, looked sexy (post a video on here Zak :smiley: )

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Oh man, which particle effect? I’ve made a few by now.

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I forgot, but it would be cool if you just showed all of them lol

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I believe the one where it cuts through the block in a digital way.

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I have a video of that one:

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this isn’t the one I’m thinking about
I think it was something where these particles were orbiting around another

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Thanks for the reply man, and I fully understand what you mean by pushing Graphics and Effects to the end of the Agenda.

I did not know this, I have very little experience working in the Unreal Engine (I’ve only made simple little side scrollers so far :P)

I know that haha, I meant, it would HELP do it, not do it itself.

I understand, thanks for giving it some thought though :smile:

Anyway, thanks for answering, I really appreciate it :smile: