PlayStation 4Overview
A sandbox communism simulator.
Engine
The Tomorrow Children runs on a proprietary game engine developed by Q-Games.[4] The game's graphics engine utilizes new technology, aiming to achieve a Pixar-like pre-rendered CGI look with real-time 3D graphics.[1][5] The graphics engine includes the following features:
- Asynchronous Compute: Utilizes PlayStation 4's Async Compute technology extensively,[6] including async shaders.[7]
- Cinematography: Color grading process, utilizing modern 3D pipeline to generate larger dynamic range of color and ‘Z’ information for every pixel to introduce Z-depth parameter, allowing effects such as adjusting black levels in the distance or swizzling colors around based on distance from the camera.[5]
- Geometry:[5]
- Deformable landscapes, with layered depth cubes: Represents the world as volumes, which are then converted to polygons as needed (such as if the player goes near, or they need to be drawn on screen). This makes it easier to manipulate, do boolean options (addition/subtraction) on the data to cut out holes, add details while the structure remains solid and intact, and easy-to-access data structures to bounce light through.[5]
- Geometry shader: Injects point lights into cascaded volume textures.[4]
- Lighting:[5]
- Cascaded voxel cone ray tracing: New lighting technology developed by Q-Games, which simulates lighting in real-time and uses more realistic reflections rather than screen space reflections.[8] A variation of voxel cone tracing,[4] it involves calculating and storing light and its direction around the player character as she moves in ever increasing cascades of data.[5] It supports multi-bounce cone tracing, with up to 3 bounces of indirect lighting,[9] and cone tracing in 16 directions.[4]
- Direct lighting: Sky lighting (represented as 16 spherical radial basis functions aligned to 16 cone tracing directions), point lights (using geometry shader), and emission.[4]
- Global illumination: Real-time global illumination, with cascaded voxel cone ray tracing,[4] in real-time, without any need for pre-calculated or pre-baked lighting.[1][2] It supports direct and indirect illumination in real-time,[4] and up to three bounces of light per pixel from all directions (compared to one bounce for Pixar films).[5]
- Screen space occlusion:[3] Screen space directional occlusion (SSDO).[4]
- Shadows: Cone tracing used to generate shadows rather than shadow maps,[9] with shadows generated from occlusion accumulated by cone tracing.[4]
- Subsurface scattering, with translucency.[3]
- Volumetric lighting.[5]
- Materials system: Supported materials include carved wood and translucent materials.[3]
