Rebellion head coder talks about Sniper Elite 3, Mantle, DX12, multi-core CPU support

[DarkKnightDude]

Obscurance fields looks great. You don't notice anything till you turn it off.

Also the game runs fantastically even on a few mid range rigs I've tried.

 

[DigDog]

i swear these two look absolutely identical

 

[Kippa]

i swear these two look absolutely identical

Look at the scarf around the neck. On the left you can see it is jagged around the edges, where as the tessellation version is not jagged. The tessellation isn't applied to the whole model, just selective areas where it would be appropriate.

 

[Gloomy]

i swear these two look absolutely identical

One on the left looks super blocky. Focus on the edges.

Then look at the one on the right. Super smooth/organic.

 

[NTMBK]

i swear these two look absolutely identical

The clue is in the name. 😉 Looks at his silhouette- areas like the cheekbones, his shoulders, the hairline and around the ears. These are all heavily tessellated, and look much smoother.

EDIT: Though the wireframe view does reveal something slightly off about it- the scarf on the back of his neck is also heavily tessellated, even though in the final view it would be totally obscured by his head. Perhaps this is simply an artifact of the wireframe view not providing obscurance? Or is tessellation performed before Z-culling? (Not up to date on my tessellation techniques.)

 

[Eymar]

One on the left looks super blocky. Focus on the edges.

Then look at the one on the right. Super smooth/organic.

Yeah the right image is clearly better once you know to look at the edges or use the polygon map and see the edges are more dense in polygons.

 

[BrightCandle]

Silhouette tessellation makes a lot of sense, I can see a lot of games using that in the future to reduce the amount of tessellation they use and increase the visual fidelity as if the models were really millions of polygons.

The obscurance fields shadows also look really good. It makes a big difference to the quality of lighting. I really dislike ssao, hbao and hbao+ as I don't find them very natural looking at all. They are better than nothing but it just adds darkness in weird places sometimes and how it interacts with other lighting and shadows sometimes looks really strange.

 

[zebrax2]

The main problem i have with ssao, hbao and hbao+ was that on some items/characters it just looks like as if they have a "shadow aura" rather than looking like it has natural shadows. It looks obscurance fields fixed it so kudos to them.

 

[Headfoot]

Lawyers gonna be lawyers. I wouldn't judge the whole company based on that lawsuit. Or, I suppose it's possible they sued Stardock knowing full well they wouldn't win, as a protective measure to show companies not to mess with them in the future - I don't know. But it's not a big deal to me.

People who don't how that law works absolutely should not judge the company for exercising its rights... You MUST enforce your trademark rights by law in order to keep those right.? To oversimplify, if they did nothing they would lose their rights to the mark.

And people who mix up trademark and patent should not comment on their opinion of either system, because its impossible to mix the two up if you have even the most rudimentary understanding of either system.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

People who don't how that law works absolutely should not judge the company for exercising its rights... You MUST enforce your trademark rights by law in order to keep those right.? To oversimplify, if they did nothing they would lose their rights to the mark.

And people who mix up trademark and patent should not comment on their opinion of either system, because its impossible to mix the two up if you have even the most rudimentary understanding of either system.

But the trademark is on the whole logo, so unless the other game uses it in the same style and color there is no problem. And the word "rebellion" is only used as a subtitle to a game. Pointless lawsuit.

The tech used in sniper looks nice, but that face looks a bit cartoonish to me, maybe it's better ingame.

 

[KingFatty]

But the trademark is on the whole logo, so unless the other game uses it in the same style and color there is no problem. And the word "rebellion" is only used as a subtitle to a game. Pointless lawsuit.

The tech used in sniper looks nice, but that face looks a bit cartoonish to me, maybe it's better ingame.

Trademark law addresses consumer confusion. So it doesn't matter whether the whole logo is implicated. If a consumer is confused as to the source of goods or services, that could raise an issue in TM law. This is true even for alternate spellings. A recent case that comes to mind is the car company Porsche suing another company using the Porsch name. That's very close, so a bit of a no-brainer, but other cases are not so close.

And I'll reiterate the point that companies have a duty to "police" their marks. If they sit back and let someone use their trademark, that company risks "generification" of their mark, where it becomes generic.

This happened to the brand name of escalator. It almost happened to Kleenex and Xerox. Ever remember the "I am stuck on Band-Aid" song that was popular back in the 80s? Johnson and Johnson actually changed the lyrics to "I am stuck on Band-Aid brand, so band-aid's stuck on me," inserting the word Brand to avoid genericide. Take a look at the band-aid website, you'll see that "brand" word everywhere because they are worried about it.

See what wikipedia has to say here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Maintaining_rights

A trademark which is popularly used to describe a product or service (rather than to distinguish the product or services from those of third parties) is sometimes known as a genericized trademark. If such a mark becomes synonymous with that product or service to the extent that the trademark owner can no longer enforce its proprietary rights, the mark becomes generic.

My point is that while it may seem at first glance that TM lawsuits are petty and "pointless" as you say, that is just from a layperson viewpoint. Every single company has a duty and obligation to enforce their brands. If they didn't, the shareholders could sue the company for not doing it, and force them.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Legally you might be right, but from a logical standpoint (which can differ from the legal one), there is a difference. Band aid or coke or whatever came to have a generic use after they were used for a product name. Rebellion is a term that was in general use far *before* the game or the studio used it, so it seems to me that Stardock would have a perfect right to use it. Should they tiltle their game "Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, but not the studio"?

 

[Hitman928]

If you read Rebellion's complaint, it's not the title of the game they have issue with, but rather the company's listing of the game and addressing the game as simply "Rebellion". They say this has already led to confusion and provided an example. They have a strong argument here. This is not a troll move at all.

This would also only apply to game development. For instance, if someone wrote a book titled rebellion, they'd have nothing to stop them without some weird set of circumstances.

 

[Headfoot]

Legally you might be right, but from a logical standpoint (which can differ from the legal one), there is a difference. Band aid or coke or whatever came to have a generic use after they were used for a product name. Rebellion is a term that was in general use far *before* the game or the studio used it, so it seems to me that Stardock would have a perfect right to use it. Should they tiltle their game "Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, but not the studio"?

"Logical" doesn't matter and is completely irrelevant.

Trademarks are orthagonally related to logic. They are what the law says they are, no more and no less. Half of things in the law are not logical at all, and rather the product of a compromise between legislative parties/legislators, flaws in regulatory enforcement or regulations, fact specific case interpretations, possible drafting errors, etc. etc.

If you want to talk about the intellectual asset protected by trademarks, that is called Goodwill and is marked on the balance sheet as such.

The point of the matter is that Rebellion, and the people behind Rebellion, would have to be 1) stupid, 2) ill informed, 3) possessing little to no goodwill worth protecting now or ever (which is extremely unlikely), 4) not have enough cash to take up the litigation. The only reason that any marginally competent business person should take is #4. The point being, not liking this company because they want to enforce their completely legitimate trademark rights is absurd. They clearly have some nice tech and keep the ball rolling on their in-house engine

 

[Headfoot]

But the trademark is on the whole logo, so unless the other game uses it in the same style and color there is no problem. And the word "rebellion" is only used as a subtitle to a game. Pointless lawsuit.

Whether its the logo, name, design is irrelevant. There are causes of action for any of the above and more. Trade dress, product design, dilution...

Besides, they aren't even talking about "rebellion," they are talking about "Rebellion" and yes, there is a difference. I won't harp on the rest of the standards because it would be largely pointless and previous posters have explained