Witcher 3 and Unity

Not sure if we have any Witcher fans here? After a couple of days of play I've been jotting notes (can't leave the dev hat off) whilst enjoying the game immensely. It's a good game and a great looking one, but a far cry from the gorgeous demo's we saw at conception.

One of the questions I had to ask is could this be made in Unity 5? Simply put, I couldn't think of a reason why not.

Besides the ample man hours for the main city's a lot of it seems to be SpeedTree and funnily enough the outskirt villages look like they're straight from a Manu 4K village asset pack. The impressive part of it comes from the sheer vastness and slick gameplay, everything appears professionally done.

In summary, great game, interesting plot, slick combat and a slight relief that "next gen" doesn't mean near CGI quality (yet). Which could be replicated in Unity, ok back to playing it ..

 

To me, Witcher 3 is one of those rare games where the 'visuals' come together to form a sum greater than its parts. The technical graphics are very good, but they combine with the atmosphere, the lighting choices, the colour grading, the day/night cycle to make a game that is simply gorgeous, believable and immersive. The only other game I can think of that pulls this off to such a high degree would be GTA 5 - both games make me stop and simply stare, thinking to myself 'how the heck did they do this?'.

From a technical point of view, I can't see why this wouldn't be possible in Unity 5, or at least theoretically - Unity would need to iron out the kinks in the Speedtree integration and GI solution first I would imagine.

On a side note, how good is the game? I'm about 10 hours in, just hit Velen and loving every minute of it. Geralt is such a badass!

 

Interesting enough, Manu 4k actually did do some work on Witcher 3:
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/07/18/interview-with-michael-orkisz-of-manufactura-k4-michael-o/

I can't see either why it couldn't be recreated within Unity.

I love the Witcher series and for the third one, I'm enjoying it immensely. It's been a long while since I've immersed myself in a game, especially one of this scale. Back to it

 

Yeah it's refreshing to see lots of love gone into the grand picture, instead of throwing rendering tech at it. Sure I've seen far superior lighting and post etc., but it doesn't detract from how good the artwork and attention to detail is. Which collectively makes it a very pretty game. There's been sweat and tears poured into it and you can tell.. Which for me kind of negates difference, I'll take pretty in any shape or form..

P.S agree with the GI and SpeeTree stuff, but we know Enlighten is capable of it hence Dragon Age Inquisition.

I'm swanning around Novigrad at the moment, not to spoil too much but Triss is back .. I'm loving it, best game I've played in years. DAI was a bit of a let down for me..

 

I think the biggest issue to figure out would be streaming game's world in efficient manner. Unity isn't built for games with a huge open world, so most of streaming things would need to be recreated. Bethesda and CDP Red have this advantage over Unity that their engines are built to handle open world so they don't have to worry about code side of things too much, they mostly just need to worry about cranking enough content.

But yes, it would be possible, but extremely hard to do - and I think it'd be easier just to license Bethesda's/CDP Red tech or even use CryEngine which also can do large open-world games or even CryEngine (lots of large MMOs such as ArcheAge uses it so it has openworld part right) than trying to reinvent the wheel.

 

That was my first thought when I saw it. I haven't played it myself. People seem to be liking the game.

Metro Redux and The vanishing of Ethan Carter set the bar I think.

 

Well this falls into amount of work, Unity could graphically match W3 I'm sure. But when were talking about size then it becomes a little more difficult. You can easily async textures etc. in Unity but the real issues come down to AI / Nav / PhysX etc.

If you wanted a large game, you'd be better off with UE4 far more than any other engine at this point. Straight to boot it supports 20KM2 blocks with everything sorted for you automatically.

With Unity I had 4X 512 HM's split and borders that split the world up into different levels, so it didn't take a massive dive. It comes down to decisions then, is loading times a big deal? Because UE4 is still really heavy in the dynamic lighting and particles section. It'll run seamlessly but has a massive performance impact as soon as lightmapping gets out of the question.

Not to turn this into a debate, it's just a different way of thinking.

 

Oh look! Another Witcher 3 thread. You all really must like the game.

Instead of going into another debate about this, i'm just going to link some games that have exploration, are big worlds, look awesome and made with Unity 5:

Ghost of a Tale:
http://www.ghostofatale.com/

PAMELA:

RUST:

Firewatch:

The Forest:

Little Devil Inside:

Now commence the usual comments of "But these aren't Witcher 3!"

 

Fixed
For starters, the Little Devil Inside devs said on an interview how Unity starts breaking down when you have to handle a lot of assets (not the scene, the game project).
And it is a known fact how the Forest even with its aggresive LoD every 5m and compact areas have a pretty horrible performance.
Won't even bother commenting on the clean sci-fi look of PAMELA, the comments on the Steam page of RUST and the toon rendering of Firewatch

Not that I disagree Witcher 3 could be made on Unity, but those are bad examples.

 

Nice list Andy.

In any case, our game is open world. There's a lot of problems in Unity 5 which actively reduce the quality of of open world games for smaller teams (but probably represent no problem for big teams) and those are:

- efficient culling groups (which is being worked on in some manner)

- efficient streaming of assets in a no-brainer way (which is being worked on as far as I'm aware) - kind of essential this gets solved better on unity's side.

- shadow quality - with open world, you're asking for time of day, and for large draw distances, this is a huge problem at the moment.

Our pressure points are generally in that it "takes an awful lot of time and effort" to improve shadows and streaming new assets / textures / sounds / meshes / etc in.

I don't actually have any barriers in Unity 5 for a large open world game, except for the fact it a) won't look as good as it could and b) won't run as nicely as it could until Unity improve those parts.

So yeah Unity can very much do open world (up to around 10 miles!) but expect to cut a few corners if you haven't got a resident expert on the team dealing just with open world problems.

Pretty sure Unity knows about all the problems, I'm just sharing some of ours on topic.

 

@Andy Touch

Yes we really do like Witcher 3, although I'm not sure what relevance the games you posted have. Different challenges, different ball game, apples to oranges. All games combined could probably fit into one small square of the W3 map..

All that and the cherry on top is it looks very pretty and the performance is good.

 

I don't see why it couldn't have been done in Unity. I was also surprised that it wasn't quite as beautiful as the promos. I'm running it at 1920 x 1080 with all settings on Ultra. It still looks great though! I'd much rather have good immersive gameplay than shiny bling bling graphics. My biggest complain with Witcher 3 to be honest is the controls. It's great with a gamepad (Xbox One controller), but I'm traditionally a keyboard / mouse guy when it comes to PC games. And I'm left handed so I map things weird, although I still use the mouse with my right. The problems I had were not being able to map enough keys close to the arrows to perform all of the actions, and when using the mouse, the camera is not very smooth, so it's definitely a game made to be played with a controller.

 

What's the largest world (terrain not space) size used in a Unity game?

As the Witcher 3 is apparently:

 

Oh, it wasn't a joke post!

And I'm not sure why you would dis-allow PAMELA because of the clean look, RUST because of internet comments and toon rendering in Firewatch. All three are big worlds that look amazing.

 

@Arowx

Which is a silly size, one an Indie wouldn't try and come any where near to if they have any sense ..

@Andy Touch

Have you actually played the game, do you understand the challenges presented?

@Dustin Horne

I have to agree, the controls do feel a little clunky in areas. Also the hair PhysX is a frame rate destroyer, one of the UE devs has been looking at the shadow tech they used and is quite intrigued at how they pulled it off.

 

I was running with all settings on Ultra / Highest and Plex server transcoding a movie and streaming it to my wife's Roku in the background, but I also just rebuilt my machine and it's a bit of a beast.

 

@Andy Touch

I love Firewatch. But, to be fair I understand why @ShadowK is fighting so hard for his corner. It's the "I have a vision" corner, and as much as you could do something stylistically and get a great game out of it (and I come from the camp that says cut your cloth according to size), what you really want is what's in your head.

Me, I want to make something entirely in an NPR style of Frank Frazetta. I'll start posting demands for oil paint filters in the near future!

As for Witcher 3, very pretty game. Less glossy than they originally showed, but that reveals that they struggle too, even when building their own engine from the ground up.

Incidentally, I prefer it with AA, motion blur and HairWorks (Ken & Barbie Mode) disabled. Then I can pretend it's 1990 and I'm seeing something even more amazing.

 

Kind of impossible at the moment where we have to prebake the entire scene for GI :...(

 

Well, it isn't really 136 though, is it, it's 72 at most, as it's split into 2 maps, as mentioned earlier.
So just under 2x larger than Skyrim as a technology comparison (though remember all cities and dungeons/caves in Skyrim are instanced too, which makes a huge difference).

And 72 sq km really pales into insignificance when compared to other titles (remember Daggerfall is well over 1000x bigger than The Witcher 3, for perspective). Not to diminish anything about the game, it's very good of course, but it certainly isn't as large as people are making it out to be, not in the grand scheme of things. In terms of the content and amount of gameplay, undoubtedly, there's a lot there.

But the real question is, is anyone really trying to make The Witcher 3 in Unity? Personally I doubt it, if you have the team size and talent available to make such a game, you'd probably make your own engine, as CD Projekt RED did.

Large size doesn't make a good game, though.

Regardless, it's a phenomenal game, I look forward to playing more!

 

Unity is perfectly capable of everything, and staff and fanboys alike are quick to point this out.

But it's often not very good at what it does (or can be dramatically improved), and this is the main thing that holds my team back. I do have faith that there are actually people at Unity who have a huge amount of pride in the engine and want to see it improve so that's probably why I stick around - I respect, admire and appreciate the hard work that is ongoing.

Will I always stick around? well unfortunately the game comes first and one must choose the engine for the game, not necessarily "what's easier" because it'll be considerably easier if wheels do not need to be reinvented, regardless of API or surface difficulty.

 

Exactly, the way it's approached / attitude sometimes really irks. Instead of reviewing what other key game makers are doing to improve, there seems to be a sense of "ohhh" look at these great games made with Unity not really touching on what's better / why and how Unity can improve.

I've already seen one of the UE engine developers taking notes, plus some Unity staff already know there's no Phsyx origin reset and they know enlighten wouldn't be up to the task as is. AI / Nav would have to be a re-write.. So somebody is passionate and understands the score there. Although what ever gets done about anything is anyone's guess..

You can make anything out of notepad++, kind of defeats the point of an engine though.

@3agle

Well in Skyrim as others have mentioned there were loading points for caves, cities, houses etc. still doesn't mean it's not a massive game in it's entirety, there were separate maps for some of the DLC.

The major feat comes from the amount of detail in a world that's pretty big, as someone whose tried making a 20KM2 game on one map knows exactly how painful even that is. Sure I get streaming boundaries kind of negates that it couldn't be near unlimited in size if done right. The issue was getting the 4 to 8 tiles in view with great detail to run performantly when lightmapping was out the equation..

Not to mention the in-ordinate amount of technical knowhow and technical challenges involved. Bit of a fools errand, but you never know until you try..

 

Oh I totally agree, it's not really a comparison of the games as games, more the technical systems and world size.
Though there are games like Fuel and Test Drive Unlimited that have giant maps, non-procedural. Of course there's less content due to those specific examples being driving games.

I guess the point to take home is that every game is different and has different requirements for it's worlds.
Which is probably why there's a lot of disagreement here as to if Unity can handle a world like The Witcher 3s'.

I'd say Unitys' Terrain and loading systems have always left a lot to be desired, which will probably impact large worlds more than anything. Supposedly they are getting an upgrade at some point, it'd be really nice to hear if any of the [Official] threads are actually being acted upon...

Oh I don't disagree, I was focussing more on the pure size of world rather than the game plus content all in. I've never attempted building such a large world, so I'm not aware of the actual limitations you'd likely run into, but typically with something so ambitious as The Witcher 3 you have to imagine the better choice is a custom engine. Not to suggest Unity couldn't do it, just not perhaps as well.

 

I'm really disappointed and surprised by the lack of polish with controls/animations. It feels pretty stiff and unresponsive. Also the combat areas are pretty bad, not open enough, uneven terrain and cluttered with objects to bump into. Loving the rest of the game though.

 

I'm getting towards the end (I think) Y'know what, I recon it's a little too big.

Novelty starts to wear off after a while, I think it could of been probably one map and polished in other areas. Although it is a game unlike no other and it is thoroughly enjoyable.

Agree with @MurDocINC

It's about getting that middle ground, there are areas that needed more work and others that are a little overdone.

 

CD Projekt made huge work on culling because they customized a lot Umbra 3 culling engine bringing streaming and storage partitions. You can read the article here :
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020231/Solving-Visibility-and-Streaming-in
And their team about 3D engine core is somewhat like 15 people if 'im not wrong.

 

Obviously, it says Umbra with a big logo when you start the game up ..

Level design is a big factor in the whole thing, the more you can occlude the better. Keep tall mountains close, don't use flat planes and you can even get around city loading if you keep it local to the tile. Lot's of ways to skin a cat, but I'm impressed with the CD Projekt team they have done a bang up job.

All the techniques are well known, If I had the man power, money and time I'd definitely look to build my own engine. It all comes down to money at the end of the day, skillsets, tools everything..

 

That looks complicated as hell.

I think the point he was making, is that it's complicated as hell. And that they needed close support with Umbra to achieve it (not to mention a server farm lol). I guess, that's about the equivalent of a Unity source license with advanced support?

 

I just wanted to point out that there is many solutions for open worlds games, if you push level of detail highter you will need to put lot more work to optimize your game.
Witcher 3 is super optimized for such detailled outdoor game, and it runs at 1080 and 60 fps on PS4, they did an amazing job on consoles and their hard work on Umbra3 paid a lot.It's also investment on their part, as thay will be bale to re use their customisation work for future games.

I think hight skilled teams matters a lot (CD PRojeckt, Cryteck ...)
The technique they used was not known as Umbra 3 was not made for Open World games, and they just customized Umbra 3 to work with their idea that was data sectors for example. They had a good team and trying a new direction (open world), they put lot of time to bring it to reality and make it good.

They also used amazing techniques for terrain (blending, holes, shadows, vegetation) :
http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/GDC2014/Presentations/Gollent_Marcin_Landscape_Creation_and.pdf
If Unity was making some Oblivion or Witcher 3, we would get such terrain features , in my dreams

 

If ou take a look at some GDC tech papers you will see that many companies just bring new tools and new techniques each time to suite their needs, because there is no such global solution available covering their specific needs and customizable as they want.

Some example like specific articles system in Infamous on PS4:
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020158/The-Visual-Effects-of-inFAMOUS
(The engine post morterm is interesting also)
http://adruab.net/wp-images/GDC14_infamous_second_son_engine_postmortem.pdf

 

Funny you mention that because they use some Unity specific techniques curtsey of Robert Cupisz.

 

Not disagreeing that it's not well optimised on console, but ...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-face-off

 

I didn't know , but i mentionned it because it is some good exemple of custom engine and custom made tools.

 

Regarding locking to 30fps, it's a bit hit and miss in Unity I've found. Any idea why that is? I've tried capping via Application.targetFrameRate and also every 2nd vsync but neither appear as smooth as most console titles.

Sensible use of Amplify Motion of course.

 

I've read somewhere that in recent versions (from something like 4.5) they made some changes that introduced some occasional jittery, maybe that's why you don't see it smooth.

 

Umbra is supposed to be a generic solution and it's a good one. But there will always be ways to push and exceed.

It's a two fold thing, firstly hardware has improved vastly over the last 10 years and secondly these well known techniques have also improved.

Witcher 3 whilst performant for what it is still requires a lot of juice and a modern GPU.

A game like this is not for small teams or the faint of heart. Plus as an indie you can make better looking games that are a fair bit smaller by using lightmaps. So a better selling point.

I was delving deep into lighting and composition for arch viz in UE4, 100 bounces and a custom lightmap .ini with good post equates to some gorgeous looking scenes with basic materials anyone could do. It's not practical for games as the size of the lightmaps even under compression are way too large but a compromise can be made.

I tried it with Unity but got bored of waiting, it definatley needs work as a small village can take days even at 2 Texels. A client based solution definatley would not go a miss..

 

I've noticed off-kilter jitter when animating through code. It's a bit weird, as it doesn't seem to affect anything running off animation clips. To eyeball it you'd think it's GC stutter (but it's not, in my cases anyway).

I'm thinking it's related to internal timers and Time, but that /may/ be just in my case. If it's not just me, then I'd sure welcome a larger push to look into it.

 

I know it's not my code. I don't actually have any allocations going on, in various tests. It might be as you point out - some sort of internal nonsense going on. But without proof other than 'eyeballing it' I don't think Unity will act.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong but looks like the Umbra streaming that they used was only used to load less data into memory in runtime? It was usually loading about 25% of total occlusion data for the whole level at once (the big area, 8kmx8km, 250MB-300MB total cooked occlusion data, like whole Skellige or Velen/Novigrad).

Off course it's always better to have less memory used and it's very important for consoles but even 250MB-300MB of data loaded in memory (for such a big level) is worth it if you can use occlusion culling.

We should also have in mind that both areas (Skellige and Novigrad/Velen) are huge and dense levels that are only in biggest games like The Witcher, GTA, etc.

As for the Unity. It would be probably achievable by splitting a level into smaller tiles/levels and baking occlusion data for each one (then streaming levels based on players position) while having terrain tiles and biggest buildings/objects (only the biggest objects are required for distance, even on very low LOD) on global level that is always loaded.

 

Actually they are aware of it, but seem they still haven't managed to fix it:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/stuttering-issue-on-unity-4-2.203552/page-2

 

Stuttering on a mobile game is a no go for me, for 2D you have smooth 2D egines that don't have that problem.

This is not the best solution in Unity, better go fully dynamic and wait for a future dynamic GI solution possible.
So did you switch 3D engine once again ? I hope not , or you'll never finish the game.

 

You're probably right there, nah UE4 for all major projects and Unity for side projects / own stuff.

 

Not sure if that's the same thing, though it could always share roots. This isn't a huge stutter (well stutter /sounds/ bigger than jitter ), more like a regular/sometimes irregular small glitch, but notably it's not just on mobile and it affects all transformations (not just 2D rigidbodies).

 

I've just noticed that streaming Occlusion Data from Umbra in Unity is not possible at this moment.

Anyway they are working on it at Unity and Joachim Ante said, that the native solution for baking occlusion, navmesh, gi/lighting etc. in Unity will be to load all scenes in editor (multiscene editing mode) and bake everything at once. Then Unity will be loading appropriate data chunks based on levels that are loaded in runtime.

I think that these are GREAT news for anyone interested in open worlds and level streaming with Unity. I hope that they would also introduce native solution for origin reset that would work with streaming out of the box in the future

As for the OC. Joachim said, that generally it would not be practical to bake areas separately with Umbra.

They would probably add more workflows in the future but this solution is first on the roadmap.

AFAIK CDPRed used similar workflow (baking everything at once and then streaming chunks in runtime).

BTW. Baking separate Navmesh data and additive loading is already supported but you need to use off mesh links.

You can read more comments about that here: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/08/04/multi-scene-editing/

 

Speaking of the witcher 3 - has anyone tried changing the language? The lip synch changes to the new language! I switched it to japanese + subs to bring back fond memories of dragon's dogma, and I was surprised to see the character models actually move their mouths for the new language

 

Could it be done in Unity?.. Probably
Should it be done in Unity?.. depends on the developer.
Best engine for a Witcher 3 clone... REDengine 3!

I love the Witcher series, but I decided to put The Witcher 3 on hold after less than 2 hours of gameplay.

I have to play on Medium if I want to have more than 30FPS. (Considering I have an i7-4770k, One of the fastest GTX780 out there and 16GB of fast ram, that's just unacceptable for the nerd that I am. )

Thread on NVIDIA forum regarding the Kepler GPU/driver issue: https://forums.geforce.com/default/...s-performance-in-the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-/69/

 

Yup, my 780 is pretty much getting it's ass handed to it by a 980M laptop GPU. There is no valid reason for a 980M to be faster, I've had the card replaced three times so I doubt all of them could of been faulty.

Not been impressed by it one bit, I'll swap to the 390X as soon as it's out.

 

Interesting... is it possibly a feature like HairWorks that isn't supported by the Kepler cards and maybe is CPU Bound? Just a guess. I've been playing Witcher 3 with a 980 and all settings on Ultra, but it's Maxwell based.

 

@ShadowK, Never thought I would of said so, but I might do that too!
Hello Red, it's been a while! (ATI 9800 series!!)

The GTX960 has slightly better performance than the GTX780, too..

@Dustin Horne, Yup Maxwell chip don't have that issue. It's only Kepler from what I know.

 

It's not just been the Witcher, even with UE4 the 980M comes out on top most times by 10 - 15 FPS (3 - 5ms latency difference). Quite a few "Nvidia" based games runs worse as well, ahh well not fussed I'll get it replaced sooner or later.

 

The problem is that there are many proofs that all 7xx series have lost a lot in performance after the 347.xx drivers update. I've notice lag in GTA V (when snipping, it's unplayable for me, while it was perfectly fine the first month I was playing the game).

Apparently Project Cars is another one that is really suffering if you are using a Kepler card.