A lot of people are curious what Hideo Kojima and Kojima Productions has in store for them regarding Death Stranding. With the latest talk surrounding Death Stranding and its progress, folks have yet another morsel of information to dissect as talk by the devs surround Height Fog effects and the Decima game engine.
A while ago, Hideo Kojima and Kojima Production stated multiple times in both literal and in a symbolic sense that Death Stranding will try and venture beyond the conventional/traditional definition of “action” and “RPG” found in similar open-world titles. While only time will tell how the finished product will be at release, we have some early footage of the game that shows the latest progress of Death Stranding.
As of recent, Kojima Productions has showcased an early look at the advanced lighting and fog system that is currently in development for Death Stranding. Much like the trailer, the actual game, presumably, will sport various types of fogs throughout its mysterious world.
In addition to the above, during a tech demo presentation at SIGGRAPH, a graphical demo was revealed for Death Stranding, which happens to be using Guerilla Games’ Decima Engine, the same engine that Horizon: Zero Dawn runs on.
Furthermore, both an introductory description courtesy of the tech demo presentation and a video by MetalGearSolidBe detail the latest progress made on Death stranding and its engine:
“The Decima engine was originally developed for the Killzone series, and is now powering Horizon: Zero Dawn as well as Death Stranding (Kojima Productions). In this talk we’ll cover some of the rendering techniques we developed for these titles. Topics include an improved method for approximating spherical area lights by bending the light vector of a single point light, practical realistic atmospheric scattering with height fog, our 2-frame temporal anti-aliasing solution for 1080p, and finally our optimized 2160p checkerboard rendering and ‘tangram’ resolve strategy used on the PS4 Pro.”
During the presentation regarding graphical elements, Kojima Productions graphics programmer Kohei Ishiyama discussed the “Height Fog” model which happens to be custom made by the studio for the Decima Engine to display an “atmospheric scattering system” that is optimized for rendering “photo-realistic lighting.” Accompanying the above information comes word from the man himself, Hideo Kojima, noting on Twitter that progress on Death stranding is going well.
Today I was able to see the good result of testing DS. I think I will have a good sleep tonight.
— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) July 27, 2017
Death Stranding is said to deliver a new kind of action experience with an open-world design. Joining Norman Reedus, Death Stranding will feature characters resembling Guillermo del Toro and Mads Mikkelsen. The game is set to come out for PS4 and has no official release date yet.
More information on Death Stranding can be found over on kojimaproductions.jp.
