The uncanny valley, for the unfamiliar, is that weird feeling you get when you look at something that almost looks like a person, but it isn’t quite right and inspires repulsion as a result. You may have felt it looking at screenshots of Detroit: Become Human. While with current hardware, it’s nearly impossible to cross that gap while maintaining a playable state, Epic Games CTO believes that we will soon be able to overcome this limitation.

Speaking with Gamesbeat, Kim Libreri discussed the hurdles that come with the uncanny valley in a rather frank manner, saying that while current GPUs within systems just can’t do everything to the right level, next generation will have no problems. “It’s going to end up being not about your technical expertise to make these things,” he said. “That technique will become ubiquitous over time. It’s got to be about telling an awesome story where people will want to watch that face get involved and do interesting things.”

The subject came about due to a question regarding the impressive Siren demo that Epic shared with attendants of the Game Developers Conference 2018. The new Siren technology that is now shipping with Unreal Engine 4.20 includes new skin shaders and facial animation techniques to bring up the quality of models in games using Unreal Engine. The new update to the Unreal Engine also means great things for weaker hardware such as Nintendo Switch.

Quantic Dream’s Lead Engine Programmer Ronan Marchalot was recently in attendance at GDC 2018, where he delved quite a bit into the technical challenges the French studio overcame while developing the Detroit: Become Human. While doing so, he revealed some interesting information on the upcoming game’s PS4 Pro enhancements.

Detroit: Become Human will run at 1080p and 30 frames-per-second on a base PS4 Pro, while on the PS4 Pro it’ll run at the same frame rate, but will instead be rendered at a 4K resolution. This, of course, won’t be native 4K, and will instead be achieved through checkerboard rendering. Both versions of the game will also support HDR.

The game also uses effects such as volumetric lighting, and Temporal Anti-Aliasing, all of which, Machalot explained, is compatible with checkerboard rendering, before speaking about things such as Temporal Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO), Temporal Screen Space Reflection (SSR), and Skin Screen Space Subsurface Scattering, all of which seem to have improved the game’s image quality.

Detroit: Become Human launches for the PS4 on May 25. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for continued coverage.

Thanks, WCCFTech!

Giant Sparrow made quite the impact last year with its long-in development adventure opus What Remains of Edith Finch. At a recent GDC panel, creative director Ian Dallas teased the studio’s next big project which is all about the “enchanting beauty of animal locomotion”. The presentation’s final slide featured birds, a strange toad and some fish. The studio is also looking for animators to join.

Over on the game’s official website, Giant Sparrow notes that it’s “still very early in development.” However, animation will be a huge focus “as a means of conveying mood, revealing character, and providing for player expression.”

But wait, there’s more. The project’s description says that it’s “drawing inspiration from works like Ico, Windosill, Spirited Away, The Life of Birds, and the spirit of Winsor McCay and early Disney films like Bambi and Fantasia that used (for the time) cutting edge technology to build something that didn’t feel technical at all, but instead felt personal and enchanting. That’s our hope anyway.”

It should be interesting to see how this plays out, especially given the team’s stellar work on The Unfinished Swan and What Remains of Edith Finch. The latter actually drew a fair amount of acclaim for its handling of themes like death and was built off of 13 different game prototypes that formed its foundation. You can check out our official review of the game to learn more about it. What Remains of Edith Finch is currently available for PC, Xbox One and PS4.

Since launching on September 26th, Epic Games’ Fortnite: Battle Royale has become a venerable phenomenon. It’s arguably more popular than PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, at least in terms of Twitch viewers and peak player counts over its lifetime, and has seen over 40 million downloads. However, it’s amazing how the mode was in development for only two months.

Epic’s Ed Zobrist revealed at a GDC panel (via PC Gamer) that Fortnite: Battle Royale had been in development right after the launch of Save the World. “We started working on this just about the time Save the World was coming out. Two months in development, launched in September 26. So let’s do some math: Save the World, the PvE game, launched July 21. [Battle Royale] comes out September 26.”

You’re probably wondering how the mode was created while the main development team focused on Save the World. As it turns out, some extra expertise was brought on, which also explains why the shooting is solid.

“It was the Unreal Tournament team that popped over to pick up the charge for us to basically put originally what we thought would be a PvP version inside our PvE game.”

Battle Royale and Save the World were meant to be packaged together with the former being an optional PvP mode and nothing more. The plan originally was to have Battle Royale behind the same $40 price tag. In the last two weeks of development, however, Epic decided to make it free to play and separate from Save the World. Zobrist noted that, “I doubt any major publisher could have pulled off this kind of pivot in the time we ended up doing it.”

Fortnite: Battle Royale continues to add updates like the new Blitz mode with shorter match times and additional loot, the recently added C4 Explosive and the upcoming Heavy Shotgun. What are your thoughts on the game thus far? Let us know below.

The Game Developer’s Conference for this year begins next month in San Francisco, and ahead of the show, Microsoft has taken the wraps off of its plans for the event- and they seem mostly geared towards its Azure and PlayFab solutions, and trying to make them more alluring for developers.

Microsoft will have a booth each dedicated to Azure and PlayFab, and also be hosting a dozen sponsored sessions through the week, covering, variously, the ID@Xbox program, new APIs for developers to use for delivering high quality graphics, the growing role of artificial intelligence in game development, using Microsoft’s Mixer to increase player engagement, and more. You can check out the full extent of Microsoft’s plans for yourself here.

GDC 2018 begins next week; since this is mostly an event for game developers, don’t expect any big new breaking news from it. Still, we have previously received some great, fun information that gives us insight into the development of our favorite games, so we can at the very least look forward to that this year as well.

The 2018 Game Developers Conference is right around the corner, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff coming up along with it. For instance, there’s going to be a panel that talks about DirectX and how the technology has evolved in all the years that it has been used as a vital part of graphics in video games.

Notably, developers working with DICE (who’re currently developing the upcoming Battlefield V), will be part of the panel. Johan Andersson, “Technical Fellow” at DICE, and Colin Barre-Brisebois, “Senior Software Engineer” at the studio, will be part of the panel, along with Matt Sandy, who is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft.

“For over 20 years, DirectX has been the platform used by game developers to create the fastest, most visually impressive games on the planet,” reads the introduction for the panel on the GDC website (linked above). “This talk is the best update on state-of-the-art innovation to get the best visuals from your game.”

GDC 2018 starts on March 19 and ends on March 23, and the panel on DirectX will take place on March 21. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for continued coverage.

GDC 2018 is almost here- and while this, being an event for industry professionals and developers (it’s in the name, folks, Game Developers Conference) isn’t a front for new announcements like E3 is, it’s still a place for companies to often hawk their wares.

One of those companies is Sony- who will be at GDC 2018 in a big way. Announcing their presence at the event on the PlayStation Blog, Sony confirmed that multiple PlayStation games will be available to demo at the event, including Gran Turismo Sport, Shadow of the Colossus, Monster Hunter World, and the upcoming Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom.

Sony will also be hosting panels at GDC- these include a couple about VR, which makes sense if they want to drum up more developer interest in their burgeoning PlayStation VR platform. Make sure to check out the full schedule on the PlayStation Blog- GDC will take place at Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA from March 19 to March 23, 2018.

One of the more intriguing mechanics in Sony Bend’s upcoming open world zombie shooter Days Gone looks to be the “Freak-O system”, which will govern the AI of how units spawn and interact, with one another, with the environment, and with the player character. Potentially, this could be the game’s most important system, as it could add spontaneity and emergence to the game.

Sony Bend will be discussing this mechanic at GDC this year. During an AI summit at the event, AI lead Darren Chisum, and senior staff programmer Tobias Karisson will discuss exactly how the Freak-O system works, and how it will play into the game’s combat.

There will be a second talk on Days Gone at GDC, this one by lead graphics programmer at Bend, Graham Aldridge, who will talk about how Sony Bend is using screen space shadows to maximize shadow detail in the game.

If you are looking forward to the game, these talks should prove to be very exciting for you. Days Gone is due out exclusively on the PS4 later this year.