pouët.net

Hi there,

Seeing the "Bound by Plastic" thread, I thought it would be appropriate to present our latest game that has finally been released last week for Wii U after working nearly 3 years on it:

FAST Racing NEO

code by Pink/Abyss & Bartman/Abyss
gfx by FadeOne/ex-TRSi
music by Bjulin

If you're interested in the technical/graphical details, DigitalFoundry has a nice write-up/video

Damn, now I need Wii U.

I got it. It's really cool.

Looks cool for WiiU!

Congratulations! Looks awesome, much like my beloved Wipeout.

I guess something that looks like a worthy successor to F-Zero GX had to come from outside Nintendo, good job!

Yep this looks awesome. Great job.

It's fun and looks gorgeous!

Ahhh, perfect christmas present for myself. I bought the original Wii version ages ago... lot's of fun.

looks really nice. is it possible to get more info about the tools (video?) and the asset-pipeline used?

so far i liked all the shin'en releases.. will check that out over the weekend for sure.. :)
(and if you guys are reading: a new nanostray would be very welcome)

Looks great! :)

According to a german game magazine, the feeling of speed is unreal and only rarely archieved before. So, I find that a huge plus for a racing game.

what would you like to know? it's all inhouse-tech.

very wipeout indeed

Great game and visuals!

Yeah, more tech info would be nice indeed: Do you use STL? At which level of abstraction do you keep your rendering code?
Is the track surface modelled in maya or do you have a spline-based tool in your level editor for that?

Btw the DigitalFoundry writeup at times seems more like guesswork and copy&paste of info from your website/other articles..

Looks great, good job.
I need a new wipeout, so will grab this :)

The DigitalFoundry article is based in part on an interview they did with Pink. So I think it's mostly correct in general.

We don't use STL. Our rendering code is abstracted in a way to support multiple platforms in the same engine. It supports 3DS, Wii U, PS4.

All the game logic is separated from the core engine and written in our own (C++-like) custom scripting language and completely platform-independent.

The track/environment is built in our own level editor by placing tiles that have been modelled in Maya. The track tiles in Maya are based on splines to easily support different curves/sections. We have a custom shader plugin for Maya that allows us to edit and preview all the PBR/deferred materials directly in Maya.

Here's some "Behind the Scenes" we did for nintendolife.com: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Looks nice. What's up with the 640x720, is the WiiU really that shit?

All the PBR/deferred rendering, and the buttload of PostFX we slapped on there, ate fillrate like crazy. We first tried a dynamic resolution approach, but that still wasn't enough, so we halved the resolution and used a temporal reprojection pass to reconstruct missing pixels with the help of a velocity buffer. Don't forget the Wii U is just something like a Radeon 4000.

Cool.
What does your G-Buffer layout look like?

The article speaks about an 128-bit G-Buffer, but on twitter I read that your framebuffer is 3.6MB - which would rather mean 64-bit / 8 bytes at 640x720 !?

In anycase it seems you use a very compact representation (only z-depth instead of full XYZ position, normals as R11G11B10, etc.) ...

// albedo
colorBufferInfo.format = gfx::kDataFormatR8G8B8A8UnormSrgb; // albedo, property bit mask
// normals
colorBufferInfo.format = gfx::kDataFormatR16G16B16A16Snorm; // RG=normals x+y. z sign encoded in property bit mask. BA=normalizedvelocity buffer
// refract,smoothness,ao,shadow = RGBA
colorBufferInfo.format = gfx::kDataFormatR8G8B8A8Unorm;

In the hq video the image looks sort of deinterlaced (with some artifacts remaining) but vertically. is that what the output looks like too?

I suppose you don't notice it too much if you don't pause the picture.

That's some artifacts from the temporal reprojection with fast moving and/or transparent objects. Shouldn't be noticable much during gameplay.

looks very cool, definitely want that .. is it coming out for other platforms beside the Wii U?