Microsoft Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - update (12/21): "The Ray Tracing Breakdown" (Digital Foundry)

[Best]

3 minutes ago, Biggie said:

How do I open the stone door???

 

Do you have the difficulty for puzzles on easy? I figured it out pretty quickly on that setting. 

[Biggie]

4 minutes ago, Best said:

 

Do you have the difficulty for puzzles on easy? I figured it out pretty quickly on that setting. 

Yeah I got it lol. The game has a nice mixture of action combat/exploration/discovery/loot/and story. Reminds me of Uncharted kinda but with more investigation. 

[Best]

1 minute ago, Biggie said:

Yeah I got it lol. The game has a nice mixture of action combat/exploration/discovery/loot/and story. Reminds me of Uncharted kinda but with more investigation. 

 

Yea it's a little more in depth than Uncharted. I'd continue to stick with it before giving up on it.

[Best]

@TwinIon @Firewithin

 

You can travel back to the college and the Vatican. I am at the Vatican now doing some side content.

 

You just go to the travels tab and select where you want to go. 

[Biggie]

I’m playing this tonight and wearing my Indy cos-play outfit @Best

                                                 

[Best]

1 minute ago, Biggie said:

I’m playing this tonight and wearing my Indy cos-play outfit @Best

                                                 

 

lol. Today really showed me how big this game is. Egypt is pretty large with different quests to do throughout. The story got really interesting today as well. 

[Biggie]

48 minutes ago, Best said:

 

lol. Today really showed me how big this game is. Egypt is pretty large with different quests to do throughout. The story got really interesting today as well. 

are you playing now?

[Best]

26 minutes ago, Biggie said:

are you playing now?

 

No I was playing this morning. 

[Biggie]

45 minutes ago, Best said:

 

No I was playing this morning. 

are you going to play tonight? maybe we can put on our PJ's at the same time and get Indiana Jones'd up in this mother fucker.

[Best]

16 minutes ago, Biggie said:

are you going to play tonight? maybe we can put on our PJ's at the same time and get Indiana Jones'd up in this mother fucker.

 

Lol no I'm not playing tonight. I'll continue my journey tomorrow morning. I think I'm on my way out of Egypt and going somewhere else. 

[Biggie]

25 minutes ago, Best said:

 

Lol no I'm not playing tonight. I'll continue my journey tomorrow morning. I think I'm on my way out of Egypt and going somewhere else. 

You’re not gaming at all on a Friday night?

[Best]

1 minute ago, Biggie said:

You’re not gaming at all on a Friday night?

 

No. I gamed for a long time today. 

[Best]

@Biggie Where are you in the game?

[Biggie]

1 hour ago, Best said:

@Biggie Where are you in the game?

I did some side stuff. Returned some piece of a tablet to Antonio.  Now I’m doing another side quest for some nun down in the sewers. 

[Biggie]

@Best got some IRL stuff to do but I’ll be playing this later. Making great progress in the Vatican. Amazing how detailed everything is. I’d like to finish everything before heading to the next area. Checking my journal I’m getting close. Then I’ll work on the main quest again. 

[Best]

2 hours ago, Biggie said:

@Best got some IRL stuff to do but I’ll be playing this later. Making great progress in the Vatican. Amazing how detailed everything is. I’d like to finish everything before heading to the next area. Checking my journal I’m getting close. Then I’ll work on the main quest again. 

 

Ok. Yea, I went back to the Vatican yesterday to do side content. One of them is helping out the nun (Gina). Like I said I'm close to leaving Egypt as well. 

[Best]

Ran into a pretty cool scenario today. I'm still in Egypt. 

[Biggie]

4 hours ago, Best said:

 

Ok. Yea, I went back to the Vatican yesterday to do side content. One of them is helping out the nun (Gina). Like I said I'm close to leaving Egypt as well. 

Did you beat the fighters in the underground boxing arena? I can’t beat the bigger guy. 

[Best]

2 minutes ago, Biggie said:

Did you beat the fighters in the underground boxing arena? I can’t beat the bigger guy. 

 

No. I only checked that out but didn't pursue it. I'm not aiming to do all side content because I usually struggle to finish games as it is. Today I focused on the main story. 

[Best]

On the medium difficulty I've died a few times with fist to fist combat. The larger guys can beat the shit out of you with two punches. 

 

The guns are extremely under powered. 

[Biggie]

3 hours ago, Best said:

On the medium difficulty I've died a few times with fist to fist combat. The larger guys can beat the shit out of you with two punches. 

 

The guns are extremely under powered. 

If I sneak up on an enemy and get a clean head shot it’ll usually take him out. Anything less than that you will use multiple bullets. Bashing them with a melee weapon is a much more efficient choice. Are you playing this tonight?

[Best]

4 minutes ago, Biggie said:

If I sneak up on an enemy and get a clean head shot it’ll usually take him out. Anything less than that you will use multiple bullets. Bashing them with a melee weapon is a much more efficient choice. Are you playing this tonight?

 

Yea I always try to use stealth first against the enemies. It's a guarantee knock out if you do it correctly.

 

No I'm not playing any games at night. I game all morning. I was in a rhythm of playing my deck at night but at the moment I am not using it. Like I've said, if I were working I'd be gaming at night time. 

[eventide11]

37 minutes ago, Best said:

 

Yea I always try to use stealth first against the enemies. It's a guarantee knock out if you do it correctly.

 

No I'm not playing any games at night. I game all morning. I was in a rhythm of playing my deck at night but at the moment I am not using it. Like I've said, if I were working I'd be gaming at night time. 

What are you playing on deck right now?

[Best]

9 minutes ago, eventide11 said:

What are you playing on deck right now?

 

Currently nothing. I was pretty deep into Dragon Quest III HD-2D but suddenly dropped it for BG3. 

[Biggie]

3 hours ago, Best said:

 

Yea I always try to use stealth first against the enemies. It's a guarantee knock out if you do it correctly.

 

No I'm not playing any games at night. I game all morning. I was in a rhythm of playing my deck at night but at the moment I am not using it. Like I've said, if I were working I'd be gaming at night time. 

What time do you start playing this in the morning? I need to set my alarm so we are playing at the exact same time. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

[Biggie]

11 hours ago, Biggie said:

What time do you start playing this in the morning? I need to set my alarm so we are playing at the exact same time. 

@Best

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's full ray tracing upgrade is beautiful

WWW.EUROGAMER.NET

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Digital Foundry gets to grips with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's full RT upgrade on PC. What does it do and is an RTX 4090 really required?

 

Quote

 

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is shaping up to be one of my favourite games of all time, capturing the look and feel of the classic movies - and its rendering plays a big part in that. The standard game ships with a form of ray-traced global illumination, but Machine Games has gone one step further for the PC version, delivering a full ray tracing upgrade. This turns an already great-looking game into an even better one, often bridging the gap between RTGI and full offline rendering. It has its limitations - which we'll go into - but overall, it's a spectacular upgrade. Yes, it can be demanding on hardware, but you can still enjoy the lion's share of the benefits on RTX 4070-class hardware at 1440p resolution.

 

The nature of full RT is that it automatically 'fixes' a lot of the issues in the standard game renderer and one of the most glaring is its shadows - or more specifically, the cascaded shadow maps cast from the sun or the moon. Moving forward and backward in the game shows big visual discontinuities, flipping between blocky shadow map representations very close to the camera in a highly distracting way. Full RT fixes that, greatly enhancing shadows quality, realism and detail.

 

The 'popping' shadow map cascade problem disappears completely, while also reducing aliased noise in the shadows close up to the player camera, most obviously seen in the jungle sections. Without full RT, shadow maps cannot resolve final detail from the trees, so details pop in and out of existence on each frame. RT shadows present all the detail from the leaves and branches above, with full soft shadow detail and none of the awkward aliasing or popping found in the base game. Also, the basic nature of RT tech ensures you get accurate penumbral effects: shadows close to the casting object are sharp, becoming more diffuse the further away from the object they are.

 

Small detail also benefits: Indiana Jones and Great Circle has a lot of high quality geometry and often, objects in the game are either excluded from the shadow map pass or they are far too small for the shadow map to resolve correctly or accurately. RT sun shadows, on the other hand, are calculated on a per-pixel basis, giving each and every rivet, blade of grass or little trinket perfectly sharp and accurate self-shadows, capable of dramatically increasing the object's apparent quality and material look.

 

Full RT is also transformative on glass rendering. Without it, glass reflections are wholly rendered via static cube maps - basic approximations of the scene, with a very low resolution and often misaligned with the environment, looking 'wrong'. Full RT option handles reflections, giving all the glass surfaces in the game sharp ray-traced reflections that resolve the issue, rendering the correct visual information in the scene. The world looks a lot more alive in comparison and glass takes on a new sheen, literally. There is not too much glass scattered across Dr Jones' world-trotting adventure, but it is there often enough for it to be an appreciated upgrade over the base game's cube maps.

 

Perhaps the largest upgrade to the visuals comes from the change to indirect lighting, both diffuse and specular. Specular lighting is essentially both glossy and rough reflections and diffuse lighting means the lighting that bounces around a scene, brightening up dark areas. A combination of systems are stripped out and replaced with path-traced indirect lighting which carries out multiple bounces and also has a system for caching results to accumulate even more. The base game's screen-space reflections, cube maps and a contribution from the RTGI work well enough - but there are obvious limitations. All reflections must be mirror-like, for example, which doesn't look right on rougher surfaces. Materials can also look much more flat than they should, which you'll see demonstrated to remarkable effect in my video embedded on this page.

 

The improvement to material quality can be substantial: polished hardwood floors now look a lot more like the real deal, showcasing very subtle reflections of bright light sources, like the sky. It's the same with marble, which looked OK at grazing angles, but just didn't look right when viewed full-on. Full RT's perspective-correct reflections alleviate that issue completely. The impact to metal rendering in particular can be astonishing: in the standard game, metal surfaces tend to look shallow and dark, so all of the glorious artefacts look dull on inspection. With full RT, metal objects reflect themselves and nearby objects. Brass, silver, and gold look much more visually distinct as opposed to looking very much the same. Multi-bounce reflections from the indirect lighting option really aid the visuals, pushing some more mundane scenes from looking 'videogamey' due to the materials being dull, to looking quite spectacular.

 

 

[Best]

1 hour ago, Biggie said:

@Best

 

I start at around 8am. If I'm enjoying the game I play until lunch time. 🤣 

 

When I work I play right after for about 2-3 hours. 

[Best]

@AbsolutSurgen When are you getting your grubby little hands on this game?

[Biggie]

How tf do I unlock this door so I can photograph the last inscription?

[AbsolutSurgen]

30 minutes ago, Best said:

@AbsolutSurgen When are you getting your grubby little hands on this game?

Probably over Christmas. The pricing on this was a little insane in Canada, so I decided to wait a few months. (And wait for the inevitable path tracing optimizations.)

[Best]

I'll tell you what I'm not a fan of

 

Spoiler

Gina at all. And they force you to stick together. She is so fuckin annoying.

 

Also, I was transported out of Egypt with absolutely no warning so I couldn't finish up quests there. 

 

[Best]

Having said that

 

Spoiler

the Himalayas and the snow storm I'm currently in looks amazing. 

 

[Best]

I've come to appreciate the combat in this game. It's extremely realistic in that it takes one shot from an enemy to die. And vice versa. This place I'm at now is really fun.