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Metro Exodus map editor and SDK

Let's gooooo! Vacation time is gonna be fun this year. It looks amazing, with tons of features/tools, and I cannot wait to play with it! I can't believe they actually did it.
 
I can only imagine how much work it would take to create a map in Metro Exodus. Is the ray tracing baked into light sources and or reflective surfaces for Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition? Or does the map designer have to manually add those?
I once designed some skirmish maps for Red Alert 2, those were a huge time sink (especially if using AI scripts) but I'll bet it's nothing in comparison to creating a FPS map.
 
I can only imagine how much work it would take to create a map in Metro Exodus. Is the ray tracing baked into light sources and or reflective surfaces for Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition? Or does the map designer have to manually add those?
I once designed some skirmish maps for Red Alert 2, those were a huge time sink (especially if using AI scripts) but I'll bet it's nothing in comparison to creating a FPS map.
Good questions. There are different applications. Like, I think it's possible to do partial illumination, factor in only certain sources. But generally I think it applies to all sources globally, factors in the whole 3D scene. You can probably tweak what is and isn't detected as a source to use baked lighting instead of RTGI selectively. And I suspect something like that was done in Metro Enhanced at certain points. If I'm not mistaken, when performance was harder to get, the global illumination was often sort of a hybrid, with some key sources hitting on RT, but other parts of the scenes still being traditional. If you play around with performance settings for RTGI, the lower performance options tend to be less blatant and seem to hit on fewer things. Hence why the difference wouldn't always be so obvious versus a game like Control's implementation, where it looks like pretty much every single surface and source is reacting to the raytraced features and utterly crippled all but the absolute fastest first-gen RTX cards up. Compare that with Shadow of the Tomb Raider's 'don't bother' level miniscule shadows at low settings. It seems like they all balance how much RT they use for various reasons, by default, with totally pure applications not truly existing in the wild. Only the devs would know that.

It's also not like RT lighting is a flat improvement. Sometimes things need tweaking and curating. Additionally, I think the effect is material-dependent. Like... maybe a flag or special texture. At a minimum, the qualities of things like specular and normal bumpmaps will telegraph onto how the ray traced illumination ultimately looks, and how apparent it is on those surfaces. I think when it comes to reflections, it's triggered on a per-surface basis and in fact can even be blended with traditional SSR, to enable using less accuracy/range in the RT reflections and save performance. Degree probably goes by an indexed material quality of some sort, some variable that dictates how reflective that surface is, if the right boolean is up.

The main visual differentiators for light have to be things like ray length, filtering levels/accuracy, internal resolution, depth-related parameters, min/max range, intensity/balance of illumination and occlusion... things like that. And then you play around with materials to balance different elements, plan your source placement carefully.

Though honestly, there are some pretty major changes to the pipeline required for RT shaders. But you do still NEED a 2D raster pipeline at the end, after the RT-injected 3D pipeline. So it should in theory be possible to blend the output between raytraced and traditional as selectively as you could want, though some things may not wind up being as straightforward as they may seem when it comes to compatibility. It's up to the engine devs to decide how to incorporate it into their pipelines. That will play a major role in what you can and can't do.
 
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I can only imagine how much work it would take to create a map in Metro Exodus. Is the ray tracing baked into light sources and or reflective surfaces for Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition? Or does the map designer have to manually add those?
I once designed some skirmish maps for Red Alert 2, those were a huge time sink (especially if using AI scripts) but I'll bet it's nothing in comparison to creating a FPS map.

Well, there are always some nerds out there who're totally into it and live out their creativity. :D But without Steam workshop integration it won't reach a big audience.
Also the engine might be quiet harder to master than f.e. Unreal Engine.
 
Also the engine might be quiet harder to master than f.e. Unreal Engine.
That, I have NO doubt of. Unreal Engine is designed from the jump as a ready-to-use package of systems and tools for making a wide variety of games, as well as animated works. Whereas this was originally purpose-built for specific people to make a specific game. I think it will be a good while before everything is understood, and a community effort will be needed.

P.S. You mentioned only some of the nerds going for it.

And I don't disagree at all. However, I would never dare underestimate the amount of things a small coalition of nerds can accomplish. Great and fearsome things. Unimaginable things. It's that old 90/10 rule of content consumption and generation. We've been talking about FO4 this past week. There's a game with a bustling, longstanding and heavily storied modding scene, with not one central community, but multiple large hubs and bunches of smaller and more loosely-connected, personally-hosted creator circles. However, the majority of the people in that overall scene contribute little to nothing to it and are just there to consume and discuss the stuff. Tons of people make mods and contribute, but most of them only work with what's been established and don't necessarily expand the knowledge pool. Across the years, all of the big breakthroughs that basically laid down the foundations for how different mods are made, can basically be tracked to very small handfuls of people with that 1-track focus on actually figuring out how things work and developing methods and workflows for utilizing the engine's features, showing everyone else how to control and leverage its behavior with their finished works. Not everyone will want to play with the engine - that won't be something for most gamers. But if one of those oddballs who does play with it, makes something cool for the gamers via what they learn, maybe it can get some momentum that leads more people to want to uncover more about it.
 
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I like to see a big map like those seen in STALKER: Call of Pripyat implemented with the Metro Exodus engine, if it can do it.

I swear I still saw art/model assets from STALKER in Metro Exodus and definitely in Metro: Last Light.
 
I like to see a big map like those seen in STALKER: Call of Pripyat implemented with the Metro Exodus engine, if it can do it.

I swear I still saw art/model assets from STALKER in Metro Exodus and definitely in Metro: Last Light.

Incl. the loading times when moving between areas. :D Maps wheren't actually that big, it was just multiple smaller maps connected.
 
STALKER had at least one map that wasn't included in any of the variants of the game: Dead City. It was an interesting level too, it had a large apartment bldg., a department store and some sort of gymnasium.
It's strange that the developers of STALKER went through all the work of creating that map and then never used it. There might have been one other map created that was never used: a kind of spa. I came across them both in a STALKER mod called The Lost Alpha. It's a really well-done mod that adds some new maps as well as these unused maps from the original developer.
 
Yes, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha. That's the version I did play years ago since it was FREE. Was a buggy mess, esp. the car physics. Once I got a car I collected every piece of ammo and gear in the trunk & moved with the car from map to map, which was on some maps pure drama. Constantly quick saving because the car could get stuck, flip or blow up on any object. Was geared up to the teeth, made it inside the reactor and then I didn't find anything going forward.

Got the Stalker collection in the meanwhile but haven't played it yet. Let's see if the experience with the original is any better.
 
I hope the STALKER - Lost Alpha developers get some work developing maps for STALKER 2.
 
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