Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2
remedygames.com
remedygames.com
Alan Wake 2 is easily one of the most beautiful (from a technical perspective - IMO also from an artistic one but that's a 100% subjective thing) games ever released and it still looks good even when you turn all the settings down, which is a true achievement. It's hard to make a game scale down to older hardware while still looking good.
Though as commentators like Digital Foundry have noted, the game runs really badly if your GPU doesn't support Mesh Shaders (they mention the use of those for culling in the article). Mesh Shaders in this case enable a lot of really smart culling and dynamic level of detail so that things like coffee cups or tires can be perfectly round without having the 'every NPC has 10k-poly teeth in their mouth' problem that's currently sabotaging Cities Skylines 2's performance, and this is one of the big advantages offered by Unreal 5's Nanite.
Isn’t CD Projekt Red moving to UE5 for future titles? Shame, Cyberpunk was gorgeous - would have loved a multiplayer game with that engine.
this strikes me as an extremely silly statement. Their engine doesn't seem to have multiplayer.
(Don't ask me for a source, I don't remember where I saw that info)
How sure of that are you?
There are several reports that the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 will be using UE5 as well.
As in, CD Projekt Red have purposely switched all future projects to UE5.
* https://screenrant.com/cyberpunk-2077-phantom-liberty-dlc-la...
* https://kotaku.com/cyberpunk-2077-phantom-liberty-expansion-...
Unless of course something changes during the development of the next Witcher game and they decide to go back to RED Engine.
Have they pulled a No Man's Sky, since, or something?
Although I'm starting to prefer retro games, great modern releases are so few, now.
CDPR has 1236 employees.
DICE (makers of Frostbite) has 714 employees.
Epic has 2200 employees (before the recent layoffs).
all numbers from Wikipedia.
Frostbite had roughly 300 employees when I joined 2 years ago.
If there is a game I'm interested in, I'd use whatever is cheaper/available for it.
If it was on Steam I would have likely bought it on Steam. But it’s not. So in my case at least, this exclusive is effectively driving me to buy on the Epic Store.
I find it sort of funny that many (not all) complaints about the Epic Store are the same things gamers complained about when Steam was released 20 years ago.
And since there's a vastly bigger audience on Steam vs the Epic Store, I don't really think that split matters as much as people would have you believe.
$ ./EpicInstaller-15.17.1.msi
bash: ./EpicInstaller-15.17.1.msi: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error
Of course it's their choice where to release it, but saying, specifically, that it doesn't affect any consumer is just plain wrong.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
As long as storefronts have to compete for games, this is what that looks like. There's not really any way to get rid of exclusives without hurting competition. Would you want a law passed for games to be required to be put on certain storefronts? For storefronts to be required to accept all games submitted to it? Either one would hurt competition by giving too much power to either the game publisher or the storefront.
Besides publishers are already free to decide where the games they publish go or don't, so I'm not sure where the "too much power to publishers" thing is coming from.
But that's not unique to paid exclusives. That's not even unique to Epic, Valve's own games are exclusive to a single storefront. You should boycott them for the same reason.
There is a cost to releasing games on multiple storefronts, forcing games to release on multiple stores only hurts smaller developers. Some smaller developers also skip storefronts altogether. Minecraft and Factorio were initially sold without any storefront. Is that still considered limited to one and therefore an exclusive?
>Besides publishers are already free to decide where the games they publish go or don't, so I'm not sure where the "too much power to publishers" thing is coming from.
I'm talking about cases where the storefront doesn't want to sell the game. Say the game has adult content, or the game has is just unfinished and not good. If storefronts are required to carry games. Otherwise games that only get accepted to a single store will continue to be exclusive to that single store.
Same thing with smaller developers, are they expected to cater to the whim of multiple storefronts to be able to release a game? One of my favorites, Zachtronic's Opus Magnum was rejected from GoG initially.
If a publisher chooses to do a single store front, then fine w/e. I don't have a problem with that. Its when a storefront bribes a publisher to keep a product exclusive to one store, in an attempt to force consumers on to that store that they likely otherwise wouldn't have used, that I have problem with.
>Its when a storefront bribes a publisher to keep a product exclusive to one store
That's not a bribe, that's a business transaction. Do you bribe a store to give you a product?
>If a publisher chooses to do a single store front, then fine w/e.
This contrasts with your previous: "as long as its not limited to one"
So now publishers are allowed to choose one storefront, but somehow they can't be paid to make that choice? How should they be making that choice if not by how much each storefront is offering?
Return to Monkey Island also released as a Steam exclusive.
Plus it’s a terrible store front from all I’ve heard and I do not wish to support it
I just don't see it. Looks like RE2make to me. And as far as art direction Dishonored 2/DOTO are dramatically better looking
Sad to see an otherwise good comment end with a misconception. The problems with the performance is much grander than just "teeth rendered but not visible" (https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/), although I guess it's a illustrative point. Missing LODs and lack of culling are the grander issues.
That is the exact start of the sentence of which you quoted the end of:
> Mesh Shaders in this case enable a lot of really smart culling and dynamic level of detail
Rockstar with the GTA series
Valve, Blizzard?
You can draw a pretty clean line from the incredible Second Reality demo[1] in 1993 to Alan Wake 2 thirty years later.
As I've commented before on HN, honestly I could write a small book about these Finnish demoscene gods.
like convincing Nvidia that dedicating silicon to RT calc was worth it, or writing part of the acceleration structures they use now ?
Don't get me wrong, the engine is incredible and the visuals and systems are some of the best we have seen.
Characters blended to the hand written, custom, euphoria behaviors in certain situations… it handled falls, stumbles, deaths, etc. Generally it replaced ragdoll physics but wasn’t used during most character movement behaviors.
The developer did a presentation at GDC 2014 on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNidsMesxSE
And games with fancy animations are often not just less responsive, but also less controllable in general: in Witcher 3 the character cannot walk backwards or turn in place, so you can literally fall off a cliff in front of you by trying to walk away from it. In terms of movement the only difference between Geralt and his horse is the turning radius.
People don't want the realistic, slow response. Normally people aren't aware of how early their body starts a movement, the conscious brain has the illusion of just having decided it but it's actually started much earlier.
That's it, there's the tradeoff; if they want legs to move naturally, they have to fight against what the user inputs. There's a setting in the Witcher 3 so that the character can turn on a dime / instantly, less realistic but more fun / responsive: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/difference-between-standard...
Personally I prefer snappy movement i.e. when I press left the screen character moves left immediately. A more realistic looking animation system introduces a delay while you wait for the feet animation to "catch up" to player input.
yes absolutely, you can't have both realism and snappy response times.
I think humans are worse than this than you might think. Give it a try! Walk around and try to change directions on the fly, maybe have a friend shout suggestions to you. I can make maybe 2 or 3 adjustments per second, which gives about 400ms response time. That's about where RDR2 sits, and players criticized it for being unresponsive.
A great tennis drill is when your coach hits the ball to you and randomly yells "LEFT!" "RIGHT!" or "MIDDLE!" after you've begun your swing. Then you have to hit the ball in that direction. Helps hone your reaction time and helps you to have a "neutral" swing that doesn't telegraph your intentions to an opponent.
One can imagine variations in many sports.
Watch a sprinting football player dodge. Their feet go in the opposite direction as they want to move the same way you move an inverted pendulum. If you want the top of an inverted pendulum to move left you move your hand to the right. It still looks very fast because you don’t see the initial ~200ms delay between deciding to doge and the point when their feet start to respond.
Most martial arts will teach their own type of footwork optimized for the style, but it’s common to use a shuffling motion which keeps people’s feet close to the ground. It allows for a more rapid change in direction but is slower and less effective than normal walking if you actually want to get somewhere. Fencing and Kendo want more mobility where wrestling and Judo wants more stability etc.
Controllers use analog input for the sticks. I guess you could create a system which uses a dead zone where the player "signals" their intention by partially moving the stick in their desired direction.
This would be incredibly cumbersome though, and the payoff would not be worth it.
Your brain is hiding a lot from you.
An interesting personal anecdote I have:
I damaged my back with bulging disc, which caused horrific sciatica nerve pain.
When I was able to walk again, I had some nerve damage.
This meant I had lag in my left leg!
I’d tell the leg to move instinctively when walking and there would be a delay. The entire walking movement of the leg was present, but just with a noticeable lag!
It was weird!
Eventually it healed fully, or I adjusted. Not sure which! :-)
I had a couple of MRIs to see what was going on.
Essentially I’ve got degenerative disc disease.
My specialist was the head of the Spinal Care unit at the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
So I trusted his advice.
He said that surgery could very well make it worse, and that over time it would likely begin to heal itself.
I had a couple of steroid injections and took mild painkillers and anti inflammatories to manage the pain for a year or so.
The initial incident was well over five years ago.
Ive had reviews since, and the advice is still the same.
Surgery is a last resort. Just keep mobile and don’t do anything to make it worse.
The MRIs show that the disc that is jamming into my nerve has slowly begun to reduce.
So I force myself to remain mobile by continuing to walk everywhere, and have a standup desk for work as I literally couldn’t sit down for months!
I pretty much now never lift anything.
Your body cant process pain and motion at the same time. Which is a simplistic explanation. So walking is an excellent path to recovery.
Before the injury I’d back squat 130kilos, and strict press 95, could run a marathon and had a resting heart rate of 42bpm.
It flares up from time to time, and is never truely better.
I’m never pain free, I just learn to ignore the pain and keep moving!
I could talk for hours about my journey LOL
There you 'actively' walk and 'manually' keep balance. It's an interesting experience, but it makes walking a conscious act, it becomes something you do.
Arguably that is less realistic than just moving an analog stick, for most people walking is just telling your body to move in direction x.
Like those arcade shooters where you duck and lean to dodge bullets, or a full fledged whole-body VR setup on an infinite omni-directional treadmill.
You could instead have the button downpress "charge up" energy and then begin the jump when the button press ends, which would allow for more realism, but also introduce a delay.
I do too, but also think it greatly depends on the game. For example, Hollow Knight designed to have snappy response to player input from the start and I loved it. In RDR2, I find the floaty behaviour adds another layer of realism.
They could alter the animation such that feet don't slide across the ground and keep responsive movement. The result would be a worse quality animation, because the movement of the legs would not appear to be pushing the rest of the body around. Instead, it would look more like the feet are following the rest of the body retroactively, while holding onto the ground.
A good example of this is Factorio's spidertron. When the spidertron moves, the legs follow with a walking motion that perfectly tracks the ground below. In this case, it's a great-looking tradeoff, probably because there are so many legs, and not much animation done to the body itself.
I guess it's all trade offs at the end of the day, dev effort vs game style vs priorities.
It appears much more believable to me than the character pathing demo, where the character moonwalks 1/2 the time. The entire pedal structure is extremely stiff compared to how humans move (feet, thigh and torso can all turn nearly 90 degrees, but they hardly turn at all in the demo). The other demos are better, but their bodies still appear stiff, like they are suffering from hernia.
I think the real issue is the difference between moving the entire character as an object, with the walking animation being supplementary to that vs the walking animation being central to the character whose object moves because of the animation.
But for a game like this, arcadey instant direction change type movement doesn't really seem warranted either.
In GTA V characters have two different animation modes, the realistic one based on Euphoria when using the third-person camera and the "do what the darned keys are saying right now" when using first-person. Always seemed like a sensible compromise to me, though first-person movement is particularly snappy and direct, more so than pretty much any other FPS, which typically still have some inertia.
However it’s a trade off of performance (the constant ray casting and IK solves aren’t free) but also responsiveness.
Many games opt for faster locomotion and responsiveness instead.
At the end of the day, it’s a technically solved issue and has been for years, but as with every single thing in game design, it’s a choice and trade off.
There are new approaches to generating realistic character motion being shown at SIGGRAPH every year, getting better and better, but the best ones are largely too expensive for games to adopt. Plus, for player-controlled characters, at a certain point you run into a fundamental tension between control responsiveness and physical realism of animations.
I recently saw a great article on the topic which even comes with a WebGL demo: https://theorangeduck.com/page/code-vs-data-driven-displacem...
Now of course you can go above and beyond that for more realistic motion and , but having worked in the space, I would Serguei that is also solved without requiring recent research. Most recent motion research is about novel motion generation but the general problem of dynamic adjustment to authored animation has been solved by several systems already. But just like my original comment, there’s both a development and runtime cost to all of this.
Agreed - there are so many off-the-shelf engines with big communities that you'd really have to need full control to do it yourself.
Ultimately, it's more efficient from a cost and productivity system 98% of the time to use something off-the-shelf.
Bethesda didn't create Gamebryo. Gamebryo was an extremely prolific game engine back in the day made by a now-defunct company, Numerical Design Limited thogh the rights live on. Gamebryo was used by Rockstar, Firaxis, Ubisoft, and others, including some current Korean MMOs. Bethesda did indeed use it as the basis of their Creation engine.
Generally, you should pick tools for the purpose you need. An off the shelf engine may not help tell the story you want to tell—which Remedy has clearly decided with Northlight.
The death of in-house engines is one we should be sad about, because it creates a monoculture of game vision—more games will be more similar then they are different—it's easiest to use defaults when you have other decisions to make.
I'm not so sure about that. We've seen incredible innovation on top of Unity and Unreal (and Gamebryo still). There are some tell-tale signs a game might be running on one engine versus the other, but among games on the same engine there is an incredible variety in everything creative done on top of the engines from art styles to gameplay to even indie business models. Unity has plenty of flaws but we've seen so much more diversity in games since Unity has provided a base platform that better lets especially small developers focus on their unique creative visions rather than reinventing low level primitives yet again. A rising tide lifts boats, right?
The sad thing about the death of in-house engines is that the tide doesn't rise more each time one dies. Game companies should open source more of their in-house engines as they retire them. (CDPR should open Red Engine now that they are moving off of it.) Game companies should externalize (if not open source, then open/easy licensing with source access) more of their in-house engines while those engines are still living. I don't expect more engines to be properly productized like Unity or Unreal, but it would still be interesting to see more engines shared in more interesting ways outside of single developer/single publisher silos.
We know Remedy can do very interesting things with Northlight and it seems to have some tricks other engines can't do, so it would be nice to see if developers that aren't Remedy can also do interesting things with it. If Remedy ever retires Northlight it would be nice to see how it did some of its tricks in a way other engines can learn from.
My limited exposure to it (via s&box) is extremely positive, the hammer mapping tool is absolutely amazing to work with, and from what I've seen way ahead of unity / unreal on this front at-least.
Example:
Our marketing folks would say the characters are more responsive and lifelike than ever before; our internal dev notes described it as "the characters won't bump or get stuck into objects in tight spaces".
realtor: cozy charmer!
For reference:
- Using an Emerging Language in Quantum Break (https://ubm-twvideo01.s3.amazonaws.com/o1/vault/gdceurope201... );
- DConf 2016: Quantum Break: AAA Gaming With Some D Code -- Ethan Watson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YjLW7anNfc).
Possible starting point if you want to dig for sources: https://forum.dlang.org/post/lymybpygzfalbdgoaizr@forum.dlan...
From the grapevine I heard there was one person that advocated for writing in D, though I'm not sure if they are still there or not any more.
Wonderful content. I hope we see more shops like this building content for ue5
I am always curious why so many games techs use Lua for scripting. Especially when designed from scratch
As such, we’ve been seeing it as a go to scripting environment for everything from Baldur’s Gate 1, to Warcraft III, to modern titles like Roblox.
> See World Editor Updates for more details on many additions and improvements including beta support for Lua
It's fast (relative to other scripting languages), familiar, and stupidly easy to embed in a C++ program.
Although to support your point, pretty much every friendly NPC is stationary. Once the hostile zone in on you you’re not looking at how they walk - they’re shrouded in mist anyway.
IMO control was a tech demo for all of this and it also supports why the enemy count is much lower and framed as a horror story.
They should release the engine. It's a solid competitor to Unreal (more scalable due to ECS, easier to write with Luau)
It's a visually stunning engine but it's just too demanding IMO.
I just upgraded to a 4080 and it runs flawlessly though, I guess they were targeting 40-series cards for anything raytraced.
I won't be surprised if there are some other licensees eventually but it seems like Valve isn't overly interested in making the engine usable in the same way that Unreal, CryEngine, Frostbite etc are.
Seems Alan Wake still has a bit of foot sliding. I wonder if they're still essentially playing an animation while moving the character "object" in a direction.
Surely someone's already come up with a system where the character object isn't directly moved but instead moved in relation to an anchor, ie anchor foot to ground, taking a step naturally moves the character, now the foot in front anchors to the ground as the foot behind lifts.
Done this way it would be cool to simulate slippery surfaces along with the ml animation models to get interesting "scrabbling for grip" effects like you see in the BD robots whenever they're kicked/on ice.
Basically gameplay beats the animation in this case. On top of this a lot of the time you don't see your characters feet or if you do you are not really focusing on that during gameplay and won't notice them sliding.
Once we figure out how to render games in true photorealism, it's gonna be so interesting to see how often studios make these sorts of stylistic/practical choices with animation.
This isn’t some gotcha that the game devs didn’t notice or don’t know how to fix. It’s one they likely either decided had drawbacks or wasn’t an issue in practice.
I'd be tempted to work on game dev tooling one day if there were more remote work opportunities.
So do it. Then show it to your team and boss then boss's boss.
I like this tool from Nvidia [1] for exploring CNN feature maps. That's more in line with what I'm talking about but it's is an offline tool. I am imagining tools that provide this granularity of information about networks in real-time during training.
Disclosure: I work for nvidia
They did, it's just not one you like.
Most games that position the camera behind and centred have to zoom out or go weirdly high so you can still see what the character is looking at/heading towards. The off-centre camera allows you to be at the same height/viewpoint as the character and still see what's in front.
Look at the Red Dead Redemption 2 camera position when walking vs Alan Wake 2, totally different viewpoints. Both are different artistic choices, I'd say both work well for each game.
(also i yelled at more than one game that had an option to switch shoulder but not put the character at the center - if you are bothering to implement this why not also add the center option? :-P)
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the camera, it's just not to your taste. They've made zero risky or offensive choices with the camera.
> Off-centre camera systems, aka "over the shoulder" cameras make me motion sick. I need the player to be in the centre of the screen or everything feels lopsided.
This is a you problem, though, and an extremely rare problem overall (rare enough for me to literally never hear about it in 25+ years of gaming). I don't think it's reasonable for you to expect the world of game development to cater to your very niche, specific issue.
I gave Luau a try recently but the syntax for external type declarations is undocumented and unstable, which made it awkward to test properly, and the available VS Code extensions default to a Roblox environment until you mess with their settings.
So mixed feelings for now, I guess this is why they built their own tooling for it.
luau-lsp for example ships this globalTypes.d.lua file[1] for Roblox development and lets you configure your own.
[1]: https://github.com/JohnnyMorganz/luau-lsp/blob/4b7872349d9b8...
But the debugger is so good, I dont know any other debugger with such low overhead in any language
I wish Cyberpunk 2077 had this. It's a very immersive game but man did those weird/glitchy NPC movements take me out of it.
The lightning is really gorgeous in the game and as always I think raytracing is not really worth the performance impact if. The game looks almost the exact same without.
I wonder if you could tune the lightning in UE5 to look like that, I always wonder how much of a games looks is actually the engine and how much is just the art direction and the devs skills to get out of the engine what they want.
I think the game itself was rather disappointing. Too much walking sym, combat was downgraded and less fun, made worse by too few save points at times so you fear to die to not get annoyed to do sections over and over again that makes you hesitant to play on hardest difficulty.
Conclusion wall is way to basic and simple you can just quickly trail and error it. And it FORCES you to advance things on the wall that are clear anyway. I had it only one time where I left it for a while and when I look back into it she was like "we already got this" and put on a bunch of cards automatically, but generally speaking you need to advance it all the time. There is one situation, there is a place, where a reviewer passed by countless times and it turns out the key item you need ONLY appears when you advance the wall. Kind of stupid game design.
Its a movie game mostly, a "press button to advance story" game. The first was like that as well but I think it had better and more gameplay, better pacing that was actually fun.
Writing was obnoxiously pretentious and dragged on for too long. After 10 hours the same Alan Wake tropes get repeated over and over again and the game ends is a cliffhanger to shill some DLC. Really makes me loose my last bit of faith in the gamers, I already do not trust game "journalist" anymore for a long time but I at least could rely on userscores in the past, this game is like praised into high heavens by everyone for no reason. The best think it has to offer is graphics but they to not make for a good game.
There are large areas in the game the story does not even lead you though, just some stupid collectibles and these boxes with stuff you do not need. I did not even find the crossbow and did not care to look up where to find it, just had a bunch of arrows. I think the game got many people a boner because of the graphics and their brain shut off. The actual game is actually not that good.
And not to forget now how insanely woke the beginning of the game is, thanks to Sweet Baby Inc. they hired to rewrite the game with some woke trash dialog in the beginning and of course the race swap of Saga who was written a white Fin women. Her self made sweater does not fit her at all. 0.5% of Finnish women are black but hey DIVERSITY so they could just keep the story and hot two birds with once stone. My issue is not that she is black, my issue is that she was FORCED in by a company that should not exist, accompanied with woke cringe dialog. Because Remedy does not really care but is taken over by the woke mind virus. If they come up with a original story with a black lead they write themselves I am all for it, but not like this. But nobody cares and I am going to get downvoted for this, I know how it goes.
Interesting theory.
AW2 is a step forward to the shared universe of Remedy.
* While it may keep their creative vision "pure", the lack of lower graphical settings makes it run pretty terribly on an RTX 3080, which is very frustrating. You can brute-force this problem away with DLSS, but I like native resolution and I'm sick of DLSS being used as a crutch.
* The difficulty is all over the place. "Story" mode is likely too easy, while "Normal" varies between being reasonable and damn near impossible. A weaker enemy can take 2 bullets in Story, and 10 in normal. That's frustrating when ammo is so tight early on. In general, the game lacks a good "progression" of difficulty. It's a roller-coaster instead of a curve.
* To add on to the difficulty, the mechanics do not feel as consistent in AW2 as AW1. Why do some enemy types have a shield you need to burn away, while others don't? (Despite looking similar) For others, it's unclear which ones will vanish with a little light and which ones require an intense light - and what exactly gets them to disappear. Why can't the flashlight have a bit more grace when a target leaves the crosshair for 0.1 seconds? Why do so many enemies have extendo-reach and teleporting? Why isn't dodging timing better telegraphed? Etc.
* The story, at least so far, hasn't hit the same highs for me. It feels a little like we're doing the same thing over again, and it doesn't hit as hard the second time after the reveals and twists from AW1 are already used up.
I much prefer setting DLSS on performance and playing with medium settings and raytracing on a 3090. The game looks way better that way.
Native resolution is 1440p.
Most of the time it hovers around 60-ish, but it dips into the 40's occasionally and is overall inconsistent. To me, at 1440p, that's not acceptable.
Drivers are the latest Nvidia offers, but I didn't scrape the old ones out with DDU - hopefully that's not necessary.
But I love the numerous references to Control and Max Payne, and how they've integrated it into the same universe. I can't wait for the Max Payne remakes, and hopefully the next installment in the series. I just wish it could be done without association with Rockstar. They ruined the experience of MP3, which was a solid game, but Rockstar's Social Club launcher is a garbage piece of software.
Some of your criticisms are fair I think, but this is actually deliberate and explained as the story continues. Saga is clearly doing more than "profiling".
After playing the first ‘boss’ in AW2, this is an amusing claim to read. The controls and environment interaction are maddening.
Remedy/Sam Lake dropped the ball.
Instead of making another game cut from the same brilliant Alan Wake cloth they botched it and took out most of what makes the original game great.
"ECS meant that iteration was quick because adding new or modifying existing systems or game objects was easy, and performance gains were clear when saving and loading the Case Board."
and there's an accompanying screenshot with perhaps 20 objects on a case board.
I scanned through the rest of the article with one question in mind: what the hell? ECS is not a solution to putting 20 photos on a case board. You're pushing 100Ks or Ms of objects and need performance and are willing to suffer for performance = ECS. Not this.
So, despite world class developer, I did not find the article credible. The main cause of the lack of credibility is the author of the article did not anticipate the reader glancing at the case board and the ECS claim and saying: bullshit. Alternatively, they did anticipate the claim, and were told to ship the article anyways.
We built a new Voxel-Based Character Control that enables smooth navigation in cramped, complex and dynamic environments; it makes character movement more natural and fluid.
Fluid movement can be a problem, but "Voxel" is not what you did here, it's a marketing term. Maybe start with how a 2d collider for a 2d game should perhaps be a sphere smaller than the character (not a square, they get stuck on corners), and then say sth interesting about how you solved 3d. I am fairly certain that "voxel" isn't what happened, esp with the prior of "ECS".
ECS also has a lot of overhead. You almost certainly don't need ECS, and whatever you're writing would almost certainly be much simpler without ECS. Use ECS because it solves a serious problem that you have.
Edit: And my seriously downvoted point was putting objects on a "Case Board" does NOT justify an ECS; it's a problem with a /lot/ of good and good enough solutions. Were there any problems that needed an ECS, or did the article just want to say ECS (and voxel) because it's hip?
When people think of overhead, they might be thinking of the jankiness of Unity DOTs and it's lacklustre ECS integration with a preexisting editor designed for Unity's Gameobjects world.
The truth is, an engine built with ECS from the outset has ergonomics that go beyond merely writing better multithreaded code. It truly enforces composition over inheritance when done right. Overwatch is an example of a game written using ECS that generally doesn't have hundreds of thousands of entities bouncing around
Cool. I get why ECS is used there. Hard problem, meet the formalism that I will use to think about you.
A case board is not a hard problem. Using composition or a functional style instead of OOP is not a hard problem, or at least not a hard problem that ECS solves.
I'm not sure that we're talking past each other now, but I did want to at least respond to your point about Overwatch and note that ECS is used to solve an actual, hard problem there.