Lack of NPCs in Niaowu

mjqjazzbar

mjqjazzbar

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Jul 28, 2018
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Shenmue IIx
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Ghost of Tsushima
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mjqjazzbar
What do you think this was caused by? UE4 or the team running out of time/resources? I can imagine programming routines for hundreds of NPCs would be extremely time consuming. Can UE4 handle displaying dozens or hundreds of character models at one time? It should be no surprise this game has quite a bit of character pop-in, but was that caused by the engine or the inexperience of the developers?

This early screenshot should've been our first warning:

shenmue-3-320x180.jpg


But we all figured it was just a work in progress.
 
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I'm asking myself the same questions...
In an ideal world, I would cut the shops number from 140 to 50 and spread the 90 resulting unemployed shopkeepers as random bypassers all around the city.
But there must be technical reasons behind the final result :(
 
I think if they narrowed the walkways it would've done A LOT to give the illusion it was crowded if they kept 3 or 4 NPCs walking around. For example when you get to Vendor Ave where it's tight it looks and feels crowded but the same amount of NPCs are there as in the larger areas.
 
I'd take shop owners that I can actually identify and know their location than random NPCs walking by.
But yeah, animating people is quite expensive, you are actually tweaking the bones transforms realtime, they should cast dynamic shadows/not baked lighting, just a lot of drawcalls that you can't batch, and running the logic behind on top of it.
Most games that with heavy density of skinned meshes actually have a different system of rendering them, so they render all of their transforms in a single update, of course is possible on UE4, but it would have required opening another can of worms.
 
kaliskonig91 said:
Yu probably didnt add them since he didn't want a ton of NPC's you couldn't talk to running around I guess.
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This.

I imagine he wasn't at all too happy with the budget restrictions that limit conversation to only the store owners and not the random npcs. It has always been a thing of pride and respect knowing almost every character in Shenmue 1 and 2 you could interact with and they were all voiced, and characters had their own daily schedules. Now thats less of the case; in Naiowu at least.
Plus, a thing with this game that kinda annoys me is the npc pop in. Sometimes I'll enter a shop and wonder "where the hell is the store clerk?" and boom; he or she just magically appears out of thin air because the game finally decided to load the character model (or show it at least)
It was there in Shenmue 1 & 2 but not as prevalent as this game has it which is odd to me because Unreal Engine 4 should be able to handle that fine and its not like this game is super open world like many others.
So I'm imagining how this would then be if there were even more NPC's in town.
Perhaps PC modders will make a mod for this since PC's have the potential obviously to be more powerful than the PS4.
This also makes me wonder if this game will run any better once the PS5 drops and if it indeed is backwards compatible like they mentioned. Will the PS5 make that problem go away? Will load times be non existent? (since load times is something Sony is marketing that the PS5 will improve greatly on).

I know in the PS3/360 vanilla retail of Sleeping Dogs, npc's were kept to a minimum which felt odd considering its supposed to be Hong Kong.
But when the definitive version of the game came to PS4/XB1/PC. the number of them were expanded.
 
This is my biggest painpoint in S3 so far. I find this lack of pedestrians really weird and disturbing like some creepy ghost town and it takes me out of the immersion of this otherwise beautiful and gigantic city.
I would gladly have more pedestrians even if none of them could talk or even if they were just random NPCs without daily schedule or background in order to fix the scenery. I know, this is against the Shenmue style but having an empty town instead? Seriously?
 
markuswegener said:
This is my biggest painpoint in S3 so far. I find this lack of pedestrians really weird and disturbing like some creepy ghost town and it takes me out of the immersion of this otherwise beautiful and gigantic city.
I would gladly have more pedestrians even if none of them could talk or even if they were just random NPCs without daily schedule or background in order to fix the scenery. I know, this is against the Shenmue style but having an empty town instead? Seriously?
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The game cant even properly load the ones that are in the game. Perhaps PS5
 
I dont think the game could of run it tbh, its distracting but not the end of the world. It does feel like the city is ironically more of a ghost town than bailu was I wont deny.
 
I wasn't sure if the system ressources were really the actual reason (consider how other games can run that) but if they rather run out of time and budget to create dialogs and background stories for the pedestrians.
My theory was that they had to add the pedestrians as only dummy creatures and in order for that not to be too appearant they decided to go with as few as possible, so people can't say "To most of the people on Niaowu you can't even talk". Now the non-talking people make only a short portion in comparison to the shop keepers.

In this case I would prefer more dummy pedestrians.
 
markuswegener said:
I wasn't sure if the system ressources were really the actual reason (consider how other games can run that) but if they rather run out of time and budget to create dialogs and background stories for the pedestrians.
My theory was that they had to add the pedestrians as only dummy creatures and in order for that not to be too appearant they decided to go with as few as possible, so people can't say "To most of the people on Niaowu you can't even talk". Now the non-talking people make only a short portion in comparison to the shop keepers.

In this case I would prefer more dummy pedestrians.
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I think its resources because the ones that are present take a while to load up.
Sometimes it looks like they're not even there then they suddenly appear.
So imagine if there were double or triple the amount.
I think UE4 is capable of not having that problem, but I think Ys Net is new to using the engine so they prob ran out of time trying to learn to properly tweak it right and optimize for best performance so they went with the least taxing approach which is limit the NPCs
 
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