Frictional Games Forum (read-only)

I have been thinking about this a bit lately, and it seemed like the old tech related blog posts gave mixed impressions about the rendering techniques Amnesia actually uses... So I'm wondering here, does Amnesia actually use deferred rendering?

If it does, I'm curious if that can be used to circumvent the forward rendering 8 lights limit... I've always wondered if there's ways to have every light in Amnesia cast proper shadows, regardless of performance impact.

If not, then would a stencil-based fallback to the Penumbra style shadows have been possible for other lights, if it had been implemented in the Amnesia engine, or would there have been some other technical rendering roadblock to having both the forward shadowing and stencil shadowing?

For that matter, will SOMA by any chance be using Deferred rendering?

I'm curious of this after playing Alien Isolation, and seeing the magnificent lighting effects at play there, and I believe it used Deferred rendering. It makes me wonder if, through shader mods or some things, similar effects could be achieved in Amnesia or SOMA.

(10-13-2014, 01:07 AM)Malli R Wrote: [ -> ]I have been thinking about this a bit lately, and it seemed like the old tech related blog posts gave mixed impressions about the rendering techniques Amnesia actually uses... So I'm wondering here, does Amnesia actually use deferred rendering?

Yes

(10-13-2014, 01:07 AM)Malli R Wrote: [ -> ]If it does, I'm curious if that can be used to circumvent the forward rendering 8 lights limit... I've always wondered if there's ways to have every light in Amnesia cast proper shadows, regardless of performance impact.

You can use more than 8 lights, you can use 100 or more if you want BUT only 8 can cast shadows, that is not a deferred rendering or forward rendering limitation but a hardware limitation.

(10-13-2014, 01:07 AM)Malli R Wrote: [ -> ]If not, then would a stencil-based fallback to the Penumbra style shadows have been possible for other lights, if it had been implemented in the Amnesia engine, or would there have been some other technical rendering roadblock to having both the forward shadowing and stencil shadowing?

No matter if you use stencil shadows or shadow maps you can only have 8 shadow casting lights has i said above but the recommended is no more of 4 per frame.

(10-13-2014, 01:07 AM)Malli R Wrote: [ -> ]For that matter, will SOMA by any chance be using Deferred rendering?

If HPL2 is deferred rendering i'm pretty sure HPL3 will be also.

(10-13-2014, 01:07 AM)Malli R Wrote: [ -> ]I'm curious of this after playing Alien Isolation, and seeing the magnificent lighting effects at play there, and I believe it used Deferred rendering. It makes me wonder if, through shader mods or some things, similar effects could be achieved in Amnesia or SOMA.

I still didn't played Alien Isolation but the effects i see on videos are not really dependant on the engine being a deferred rendering engine or not, it is more if the engine uses PBR (physically based rendering) for its shaders and materials, HDR/bloom and other high end effects.