Had a cool conversation with a dev over XBL yesterday. No breaking news or insider info. Just a perspective on stuff that's out there that he's allowed to talk about. He creates assets using UE4. In addition to working for a studio, he's been doing his own independent thing on the side.
- SSDs are nice, will provide benefit...but it's getting a lot more hype than it should.
- In terms of next gen advances, people are talking about the wrong things right now.
- Next gen tools are much more powerful. The missing AA games from this gen will come back from Indie studios next gen due to the tools.
- There's exciting next gen features that haven't been talked about yet.
- Lumens was the thing he was most excited about from the UE demo. Said it's going to make a world of difference for developers.
- CPUs are easily the bottleneck of next gen. While the new CPUs are a nice step up, they are still disproportionately powered compared to the rest of the systems.
- Microsoft still hasn't released or shown any major advancements with Havok yet.
- Believes Cloudgen (the company Epic bought who did the Crackdown demo in 2015) is going to provide some exciting things for Unreal Engine in the future especially as the industry starts to take advantage of cloud compute more often.
Interesting conversation around cloud compute. He feels that next gen game design is still bottlenecked until they move entire aspects of games to the cloud. He talked about moving AI to the cloud since the CPU jump isn't enough to handle true advances in that area while it isn't latency sensitive. He gave an example of every NPC in a game world being trained with it's own AI. When I mentioned driveators from Forza, he said it's a nice attempt but that implementation is way too basic compared to what he's talking about. True advances require a lot more compute than what's available in local machines.
Also he's the same dev that mentioned his assets jumped 4x when Epic added Quixel to Unreal. Really thinks Indies are going to shrink the graphics gap considerably relative to AAA devs next gen.
I didn't get into plastic wars conversations with him because mostly talked about tools and next gen possibilities. Overall really positive perspective from him.