official inFamous Second Son

[McKay]

Well frakking sods law, pretty much the only game I didn't pre-order in years is sold out. Pretty much every game in the past few years Ive bought has been in plenty of stock.

[Boxster17]

Now that I've figured out how to use the 3rd power a little better for mobility and have some shards spent in that area it's really nice for mobility.  Still find that overall power against enemies is a bit lacking though compared to neon.

[DeltaXray]

The graphics in this game are mind blowing. At night when it is raining - wow - those reflections!

I've just unlocked neon, kinda bemused why you would put so much effort into smoke and then trade it in and not use it again?

[Am_I_Evil]

I've just unlocked neon, kinda bemused why you would put so much effort into smoke and then trade it in and not use it again?

 

says who?

[DeltaXray]

says who?

Well I got a bit further in the game and it became clear what's happening haha

[soniqstylz]

Was at my buddy's house last night watched him play for a while.  Love how it looks, but man, they still haven't figured out how to add weight to the main character.  The jumps are still so floaty.

[+Anarkii Subscriber²]

Was at my buddy's house last night watched him play for a while.  Love how it looks, but man, they still haven't figured out how to add weight to the main character.  The jumps are still so floaty.

This is the only thing that bothers me about the game, it would be pretty much perfect but those character animations of climbing and jumping is just laughably bad. 

[neoadorable]

Best entry in the series and yes, the best looking "new gen" game we've seen so far. Very consistent, unlike KZ:SF. Looks and runs great, i think it looks basically like that E3 2012 demo of Watch Dogs, i feel there's quite a Ubi Montreal touch to this game even though i know there's no relation. Really enjoying it, it's challenging even on easy as were all the Infamous games, but it's much more enjoyable and compelling. Could be a little on the shortish side, only played like 3-4 hours and already 25% complete.

[Ironman273]

New Infamous Game Is Secretly Pretty Funny

 

 

Cute, Infamous. Very cute.

 

If you haven't seen, the rest of the game is pretty great too. If you end up picking it up, be sure to keep an eye on some other signs as well (click "expand" on the one below to read the fine print).

 

 

Source: Kotaku

[soniqstylz]

New Infamous Game Is Secretly Pretty Funny

 

Cute, Infamous. Very cute.

 

If you haven't seen, the rest of the game is pretty great too. If you end up picking it up, be sure to keep an eye on some other signs as well (click "expand" on the one below to read the fine print).

 

 

 

Source: Kotaku

 

There's also a store called Cole McG's Electronics.

[GotBored]

I went the hero route first and its also pretty funny when you walk in the street and AI people come up to you with camera's to take photo's and praise you. lol

 

Anyone went the evil route? I'm guessing people will get scared and run away or something like that?

[soniqstylz]

I went the hero route first and its also pretty funny when you walk in the street and AI people come up to you with camera's to take photo's and praise you. lol

 

Anyone went the evil route? I'm guessing people will get scared and run away or something like that?

 

They did that in the first two as well.

[trooper11]

Well I'm about 3/4 of the way through the game with about 8 hours put into it.  Still enjoying the heck out of it. While I still enjoy playing around with the new powers as they unlock, I do agree with others that my favorite has been:

 

Neon

 

I was a bit sad to see it change, but All of the powers seem to offer something enjoyable once you get use to them.

 

I decided to play my first run on the evil side unlike in the previous games and its pretty funny.  With the much improved visuals, the whole npc reaction to you is more enjoyable.  They try to steer clear of you as if its a Godzilla movie :laugh:

[DirtyLarry Veteran]

Friday night I played Infamous from 6-9 PM. Then 12-2 AM

Saturday woke up at 7 AM so I could play until about 10 AM.

Played Saturday night from 11 PM - 1:30 AM
Woke up Sunday at 7 AM and played until 9:30 AM ish.

Then got to play for about an hour right around 1 PM.

 

Did not get to play at all the rest of the day on Sunday and was really bummed out.

Went to sleep Sunday night and could not stop thinking about playing, like was semi conscious in the game itself thinking about playing. Was crazy.

 

My point in sharing all of this is to express how much fun the game truly is. I have not specifically woken up on purpose to play a game in a long, long time. Sleep was truly irrelevant this weekend, and although I am paying for it now at work on a Monday morning, it was beyond worth it.

[firey]

Im ~30% through the game.  Just did:

 

the drug bust

 

Been taking time trying to un-dup the city.  Have 4 sections clear.. though I had to stop a fight between my kids and I think I forgot to save (after clearing one of the zones from 90%).  

I have also been doing the "Paper Trail" stuff and I was amazed at the detail and such of the paper doves (theres like 100 that float around the guy). Definitely a "must have" game in my opinion.

Though I do agree. the jumping/climbing felt.. strange.  I felt almost like spider man.. wondering why (without a certain power) I couldn't just climb up the wall without jumping.

 

Also, I found a bilboard with a QR Code in game, I scanned it with my phone (irl) and it linked to suckerpunch.com 

[+Audioboxer Subscriber²]

Friday night I played Infamous from 6-9 PM. Then 12-2 AM

Saturday woke up at 7 AM so I could play until about 10 AM.

Played Saturday night from 11 PM - 1:30 AM

Woke up Sunday at 7 AM and played until 9:30 AM ish.

Then got to play for about an hour right around 1 PM.

 

Did not get to play at all the rest of the day on Sunday and was really bummed out.

Went to sleep Sunday night and could not stop thinking about playing, like was semi conscious in the game itself thinking about playing. Was crazy.

 

My point in sharing all of this is to express how much fun the game truly is. I have not specifically woken up on purpose to play a game in a long, long time. Sleep was truly irrelevant this weekend, and although I am paying for it now at work on a Monday morning, it was beyond worth it.

 

Sounds like me and Dark Souls 2. Took time off work to finish up an assessment, ended up playing Dark Souls 2, assessment has now been rushed over past 48 hours  :laugh:

[neoadorable]

That is the sign of true enjoyment, when you keep thinking about a game. It's the whole point of having a hobby. What's life without joy? It's no life at all, so have fun.

[DeltaXray]

Urgh. I was really enjoying this game until they rolled out angels, dragons and floors of lava. Have rapidly lost interest now :/

[StealMySoda]

Pick this up from PSN tonight, with paying ?29.50 for ?35 PSN credit works out about the same price as a physical copy. Have to say I'm enjoying it so far, perhaps it helps I've never played any of the other games in the series.

[neoadorable]

The first one was OK, just thought it was too hard and didn't like the look. Infamous 2 was excellent, very playable and nice look. Second Son is to me by far the best in the series, and there's no immediate need to have done the first two.

[iARDAs]

I really need to get my hands on this game soon.

[trooper11]

I have finished my first run through of the game on the evil side and I'm very happy with the experience overall. My comments listed above still apply and I didn't run into anything that made me second guess my early impressions, just a very fun game with high visual appeal.  I'm going to start a 'good' play through, but I'm going to take a bit of a break from the game for this week to let it all settle. 

 

 

On another note, they announced what the next update for the game will include:

 

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2014/04/01/second-son-update-incoming-change-time-of-day-hud-off-30fps-option/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PSBlog+%28PlayStation.Blog%29

 

I like the idea of locking the frame rate and the hud control.  Its pretty cool to see more pc-like controls in these games.

[+Audioboxer Subscriber²]

The more PC like controls the better (Y)

[neoadorable]

The frame locking at 30fps worked wonders for Shadowfall, made it consistent and allowed the engine to stop compromising resolution and effects "dynamically". I personally don't mind 30fps and can barely tell the difference next to 60fps, guess being old has its merits. As for Second Son, it looks great as it is, there are very occasionall dips which i barely notice (nothing like the ridiculous stuttering recently in Ghosts, which has to do with netcode i believe). But sure, guess no harm in adding this option.

[+Audioboxer Subscriber²]

inFAMOUS: Second Son is definitely one of the most visually impressive games available now on a new generation system, and at the Game Developers Conference Lead Engine Programmer Adrian Bentley Explained the ins and outs of its engine and how the resources of the PS4 were used for the game.

Interestingly enough, the first thing we learn is that the game uses only 4.5 GB of RAM and 6 cores of the eight included in the PS4?s CPU. The data about memory matches what was shared about The Order: 1886.

Here?s what we learned from the panel:

The RAM if the PS4 allowed Sucker Punch to increase memory budgets by four to eight times.

I/O (input/output) speed was a big problem, even from the hard drive. Input/Output speed is the communication speed between the drive and the CPU.

Measures were taken to reduce I/O pressure, caching seven more streaming chunks with a memory budget of about 240 MiB (Mebibyte, basically a more professional equivalent of megabyte) and using more and bigger media streaming pages with a budget of 40 MiB.

Texture atlases were used for many purposes, with a budget of over 200 MiB. A texture atlas is a large texture that includes many sub-textures that can be used for many objects, instead of having separate texture files for each object.

Ambient index was cached per static vertex with a budget of about 30 MiB.

The tiled light list was stored for forward pass (4 MiB).

Code was kept simple, using big linear buffers.

Most of the 4.5 Gb of RAM actually available were used. You can see the full allocation below.

We also learn that the CPU does hundreds of different jobs while running inFAMOUS: Second Son. Each ?job? is a single computing task.

Below we can see the difference in the tasks performed by the SPUs (Synergistic Processing Unit) of the PS3?s Cell processor to render inFAMOUS 2, and the six available cores of the PS4?s CPU while rendering inFAMOUS: Second Son.

The PS4?s CPU is defined ?decent,? able to handle 30,000 draws instanced in 10,000 actual draw calls, 100-400 asynchronous raycasts per frame, 50-100 animated characters with 300+ bones, even if prefetch is not a replacement for the SPU?s direct memory access.

It was also hard to max out the CPU (while we learned in a previous interview that the GPU is used at its maximum capacity most of the time), with 50-70% used for main jobs and 5-16% for other threads.

Below we can see a breakdown of the Geometry buffers between the various effects used in the game.

Physically based materials and lighting were used. They?re less intuitive for artists, but better for lighting changes. Deferred shading was also implemented in most cases besides preintegrated skin, anistropic cloth and hair and glass.

A variety of post production effects are implemented, broken down in the slide below:

The following effects were also used:

Indirect Diffuse Lighting with a budget of 25 MiB for the whole world and a resource cost of 1-3 ms. Data was cached to avoid redundant computation.

Indirect Specular Lighting with Local Specular Cubemaps and Screen Space Specular Reflection.

GPU compute was used for some of the game?s rendering, having a positive effect for caching data like tiled lighting and specular probe application, particle and mesh processing, and easier code generation. Yet it also comes with some problems. While compute is fast, synchronization with the CPU can be a problem. It was solved by frontloading compute phases or using compute queues running alongside the graphics pipeline. The register count was also reduced to hide latency better. Ultimately GPU compute is defined ?Super awesome?

The following slides show how compute was used for different effects:

As a wrap-up, Bentley mentioned a few elements we (or at least developers among us, gamers will just see the effects) could see in the future:

Much more threading and compute.

lighter weight instantiation.

Improvement in perforce sync time.

less manual ambient and faster baking.

Better distant environment LOD (level of detail).

Overhauled pathing system.

Easier scripting reference for parts of objects.

Fewer heavy weight objects.

 

 

What was done with the PS4 memory...

I UNDERSTAND NONE OF THIS