Here we gooooo

Right off the bat there's something fun going on depending on whether or not you have realtime ray tracing turned on.

Without ray tracing, it uses probes and screen-space reflections, whereas with ray tracing turned on the reflections are much sharper and more high contrast.

I also notice a little bit of crunchy, sparkly stuff in high-contrast screen regions moving over the top of the ray traced reflections, probably because of a combination of caching and anti-aliasing+motion blur being a frame behind or something along those lines.

Looks like a lot of the motion blur is pretty noisy in general with reflections and transparency, which is interesting and makes me wonder how it works

Ohoho yess, this is what I live for. Look at that realtime reflection in the glass.

Fuckin' delicious.

Here's something I find interesting:

The shadow map here is surprisingly low resolution and has noticeable aliasing. I'm sure there was a performance tradeoff here; raytracing and other reflections are notoriously expensive, so I bet they intentionally kept shadow res low.

Speaking of shadows, looks like they pass some noise through the shadow buffer to soften things up. The visible noise here jitters and changes every frame.

This is something I find interesting as a character artist. I would've expected the small details of this jacket to be separate materials rather than baked in. I'm guessing her character model was getting pretty expensive, so they decided to optimize it.

Oop, just realized I didn't have textures set to ultra. The difference is nice, though I'm still surprised the stitches and zippers are all on the same material.

I find it interesting that they didn't model her eyebrows, but I imagine most people wouldn't notice or care

Oooh, this is a brave place to put a UV seam.

They probably did this because getting an upper chest into a high quality character model with good facial animation would be a waste

Honestly surprised at the fact that someone baked a normal map for this ash tray. The wobbly stuff around the edge is an artifact of how it was baked.

Heh, I think I've seen this before

I'm a bit surprised at how long it takes certain textures to stream in. I'm running this off a solid state drive and I have a Ryzen 5, 64 GB of RAM, an RTX 2080, so I'm not sure where the bottleneck for that is

I am very much Not About the fact that I just walked out the same door I walked in, and from a completely different direction.

Also very much Not About the fact that suddenly there's an elevator where once there was a painting of the janitor.

Testing out the DLSS feature

The most noticeable difference, here at least, is the halo around some high contrast areas. I haven't had a chance to see how it changes framerates in other areas, but I'm interested in seeing it

Oh good lord

I really, REALLY dig the way they're combining in-game models and live action footage in these cutscenes. It makes it difficult to determine if shots like this are real or CG, which I like

This is some of the best in-mouth occlusion and shadowing I've ever seen in a game. Hot stuff.

Fun little tidbit:

When you shoot this bulletin board, it shoots flipbook particles that show full pages of paper

UHHHH

Good lord, these huge iridescent effects are gorgeous

I have no idea how they work

I want more

They're subtle here, but they clearly occupy some sort of volumetric space

Hmmmmmmm, maybe a low-res fluid type sim or metaballs with screen-space texturing?

These people are clearly fans of the SCP wiki

MORE PLEASE

I have some concerns

I want to say the normals on this are messed up, but I can't imagine a prop of this size would ship with a bug like that.

It's wigging me out and I don't like it

This big text is fucking bold and I love the hell out of it. What a beautiful choice

Good lord

Some really brave compositions in these shots. I'm curious who was in charge of setting up the cameras in these cutscenes

What's in the cell? A monster? An enemy? Some kind of supernatural, shifty looking artifact?

Heh

Ooooh, this is neat. You can see some of the limitations of the ray tracing resolution here. Each of those spots is, as far as I know, a ray which has taken on the color of the light on the radio.

Seems the ray tracing solution works best on glossy surfaces, which is interesting

Look, it's even shooting green dots at the character model! So cool.

How the fu...

This is unbelievably cool

The volumetric lighting in this game is flawless

I'm sorry what

So here's something fun to note about most games:

For usability's sake, most doorways have to be waaaay larger than real life doors because of things like camera field of view, the inaccuracy inherent in moving a player character around, and various collision issues.

Ooooh, look at that.

The ray traced reflections don't reflect anything but directional lighting on the character model. Considering that the shadows, ambient occlusion, etc. are are screen-space effects, I suppose this shouldn't be surprising.

Neat!

Also fun to note:

Raytraced reflections only have a single bounce for mirror reflections. That is, you get reflections, but not *reflections of reflections.*

In this spot, for example, I'd expect to see at least four reflections of the player character.

trim

sheets

The use of tiling detail textures in this game is really solid

The effects in this game are absolutely bonkers. I need to go digging for some info on how they did it

Here's something fun to note:

The red aura around this carousel horse is fog or additive color in a cube, with the edges fading out. They probably either placed a fog volume in this area, or put a shader with depth biased alpha on the cube.

This is interesting:

They sample previous frames and distort them for this smearing particle effect. If you move the camera around, the effect follows the camera and updates every frame. When the camera doesn't move, the effect just shimmers around the object.

Also very interesting:

The effect seems to waver in time with the movement of these segmented walls.

This is either a fun art direction choice, or (and I think more likely) a happy accident of the effect sampling motion vectors in the scene to give it a pulse.

Neato

Nope. Don't fuckin' like this shit.

Leave it to the creepy janitor to have a pinup of himself on the outer door to his office.

Regardless of how creepy he is, this character is fuuuuuckin' amazingly well done. Kudos to the entire team that brought him to life.

One thing I'll say could use an improvement is the animation of eyes. Eyes naturally have small, involuntary movements called saccades which are important for human vision, and they're largely absent here.

It's a small thing, though

Here's a small, fun element of game visuals that doesn't see a lot of talk outside actual gamedev circles. Post-processing volumes.

As you step between them, the color grading changes, allowing for a different mood between two adjacent areas.

I think I've figured out what's weird about the mouth movements of these characters. They don't have the "sticky lips" present in many lipsync rig solutions, so they end up accidentally opening their lips a little too wide and exposing their teeth too much.

For what it's worth, this is a REALLY problematic area of performance capture, so it makes sense.

I really, really dig this guy's outfit

This machine gun is an interesting detail. It's a WWI-era gun called a Lewis gun that was only widely adopted in the UK. In terms of in-game lore, it actually makes perfect sense if the team at the FBC is multi-national.

I like this small detail an unreasonable amount.

I fucking love green barrels in video games and hope they never go away

I kinda love it when environment artists and lighters place bright spotlights specifically to light up big gnarly pieces of machinery and pipes

Check out this sweet-ass coil of shrink-wrapped black hose. This is awesome.

More pipes and spotlights!

I'm thinking no.

The sheer number and scope of pipes in this game is absolutely bonkers.

Especially since it looks like, in just this shot alone, there are no fewer than FIVE pipe sets on display.

Judging by how often I see things like this in games, I'm part of a large number of people who fucking love this aesthetic for computers and control panels.

More please!

God, the lighting and general atmosphere in this game are amazing.

Here's something interesting

The light spilling from this shaft really doesn't make any sense, and is only there for aesthetics. But there's also something weird going on with the shadow mapping which is introducing lines and banding.

Bit depth or interpolation issues maybe?

Mmmm, don't think I'm going to get tired of reflections like this. The wavy normal map on the ground adds just the right effect and I love it

This is some delicious and hilarious commentary. This men's bathroom has two stalls and is absolutely tiny.

The combined men's and women's right next to it in the same hall has 12 stalls and it's huge.

Look at this before and after with and without ray tracing enabled. The bounce light on the disk drive and wall are lovely.

Man, even with all the graphics settings as low as they'll go, this game is still gorgeous

Left is lowest settings, right is highest

High vs. low. This is the power of baked lighting. It's pretty even without fancy effects like ray tracing, and stuff like ray tracing is just a cherry on top.

Thus is the power of Art Direction

This is why you should study more than just games. You don't get environments like this without studying architecture.

This simply wouldn't exist without the architects responsible for proliferating Brutalism as a style.

DO

YOUR

RESEARCH

God, I love projectors in video games. They usually serve no purpose other than to have the lighting team do some flexing

I love this because it's pointless.

is this twin peaks

I have no idea what this thing is, but it looks awesome.

This game is hard.

There's a ton of stuff I love about this character, but I want to draw special attention to the curly hair, the fuzzy collar, and the puffy folds on her jacket arms. You only get that kind of folding with a stuffed leather/pleather jacket, and it's wonderfully executed.

this is ominous

God, I love this style of terminal. They're so wonderfully physical and tactile. I wish my computer looked like this.

YEAH

FUCK YEAH

BIG TEXT

People who refuse to engage in social distancing:

Before and after.

Where is the light coming from?

Who cares?

These character designs are fantastic. Simple, bold, effective, great balance of detail and areas of rest, functional, while also being highly designed.

Love it.

More spotlights and pipes! And this time, there's also a plasma or water cutting machine in the middle. Makes sense given this area is all about finding a prism.

This has nothing to do with graphics, but I still love it.

The idea that the entire facility is powered by energy leaking from some sort of living paranormal creature is just fucking amazing. Wonderful world building.

It's possible to write decals to only certain parts of the frame buffer in addition to simply placing a polygon with a texture.

In this case, it's replacing some of the diffuse/albedo, and modifying some of the normal component so it looks like a dent in the floor.

Here's another example of the same effect. When you drop onto this ventilation shaft, you leave a dent. This is done by spawning a decal under you that affects only the normal channel of what you landed on.

YEAH ROCKS

SATURATED RINGS AROUND HIGHLIGHTS

YEAH

Mmmhmm yes yes this is good I like detail textures.

I'm seeing at least two layered detail textures on top of baked stuff on the foreground rocks, and I dig it.

These smaller columns are vertex painted in, and they have a threshold in the shader that's probably modulated by a noise texture so the transition isn't just a perfect gradient.

I can't help looking at mines in games without thinking of the escape from Cragscleft Prison in Thief. God, I wish someone would remake those old games with a new engine and keep a lot of the old gameplay elements.

I will never not love spotlights in video games. They're impossibly perfect.

Neat!

I have no commentary here, so

Neat!

Something you usually don't see in this game is LOD pop-in because most of the areas are too small for it, but that's not the case here.

This is pretty interesting. These ropes don't start their simulation until you bump into them. This is usually something that would happen at the level load time in other games, but here it's based on contact. I wonder if this is a bug or a feature.

I don't think I've ever seen yellow light used like this

I dig it

A lot