
Metal Gear Solid V – Graphics Study - jsheard
http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2017/12/15/mgs-v-graphics-study/
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michaelsbradley
Slightly off topic, but hopefully a fun anecdote:

Sometime in the second half of 1988 — I was 11 or 12 years old at the time — I
was determined to beat the original Metal Gear (North American NES
version[+]). I got up one Saturday morning, played straight through to the
early afternoon; I had the NES hooked to a little 10-inch color CRT in my
bedroom. I don't remember writing down any save-point passcodes (if there even
were any, memory is hazy; or maybe I was down to my last re-spawn despite save
point), and I don't recall having gotten too far in previous attempts...
challenging game! It was apparent to me that I was reaching the final stage of
the game, big boss ahead. My kid brother had been hovering around for hours,
and I declared my bedroom off-limits until victory or defeat was certain. All
of a sudden, my brother comes bouncing in and says, "Here, have a jolly
rancher!" — which was appreciated momentarily, it was even watermelon flavor,
which (God knows why) I savored for some reason — and then granny passed the
hard candy in my direction. It ricocheted off the back of my chair and
then....... struck the reset button on the NES!!! All was lost, and I was too
devastated to pursue him downstairs in anger. About 6 weeks later, I finally
beat the game.

[+]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJPVTylzt80](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJPVTylzt80)

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CryoLogic
Not only was MGSV5 great graphically, it also was very performant. I always
wondered if they where using rendering tricks like the ones known in Just
Cause (loading in 2d assets when very far away and than swapping them with 3d
assets as you get close) or similar.

~~~
rootlocus
Someone else replied pointing out that what you're referring to are called
imposters. I would also like to add they're a very very common technique, and
something Wolfire Games added to their indie game Overgrowth in 2010, with a
complete explanation:
[http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/10/Imposters](http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/10/Imposters)

Yes, you can expect modern games to use any and all tricks available to
squeeze performance. Imposters are an example of a LOD (Level of Detail)
technique, which is standard in all game engines.

~~~
x0re4x
Imposters seems to be really old technique - see Trespasser 1998:

"The engine also used two other big tricks to lower the poly count: The most
famous was "object caching": While rendering objects, the distant ones would
be rendered to a cache and drawn as sprite on a quad. This trick originally
resulted in mixed results since the mesh would remain a sprite too close from
the player and changed from 2D to 3D in a very noticeable way as see in the
two next images"
([http://fabiensanglard.net/trespasser/index.php](http://fabiensanglard.net/trespasser/index.php))

~~~
drharby
Another fabien post!!! Can never get enough of his writeups, no fluff just
good review analysis and code.

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coolspot
After I played MGSV first time, I was stunned by it's graphics. Everything is
so perfect: materials, lighting, camera movement, character animation.

Looking forward for next Kojima's game - Death Stranding.

~~~
speps
> Looking forward for next Kojima's game - Death Stranding

Because one person makes a game... sorry it's my pet peeve, a game is made by
a team not a single name.

~~~
fareesh
When people reference Kojima, they do it referring specifically to his unique
inputs to the game, which are pure genius.

~~~
vgstories
His contributions seem to be the inane dialogue, impenetrable cutscenes, and
nonstop flogging of his own name in the constantly repeated credits, plus the
"problematic" take on women. does he actually do anything with the parts of
his games that aren't terrible? i see no evidence

~~~
JCSato
I've been playing through the Metal Gear series in release order, starting the
MSX games, currently on Peace Walker.

It took me until 3 to actually think Kojima was decent at storytelling, and
then 4 got me onboard the "Kojima is a genius" train. Metal Gear's _backdrop_
is a fever dream about the military industrial complex, but the storytelling
is always much more focused on exploring themes and ideals than it is
dedication to realism.

FWIW, there has been a significant increase in the quality of his work. Solid
1 was kind of puerile and hamfisted in its approach to its themes, in a kind
of "terrible shounen anime" kind of way. Solid 2 was a really amazing
prediction of the way surveillance works in a modern society, but was
needlessly obtuse. Solid 3 was way easier to digest, and Solid 4 was sublime.
But neither really work in isolation from the first two, and slogging through
them definitely takes a lot of patience, so I see where you're coming from.

I guess the way I'd summarize is: a lot of people talk about abandoning
setting details for other motives (e.g. there are monsters in the witcher, so
why can't there be a sizeable black population), but Kojima is one of the few
I'd trust to actually pull it off - I just need it to not be ~1999 Kojima.

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freeflight
Does anybody know who actually owns Fox Engine at this point? Afaik it was
Kojima Productions who created the engine, but Kojima and Konami split.

Yet the Fox Engine wiki lists Metal Gear Survive as the only upcoming Fox
Engine game, not Death Stranding. Death Stranding's wiki says it uses the
Decima game engine. That, in turn, was developed by Guerilla Games and Kojima
Productions.

So from that situation, I guess it's Konami who now owns the Fox Engine? I
wonder how that ended up happening, Kojima's own studio developing an engine
and then he doesn't even get to keep it.

~~~
spondyl
Kojima Productions, pre-Death Stranding, was only a subsidiary under Konami.

As I understand, its purpose was to relieve Kojima of business
responsibilities that a traditional executive would have. I would assume it
was only a studio on paper and all assets and IP were still retained by
Konami.

I didn't realise until now but Fox Engine has also been used in the yearly PES
Soccer games as well!

After Kojima left, he reformed the studio as an actual independent company
which is backed and funded by Sony with complete creative freedom.

He toured studios around the world and decided to work with Guerilla Games,
who built Decima for their title Horizon: Zero Dawn.

They're simply using the engine and collaborating with Guerilla to make tweaks
and modifications to suit their title.

I believe it's not unlike the working relationship that Insomniac and Naughty
Dog had in the PS2 days, where they would share tech and insights.

So yeah, tldr: Fox Engine was always owned by Kojima. Kojima Productions was
once a subsidiary and is now an independent entity. KojiProd is essentially
borrowing Guerilla Games Decima Engine rather than building one from scratch.

P.S. I'm just a fan, not anyone who is speaking with authority ;)

~~~
freeflight
> Kojima Productions, pre-Death Stranding, was only a subsidiary under Konami.

One would assume that if Kojima is already influential enough to get a whole
studio, even named after himself, he might as well ensure, at least partial,
ownership of the properties created by that studio.

These contract negotiations, for the studio's original formation, must have
been a really awkward process.

~~~
spondyl
On a side note, I was hoping to look up the subsidiary under the Japanese
companies register out of curiosity but unfortunately they don't provide free
and/or unregistered search like the one here in my country.

They also don't run their service on weekends meaning they quite literally
shut down registration and other functions. I feel like that defeats the
entire purpose of having a website!

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agumonkey
Even though I knew most of this, I'm still surprised how many layers are
rendered every frame

~~~
mjb
Yeah, it's absolutely mind blowing. My last involvement with graphics
programming was the 90s demoscene, and fill-rate was a massive constraint on
doing cool things. Doing the amount of math these modern engines do per frame,
let alone multiple times per pixel, would have been unimaginable.

It's amazing and cool how much GPUs have changed all that, and the techniques
are so different and constrained in such different ways.

~~~
agumonkey
I also like how if you remove most of the passes you end up with virtua
fighter

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frik
Great blog post. Maybe he will post another article about MGSV5 open world
rendering, as it's one of the highlights of the Fox engine.

Anyway RAGE engine from Rockstar (GTA IV+V, RDR 1+2) is probably one of the
most advanced engines, so much details in rendering.

[http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-
graphic...](http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-
study-part-3/)

A detailed comparison of open world game engines would be interesting with
focus on LOD, streaming and rendering techniques.

    
    
      * RAGE (GTA5/RDR2)
      * AnvilNext (AC:O, GR:Widelands)
      * Frostbite3 (NfS:Payback, SW:Battlefront2)
      * Just Cause 3
      * Watch Dogs 2
      * Mafia 2/3
      * Dunia (Far Cry 4/5)
      * Decima (Horizon Zero Dawn)
      * Fox (MGSV)
      * REDengine (Witcher 3)
      * Minecraft (Java + new C++ Bedrock ed)
      * Genome (Elex)
      * CryEngine/Lumberyard
      * Unity
      * Unreal 4 (PUBG)
    

It's impressive how such game engines provide seamless high speed travel with
vehicles (cars, airplanes) in an open world environment.

