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Forums - Microsoft Discussion - Alan Wake cinematics are all pre-rendered video files

I'm glad for this, I always like something to look at during load screens, and awesome pre-recorded cut scenes are a good thing for that. Why did this thread get destroyed? Why must they always get destroyed?



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The cinematics look great, regardless of HOW they are rendered.

I still do not see the problem.



Well ... God of War 3 and Uncharted 2 use prerendered game engine cut scenes. Did any XBOX fan made a big fuss about it? Now Alan Wake join them and all of a sudden so many PS3 fans jump on the XBOX games bashing bandwagon.



I don't see this is a bad thing. It's not like the whole game is prerendered.



Mistershine said:
mirgro said:
JaggedSac said:
mirgro said:

Except that if this were on the PC those graphics would be very possible in real time. Furthermore jsut because it's the same engine doesn't really mean shit. It's like saying that Crysis on Low settings looks just as good as Crysis on Ultra since it's just the same engine. I am sorry but that is simply not true in any way.

It is funny because I was just called a PC-hater a few hours ago in the SC2 CE edition thread, and if you visit recent SONY threads you will notice that I apparently want SONY to go bankrupt and whatnot. But I am sorry for interrupting any of you all's circlejerking. I can see how the truth can annoy you to the point where you think it's trolling. I will now leave this thread and you can contiue your ignorant circlejerk, I hope no more turth sayers come in here to ruin it for you.

Those fucking turth sayers.  Everybody hates turth sayers.  So much damn turth.

I probably wouldn't enjoy someone telling me how the chick I'm doing is ugly either. The fact remains that she is ugly, whether I liek it or not.


Ain't that the turth!

I had a turth come up to me and it said it would set me free and that it wouldn't hurt.  But the turth did hurt.



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BrayanA said:
Well ... God of War 3 and Uncharted 2 use prerendered game engine cut scenes. Did any XBOX fan made a big fuss about it? Now Alan Wake join them and all of a sudden so many PS3 fans jump on the XBOX games bashing bandwagon.

Really? Didn't notice much of that myself in this thread. I just seem to be seeing a load of people arguing over nothing. It's quite funny actually.



LOL.  What the hell is that from?



More comments from Remedy:

 

Since this keeps popping up every time the cutscenes are discussed, let me try to give a bit more thorough answer even though it's not my area of expertise. We could've done the cinematics "realtime in-game" -style too if we would have wanted to but there's a few good reasons why videos (rendered with the game engine, of course) were a good choice for us:

We can do the editing in a software that's dedicated to it instead of building some sort of editing and camera management system in our own toolset. We have our own engine so we don't always have the luxury of using pre-existing tools.

We can do transitions like crossfades (which are notoriously difficult in real time graphics since basically you would need to render the picture twice and blend them together).

We can do post-processing on the video if needed without the need to implement said effects in the game engine. That being said, the post-processing capabilities of our engine are pretty awesome but it can be a bit silly to do additional features to the graphics engine if said features are only to be used in some cutscenes. It's not economical for a company of this size.

With video, we are not limited by the streaming of the game world. Terrain, objects, characters, textures etc. need to be read from the DVD into the memory before they can be displayed. With video, we can do cutscenes that show several distant locations in a quick succession without us having to worry about the time it takes to stream in a new location.

And as previously mentioned, we can do things like streaming in a completely new game location while the video is playing so the player won't see any boring loading screens when we want to switch the location.

We can pretty much ignore most of the potential memory or performance issues with the hires characters and textures when using video. It's much much faster to produce hi-resolution content when you don't have to worry about making it optimal.

And runtime memory is very precious. If we can avoid keeping hires characters in the memory, we can make rest of the game look better.

---

I hope this clarifies our choice of going with videos instead of "in-game" cines a bit. And I do stress that it is a choice: what works for Alan Wake is not the right approach for many other games. We chose videos because it was a better option for us (meaning Remedy and you, the players) because it results to a better looking game (both the playable bits and the cinematics) and less work for our programmers and artists. Of course videos are not an entirely problem-free approach either but game development is full of choices like these.



"All of the cinematics have been rendered by our game engine, though. It's just that we use more high-resolution models because the camera tends to be a lot closer to the characters than during gameplay, and we throw in a bunch of post-processing to make things look very pretty."

Uh oh, someone beat me to it, but I hope selnor doesn't read this, but knowing that he is really following the game, he will most likely find out. Things could get baaaaaad.

But, good use of the pre-rendered videos, there.



That's right, just one "d"

In b4 "it's addict"
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