Media Molecule Announced Dreams ... What Exactly is it?

[Mmm_fish_tacos]

GENERAL
- Dreams is LittleBigPlanet evolved (spiritual successor): The core idea of allowing players to create and share whatever they like remains, but the acts of content creation and consumption both are distinctly different.
- Accessibility is key for Dreams
- Dreams shifts creation into a 3D space.

REMIXING
- Anything that someone creates can be appropriated and repurposed: At some point you might see an element in a dream and you're like, 'I could take that purple elephant and [turn] it into my own creation. So we're hoping for this Lego-like moment where you realize that if you don't quite like how something works, you can mash it up and make it your own

HUBLESS CONNECTED WORLD
- Dreams is much more exploration and MMO-like. Rather than constantly returning to a home screen (like LBP had a hub); instead, it's more like Wikipedia. You search for cucumbers and you end up in Ohio farming and then you get to Batman.

ABOUT THE TRAILER
- [Debut trailer] "for Dreams was done in about two weeks. We took some playable levels and some non-playable levels, basically a cross-section of the content that we had. For example, the polar bear sequence comes out of a snowboarding game crossed with a guy who was building this polar bear character for his daughter."

HOW YOU PLAY
- It's also indicative of how Dreams is meant to flow, particularly when you fire it up for the first time. Much like actual dreams, there's no story, no continuity that ties everything together... "The idea is that you explore. So you travel through this sequence of dreams of dream-like— I hesitate to say 'levels,' but initially I think they will be game-like levels."

BETA
- "Right now, the team at Media Molecule is working on a beta trial. We haven't got the details of when and what, exactly; that's what comes at Paris. "

[Legend]

So hyped!

[Aura7541]

Sounds awesome

[Dr. Pezus]

HUBLESS CONNECTED WORLD
- it's more like Wikipedia. You search for cucumbers and you end up in Ohio farming and then you get to Batman.

dat analogy

[kitler53]

GENERAL
- Dreams is LittleBigPlanet evolved (spiritual successor): The core idea of allowing players to create and share whatever they like remains, but the acts of content creation and consumption both are distinctly different.
- Accessibility is key for Dreams
- Dreams shifts creation into a 3D space.

see.. i told you so.
i'm going to like this but i imagine MM is going to have a problem marketing this.  still, my number 1 hope for this is a more robust/responsive online component.  LBP online sucked.

[Legend]

http://media.lolrus.mediamolecule.com/AlexEvans_SIGGRAPH-2015.pdf

Huge PDF with tons of info about the game's graphics.

What you see is the 'tight' end of our spectrum. i.e. the point clouds are dense enough that you see sub pixel splats everywhere. The artist can also 'turn down' the density of points, at which point each point becomes a 'seed' for a traditional 2d textured quad splat. Giving you this sort of thing:



We use pure stochastic transparency, that is, we just randomly discard pixels based on the alpha of the splat, and let TAA sort it out. It works great in static scenes. However the traditional 'bounding box in color space' to find valid history pixels starts breaking down horribly with stochastic alpha, and we have yet to fully solve that. So we are still in fairly noisy/ghosty place. TODO!

We started by rendering the larger strokes - we call them megasplats - as flat quads with the rasterizer. thats what you see here, and in the E3 trailer.



Interestingly, Simon tried making a pure CS 'splatting shader', that takes the large splats, and instead of rasterizing a quad, we actually precompute a 'mini point cloud' for the splat texture, and blast it to the screen using atomics, just like the main point cloud when it's in 'microsplat' (tight) mode.



[Legend]

[Mmm_fish_tacos]

[7H3]

this looks like a very fun interactive art experiment