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douxreviews · 5 years

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American Gods - ‘A Murder of Gods’ Review

"That’s some profound knowledge for you right there. Wrapped up in a quaint sexual metaphor."

American Gods takes a quick side trip to alt-right paradise, and makes some new friends along the way.

One of the things most widely known about this episode among people who care in any way about such things is that everything we see this week is a brand new creation on the part of the series and has nothing at all to do with the novel. Which is good, really. That's the main virtue of doing a multi-season adaptation of a novel like this; it gives them the opportunity to really explore the corners of the universe that they're showing us in a way that a novel really can't.

Fortunately, they really take the opportunity and run with it, giving us a highly enjoyable episode while really digging into the ramifications of a couple things that were thrown out there previously. Most notably, last week we saw Mr. Wednesday being offered the opportunity to stop fighting and allow Mr. World to assimilate him into the new order of things. Specifically, as a weapons satellite over the middle east, which is a fair enough example of the sort of thing that is worshiped by a certain striation of humanity.

Wednesday turned down the offer in favor of remaining himself and fighting the new gods, which is for the best since that's sort of the plot of the whole series. But this week we get to see what happens to an old god who does agree to the offer. And so we stop off in Vulcan, Virginia, where every store welcomes open carry sidearms and fascist style armbands are all the rage.

Vulcan, for those of you who were popular as children and therefore might not have spent every second obsessively studying these things, was the Roman god of fire. In the episode they identify him as the god of the Volcano, which is close enough, if not strictly accurate enough for the more pedantic of us. He was the rough equivalent of Hephaestus in the Greek pantheon, but I feel obligated to point out that the whole metalwork thing was more Hephaestus' gig than Vulcan's. Which kind of makes me wish they'd gone with the Greek version of this particular god rather than the Roman, but I suppose they wanted to use the less difficult name. Plus the 'V' made a nice logo for his company.

When your whole show premise is based around addressing the idea of new gods based on things that modern American's actually worship, guns and ammunition has to be pretty close to the top of the list. Even so, it's quite brave for the show to be as up front about it as they are here. This is a town, and by proxy a country, that openly worships their guns. They all carry them, a volcano on every hip, as Vulcan says. The 'firearms as a way to make yourself feel powerful' theme is in no way subtext. It's the text. The good people of Vulcan only have to turn a blind eye to the occasional factory manager 'falling' into the smelting pots and they get to keep their nice, shiny guns.

I have to say, Vulcan transitioning from the volcano to the bullet factory works really well. The show spells it out, in a nice turn of phrase; he's gone from fire to firepower. They're showing us what happens to Gods who accept the offer Wednesday turned down last week, and what we see having happened here is a bloated, smug, king of his own little hill, openly rubbing Wednesday's nose in his own comfort. His taunting of Shadow with the front yard lynching tree, is just one detail in the sub-textually hostile dynamic between Wednesday and Vulcan.

But the idea of what happens to a god who assimilates isn't the only thing we're being shown here. We're also being shown what happens to an old god who turns down Mr. Wednesday's offer. That's going to come up again the next time he reaches out to an old friend, because now we know what the implicit threat is. That's a nice structural note for the season to build on later. Vulcan turned Wednesday down, so Wednesday decapitated him and vowed to tell everyone that Vulcan had decided to betray his new friends and so the new gods killed him. To say nothing of his urinating into the foundry. Seriously, let's not say anything about that.

Meanwhile, in the other plotline, Mad Sweeney, Laura, and Salim have ended up together on a road trip to Kentucky, by way of Indiana. Honestly, I could watch these three all day long. The combination of Laura and Sweeney trying to out-cynic one another contrasted with Salim's endearing sweet positivity is just a winning formula. One thing that this show doesn't get enough credit for is the way the characters interact with one another. Pleasingly, it makes perfect logistic sense why they're together despite not liking one another particularly. Sweeney very kindly even spells it out for us: He wants his coin. The only way Laura will give it to him is by getting her resurrected properly, and it so happens he 'knows a guy who knows a guy.' They need a car to get there, and Salim has one, but Salim is searching for the Jinn. Well, it so happens that Sweeney knows how to find him and will do so in exchange for a lift. Perfectly set up, they're all doing what they're doing out of self interest, and that's a solid way to establish your mismatched buddy road trip.

Lastly, it's worth mentioning the opening sequence. We've seen several 'Coming to America' vignettes in the past, but they've all been in a comfortable past setting where we can view them as history. By setting this weeks segment as immigrants crossing from Mexico illegally, only to be greeted with gunfire from sinister shadowed 'border patrollers', the show is forcing the viewers to confront some very uncomfortable thoughts about what coming to America means. The sequence is made even bolder in the way it unabashedly frames the immigrants as the heroes and the border patrol as the villains, right down to Mexican Jesus assisting the immigrants and getting shot by the patrol for his efforts.

Seriously. A TV show just showed American border agents, unofficial or otherwise - it's not really clear, shoot and kill Jesus. That's... well, brave doesn't seem to even cover it.

Quotes:

Shadow: "Who are you?" Wednesday: "If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me."

Laura: "Do you have a car?" Sweeney: "Yes. I do." Laura: "Well Chop-chop, ginger minge. Let’s go."

Laura: "Did you just name drop Jesus Christ like you know a guy who knows a guy?"

Wednesday: "There’s always been a god shaped hole in Man’s head. Trees were the first to fill it."

Wednesday: "Religion inspires in those who fear nothing fear of the gods. And using that fear requires a certain element of f**ked up."

Salim: "You are not a leprechaun?" Sweeney: "Oh, she’s a lepre-c**t" Laura: "(after smashing his face in the glass) If I hear that word pass your lips one more time I’m gonna peel them off your gums."

Salim: "I never met Ibrahim bin Irem. I imagine he was given a new life, just as I was. My name is Salim. Or, it was Salim. I do not know what my name is now."

Bits and Pieces:

-- So, rapture and fear. Wednesday seems to be telling us that Gods get their energy from fear and that sacrifice is essentially food to them. That's an interesting differentiation, because it makes a distinction between thought and action. I'll be interested to see if they expand on that.

-- Vulcan says that people like to be watched and that they don't do evil while being observed. That's very Jeremy Bentham of him. There's an interesting Doctor Who connection there, if you feel like doing the research. Key word to look up being 'panopticon'.

-- Sweeney uses the phrase 'murder of Gods' as the group singular noun, like a pack of wolves, a murder of crows, or a romp of otters.

-- Yes, the group singular for otters is a 'romp'. I've been waiting to work that into conversation for years.

-- Wednesday is desperately trying to convince Shadow to let go of Laura, including implying that she only came to see him to let him go and lying to him about knowing about her presence there in the first place. I wonder why he's so desperate to get rid of her.

-- There was a really nice shot transition from Mexican Jesus forming a golden halo to confirm who he was, and then that halo turning out to be the headlights of the border patrol trucks. Really nicely framed.

-- Shadow's being infected by the bit of 'tree-thing' was kind of a waste of episode space, to the extent that I forgot to even mention it last episode. It did, however, allow Wednesday to tell us about Mr. Wood, one of the first Gods, which introduced the concept of gods evolving and changing to adapt to changes in the world, which thematically set up Vulcan's situation. SO it wasn't a total waste.

-- The shot of the 'World's Greatest Boss' mug dissolving in the molten metal made me laugh out load.

-- That is, in actual fact, what happens when you fire bullets into the air like that. Don't fire bullets into the air like that. It's a dumb-ass thing to do.

-- As I mentioned in a previous Punisher review, Corbin Bernsen really does a great 'villain'. It's a shame he lost his head.

-- It's a little inexplicable however why Vulcan actually made that sword for Wednesday. It seemed pretty clear that they were both already planning to betray one another, so why actually give him a powerful weapon like that?

A really great character piece, as well as an exciting advancement toward the season one finale. Can't wait to get to Kentucky.

Three and a half out of four shell casings.

Mikey Heinrich is, among other things, a freelance writer, volunteer firefighter, and roughly 78% water

#American Gods #Shadow Moon #Mr. Wednesday #American Gods Reviews #Doux Reviews #TV Reviews

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aestheticdumpp · 7 years

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interview.

broadway babies: what it’s like to grow up on stage

Story by Elizabeth Schuyler, reporter for Playbill Magazine.

Famous friendships have been made on the stages of Broadway, but none quite as close as youngsters Madison Henderson, 21, and Holly Blake, 24, who are singing and dancing their way into our hearts.

The two met during an Off-Broadway production of a musical adaption of the cult classic 80s film Heathers, and moved in together halfway during rehearsals. Despite playing bitter revivals in their first show together, the two couldn't be friendlier.

I was welcomed to their apartment when Madison opened the door, one shoe missing but positively beaming. She's very excited for this interview - even if she hadn't already told me, it's obvious in her energy as she bounces over to me and greets me with a wonderful hug.

When I'm ushered inside, I see that the apartment is quaintly furnished, with a few small plants dotted around; there's a couple of scripts placed on the coffee table, one for each young woman; overall, a pretty minimalist apartment, dressed in black or white and accented with the bright colours of plants, the odd painting, and books.

I follow Madison into the small kitchen/dining area and take a seat at the table when her counterpart comes in from down the hall. The two bump into each other for a second and Madison goes on the hunt for her missing shoe and Holly laughs, steps aside for her friend, before stepping over to me. She, too, greets me with a hug, and tells me to take a seat.

Holly makes a pot of tea – the correct way, she jokes, by warming the teapot first – before bringing the tray with matching milk and sugar bowls over to the table. By the time she sits down, Madison has given up on the second shoe and returned, barefoot.

Madison is no stranger to Broadway. She had small parts in a few shows as a child, debuting as Molly, the youngest orphan in Annie. She says she doesn't really count it, though, and says that she feels like her time as Liesl in the first all black Sound of Music was her true Broadway debut.

"I didn't really know what was going on when I was that small. Like, I was singing some songs with my friends. Liesl is different, I actually remember being nervous about auditions. It's also very important being an all black show of what's traditionally very white."

She's currently playing Natasha in the new musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. It's one of the roles she's been most excited to take on – this is the first time she's ever originated a role, especially one so weighty. The show, she tells me, is adaption of Tolstoy's novel War and Peace.

"Oh my God." Madison laughs, touching her forehead and retelling the story of the phone call. "Our producer was like, the part's yours, and I just cried. I get emotional. I've been emotional about certain roles before but this was so different. I'm the first! I still see myself as a kid from New Orleans, not a Broadway actress."

"Or Tony nominee." The redhead opposite her interjects, grinning.

Madison's nomination for best actress as Natasha is her first ever nomination for any role, and doesn't expect to win. Holly scoffs, confident that her friend has it in the bag.

"One of us has to be optimistic for you."

Madison's other previous roles include being the first black Elle Woods in Legally Blonde: the Musical, Mimi Marquez in Rent, and of course, Veronica Sawyer in Heathers: the Musical (off-Broadway).

"We met during Heathers. It was her first show in New York, and so we had to show her how it was done." Madison nods towards Holly, who smiles modestly.

The elder between the two has been very successful in Australia, where she was born and raised, having a resume just as impressive, including Sally Bowles in Cabaret (for which she won a Green Room award), playing both young and grown up Cosette in two different versions of Les Miserables, and Janet Weiss in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

"Australian theatre is different. We have one cast that tours, instead of various casts across the country like it is here, so I travelled a lot growing up."

Holly played Heather Chandler opposite Madison in Heathers: the Musical, but her first show here was the national tour of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Currently, she is taking her Broadway debut as her ultimate dream role as Penny Pingleton in the Hairspray revival.

"Penny's my be-all-and-end-all. If I never worked again I wouldn't even be mad." She laughs, only half joking.

We break into conversation about various things, including Holly worrying I made it to their apartment alright, Madison's "low-key" addiction to Flaming Hot Cheetos, before the topic of fellow actor Thomas Jefferson comes up.

Jefferson, 31, plays Seaweed, Penny's love interest in Hairspray, and is nominated for best supporting actor in a revival of a musical. Similarly to Holly, the show is his Broadway debut.

Holly laughs as Madison scowls. It seems the two do not get along. There's a quick exchange of words between the two:

Madison starts, "He's a pig."

"Thomas Jefferson is a doll and you're basically in love with him." Holly fires back, tongue pressed against her cheek as she fails to hold back a grin.

Her friend is riled up, but turns to me. "Eliza, she's a liar. It's terrible, really. It's such a shame, she'd be so nice otherwise-"

Holly laughs, swears at her friend (it's the thickest her accent sounds throughout the entire time I'm with them), and turns to me.

"He's great. Really witty. Brilliant dancer." Her eyes flick to her friend. "Good kisser."

Of course, the two lock lips multiple times a week, sharing various kisses throughout each performance, but it unsettles Madison all the same.

"That's disgusting. Apologise to Eliza."

"Eliza, I'm sorry that Madison doesn't realise how much she wants him. It's a really painful situation to walk into."

Madison throws her teaspoon at Holly, who gets hit, but laughs all the same.

A week passes and I catch up with Madison again, just as she finishes her first show on this two-show Saturday. I've sat and watched the show and the youngest cast member is phenomenal: emotional, brilliant, and memorable. It's no surprise that she's nominated for the Tony.

As we're walking over to the Richard Rodgers Theatre, where Holly is performing (which is right next door to the Imperial Theatre, where Madison is performing), we chat about what it's like to grow up on stage.

"It's weird. It's a weird kind of fame." She remarks. "I can be getting coffee or food before a show, just waiting in line, and then somebody asks for a photo or whatever and everyone else is looking at me like, 'Who are you and why are you important?'"

We slip in through the stage door and we go through and sit in the dressing room that Holly shares with her two castmates Abigail Smith (who plays Tracy Turnblad) and Dolley Payne (who plays Amber von Tussle). The room is decorated with a string of lights at the window, and an old purple couch at the end of the room where we sit. There’s a group of three candles in yellow, pink, and green (to represent Amber's, Penny's, and Tracy's pageant dresses), all matching and sitting on the small side table where a docking station sits. There’s a phone plugged in, softly playing hits of the late fifties and early sixties.

Live music pumps from below us as Madison starts to rifle through the shared mini fridge, where there's a small plastic bag with a note taped to it, bearing Madison's name. She takes it out, and inside it is a bottle of water and a bag of Hot Cheetos. She reads the note aloud:

"Madison, hope you managed to break in alright. Tell Eliza she's welcome to whatever she wants from the fridge, if anything, but I bought you these so you'd stop taking Abigail's snacks. Love, Holly."

About twenty minutes pass and Holly appears at the door in a bright pink dress and riding on the back of John Adams, the actor who plays Link Larkin and the Anthony to her Johanna in the Sweeney Todd days. Hairspray is a mini reunion for them - actors George King and Louis Roi, playing Corny Collins and Wilbur Turnblad respectively, were Toby and Sweeney Todd in the tour.

Holly squeals and slides off his back before he races off, calling for Baron von Steuben (yes, that Baron von Steuben, who plays Edna Turnblad) as he races off. She comes in, pulls off her shoes, and sits in her seat opposite her mirror. Her dressing room neighbours dart in, change quickly, and rush out to meet fans at the stage door, whilst the redhead begins to undress carefully so the three of us can get coffee (I’ve been invited to their Saturday ritual of coffee and food between shows).

Madison is talking about John Laurens, her Pierre, as her friend listens intently, removing her wig and pinning it to her wig stand. There’s something very familial and sisterly about the two of them, and it’s heartwarming. The two giggle as they joke about something I’ve missed whilst looking at the photos pressed to Holly’s mirror.

Previous casts, two of her and Madison, and a couple of her family back home. Madison points out Holly’s parents to me as she changes from her costume into her regular clothes.

The door is opened and a young man walks in. Madison's up first to hug him, and he smiles at her. His name is Usnavi, and he's the brilliant tech that works at each show that Hudson Theatrical Associates oversees in alternating weeks, or whenever there's a problem. He's spent most of his time over at Natasha, making small changes every week as new shows go through scores of changes every so often.

He walks over to Holly, who hands him her mic belt and headset. She introduces him to me, and he shakes my hand, but his attention is quickly turned back to Holly, whisking her away for a quick mic check before the second show.

Madison snorts. "That boy keeps telling her that her batteries are going out so he can spend time with her."

I ask if he has told her that. She responds with: "He don't need to."

We eventually make it to coffee and the girls converse so regularly that it's difficult to believe that they're winners and nominees of highly revered awards. It's a wonder how two people so young can be so accomplished and talented and still find time to be young. Madison enjoys the New York night life, and makes sure to dedicate time to spending a night out with her friends whenever she gets a few days off, and Holly has a teaching degree.

The Australian throws her head back in laughter at something her younger friend has said, and Madison is beaming with a dazzling brightness, giggling too at her own joke. It's so odd to see these girls in lights and costumes and then twenty minutes later see them curled up in hoodies and leggings, talking about culture and coffee like us normal people, especially when so many young people who grow up under a spotlight end up stressed or arrogant.

"There ain't no reason to be arrogant. I'll pull it with my brother, you know, like, 'Oh, I'm Tony nominated, what are you doing?', but it's never serious." Madison says, shrugging.

Holly adds, "I used to think I was it and a bit for a while, but then I went to uni and I had no friends so nobody knew who I was really, and then it hit me. Sounds bad. It's nice to be important, but it's important to be nice."

The two girls will finish their runs soon enough. Madison finishes about three months earlier, but is greatly looking forward to the time off, but will likely be featured in the Tony performance that Natasha is bound to do. She can't confirm, but I'm certain of it.

Holly, too, is likely to perform, as Hairspray is a show with big, crowd pleasing fan favourites. With the Tonys less than two months away, I for one can't wait to see what these ladies and their respective shows will pull off.

As for their future beyond these shows, the ladies confirm the Wicked rumours – they will, in fact, be starring opposite one another in the roles of Elphaba and Glinda.

They've known it's been a goal for them to appear together on stage again since Heathers, and there's nothing more iconic than that duo. Madison will be painted green and Holly will wear Broadway's most glittered crown in a date yet to be confirmed.

"We can't say much about it. We know the parts are ours, but we don't have scripts or anything yet."

"We both know the show by heart though."

"I think everyone does."

It's nice to know that Broadway's still producing sweet, clever leading ladies, both on and off stage.

See Madison in Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 at the Imperial Theatre, or see Holly in Hairspray at the Richard Rodgers Theatre! Tickets are selling out fast for both shows, so don’t miss out.

Don't forget to catch the Tonys on June 12, at 6/7c, and look out for all of the latest Playbill articles to keep you up to date on all your favourite show business!

#broadway au #madison #holly

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entergamingxp · 4 years

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see Unreal Engine 5 running on PlayStation 5 • Eurogamer.net

We’ve seen the specs, we’ve heard the pitches – but what we haven’t experienced is any demonstration of a genuine next-gen vision. That changes today with Epic Games’ reveal of Unreal Engine 5, accompanied by an astonishing tech demo confirmed as running in real-time on PlayStation 5 hardware. The promise is immense with the quality and density of the visuals on display almost defying belief. Imagine a game world where geometric detail is unlimited, with no pop-in and huge draw distances. Now picture this unprecedented level of fidelity backed up by real-time global illumination that’s fully dynamic. It sounds too good to be true, but watch the video on this page and that’s what’s on display. This is next-gen and it’s enormously exciting.

With Unreal Engine 5, Epic is looking to free developers from the constraints of poly counts and draw calls, to allow artists to simply drop in their full-fidelity ZBrush models and photogrammetry data. There’s no need for simplifying models to hit performance targets, no need for LOD generation. The new UE5 system – dubbed Nanite – takes care of it for you. Meanwhile, full dynamic global illumination via Epic’s new Lumen technology ensures accurate lighting of the scene with phenomenal realism.

What kind of detail levels are we talking about here? The ‘Lumen in the Land of Nanite’ demo includes a close-up on a statue built from 33 million triangles with 8K textures. It’s displayed at maximum fidelity within the scene, with no developer input required. Moving into the next room, the demo wows us with almost 500 of those same statues in place (485 to be precise), all displayed at the same maximum quality. That’s 16 billion triangles in total, running smoothly in-scene. It sounds impossible, but what next-gen delivers are the tools to deliver on an age-old rendering vision that seemed unattainable – until now. Along with other media outlets, we were pre-briefed by Epic Games and had the chance to put questions to CEO Tim Sweeney, CTO Kim Libreri and VP of engineering, Nick Penwarden.

“You know, the philosophy behind it goes back to the 1980s with the idea of REYES: Render Everything Your Eye Sees,” says Tim Sweeney. “It’s a funny acronym which means that given essentially infinite detail available, it’s the engine’s job to determine exactly what pixels need to be drawn in order to display it. It doesn’t mean drawing all 10 billion polygons every frame because some of them are much, much smaller than the pixel. It means being able to render and an approximation of it which misses none of the detail that you’re able to perceive and once you get to that point, you’re done with geometry. There’s nothing more you can do. And if you rendered more polygons, you wouldn’t notice it because they just contribute infinitesimally to each pixel on the screen.”

Here’s Epic’s official ‘Lumen in the Land of Nanite’ technology trailer, running in real-time on PlayStation 5 hardware.

Put simply, the scene renders through UE5 on a triangle-per-pixel basis with the user seeing only what he/she needs to see. It sounds preposterously simple, but it’s the culmination of over three years’ worth of research and development headed up by Epic Games’ technical director of graphics, Brian Karis. UE5 – on next-gen at least – is the realisation of the micro-polygon engine, and despite being demonstrated on PlayStation 5 specifically, Unreal Engine 5 is a cross-platform endeavour, just like its predecessors.

“The key features we’re debuting will work across all of the next generation console platforms,” adds Sweeney. “We don’t have performance comparisons, we can’t share performance comparisons, but this is a feature set you can count on with that generation, particularly micro polygon geometry with the Nanite technology and real-time global illumination with Lumen.”

UE5 gets its first public release early in 2021 with franchise juggernaut Fortnite transitioning across from UE4 later on in the same year. Unlike UE4, however, the new iteration of the engine isn’t a clean break from the past. It has the same system targets as UE4, meaning it’ll run on anything from the most high-end PCs to old Android and iOS devices, encompassing current-gen consoles too – including Switch. Obviously though, you can’t expect the same level of fidelity as the fully-fledged next-gen experience revealed today.

“To maintain compatibility with the older generation platforms, we have this next generation content pipeline where you build your assets or import them at the highest level of quality, the film level of quality that you’ll run directly on next generation consoles,” continues Tim Sweeney. “The engine provides and will provide more scalability points to down-resolution your content to run on everything, all the way down to iOS and Android devices from several years ago. So you build the content once and you can deploy it everywhere and you can build the same game for all these systems, but you just get a different level of graphical fidelity.”

Epic is keen to stress a strong commitment to the interoperability of its new technology across multiple systems, despite demonstrating on PlayStation 5, where Sony has made strong arguments about the need for extreme bandwidth from storage. Meanwhile, Microsoft has developed DirectX 12 Ultimate, which also includes a radical revamp of how storage is handled on PC, but apparently the firm isn’t leaning heavily on any one system’s strength. However, subsequent to our interview, Epic did confirm that the next-gen primitive shader systems are in use in UE5 – but only when the hardware acceleration provides faster results than what the firm describes as its ‘hyper-optimised compute shaders’.

DF Direct: John Linneman and Alex Battaglia offer up their thoughts on Epic’s next-gen showcase.

“A number of different components are required to render this level of detail, right?” offers Sweeney. “One is the GPU performance and GPU architecture to draw an incredible amount of geometry that you’re talking about – a very large number of teraflops being required for this. The other is the ability to load and stream it efficiently. One of the big efforts that’s been done and is ongoing in Unreal Engine 5 now is optimising for next generation storage to make loading faster by multiples of current performance. Not just a little bit faster but a lot faster, so that you can bring in this geometry and display it, despite it not all fitting and memory, you know, taking advantage of next generation SSD architectures and everything else… Sony is pioneering here with the PlayStation 5 architecture. It’s got a God-tier storage system which is pretty far ahead of PCs, bon a high-end PC with an SSD and especially with NVMe, you get awesome performance too.”

But it’s Sweeney’s invocation of REYES that I’m particularly struck by. The UE5 tech demo doesn’t show extreme detail at close range, it’s also delivering huge draw distances and no visible evidence whatsoever of LOD pop-in. Everything is seamless, consistent. What’s the secret? “I suppose the secret is that what Nanite aims to do is render effectively one triangle for pixel, so once you get down to that level of detail, the sort of ongoing changes in LOD are imperceptible,” answers Nick Penwarden. “That’s the idea of Render Everything Your Eye Sees,” adds Tim Sweeney. “Render so much that if we rendered more you couldn’t tell the difference, then as the amount of detail we’re rendering changes, you shouldn’t be able to perceive difference.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the definition of a micro-polygon engine. The cost in terms of GPU resources is likely to be very high, but with next-gen, there’s the horsepower to pull it off and the advantages are self-evident. Rendering one triangle per pixel essentially means that performance scales closely with resolution. “Interestingly, it does work very well with our dynamic resolution technique as well,” adds Penwarden. “So, when GPU load gets high we can lower the screen resolution a bit and then we can adapt to that. In the demo we actually did use dynamic resolution, although it ends up rendering at about 1440p most of the time.”

Penwarden also confirms that the temporal accumulation system seen in Unreal Engine 4 – which essentially adds detail from prior frames to increase resolution in the current one – is also used in UE5 and in this demo. The transparency here from Epic is impressive. We’ve spent a long time poring over a range of 3840×2160 uncompressed PNG screenshots supplied by the firm. They defy pixel-counting, with resolution as a metric pretty much as meaningless as it is for, say, a Blu-ray movie. But temporal accumulation does so much more for UE5 than just anti-aliasing or image reconstruction – it underpins the Lumen GI system.

“Temporal accumulation, you know – more than just normal temporal anti-aliasing – it’s is a huge part of how we’re able to make things look as good as this,” says Kim Libreri. “The global illumination, without a temporal intelligence, there’s no way you could do it on hardware yet. We’re actually doubling down on the understanding of how temporal can help us, and there’s been so many huge improvements in quality because of having a temporal component. It’s the way that we get close to movie rendering – without those samples (and they’re not just necessarily pure screen-space samples, there’s loads of things you can do to temporally accumulate), the GI would not work anywhere near as well as it does without it.”

Libreri himself has an award-winning background in the movie business, an area where Unreal Engine 4 is proving increasingly influential. He’s particularly enthused about the idea of a universal workflow that allows for assets of identical quality to be used in all areas. “A lot of this came from the fact that we have these two extremes. We have people making mobile games on UE4 and we have people making the Mandalorian on UE4 and trying to work out how can we have a unified way of everybody working, so there’s not this pressure point,” he says. “You know, people’s time should be spent on making awesome games and awesome gameplay and not necessarily on the minutiae of asset creation, the tedium because we have these old techniques from over a decade ago that were necessary to be deployed to be able to produce your environments.”

And to prove the point, the UE5 demo running on PlayStation 5 mostly uses full fidelity assets taken from the Quixel Megascans library – not the more simplified versions designed for video games using 8K textures. Liberi adds: “The proof of the pudding is that the environments in the demo… half of our environment team were standard, Epic-experienced environmentalists and the other half were brand new to the company, they came from the movie industry and they took to the engine like a duck to water because they didn’t have to worry about this barrier or making normal maps, low resolution meshes to best emulate the high resolution… so it made a huge difference to our throughput.”

Ray tracing will be supported in UE5 but right now, it’s only just starting to appear on UE4 – we put the engine’s RT features through their paces here.

And there ends Epic’s next-gen pitch with Unreal Engine 5. For next-gen game development, unprecedented detail and lighting is combined with the tech to deliver insanely detailed assets at as close to full fidelity as rendering resolution allows, combined with revamped physics, animation and audio systems. Meanwhile, with concerns spiralling about the cost and effort required to deliver a true generational leap in visual quality, Epic’s strategy is all about giving easy-to-use tools to all developers, while unifying the tech and the required assets to work from the smallest indie projects up to the biggest motion pictures. At the same time, Sweeney is promising a smooth transition from UE4 to UE5.

“We’re on Unreal Engine 4.25 right now, which is the 25th in its series,” he says. “And in upgrading to the UE5, the cost to developers and the complexity will be like going through a few of these minor version updates, which most developers go through every few months. We want to bring the community along and bring them along quickly so that you don’t have stragglers who are stuck with previous generation features years from now.”

Today’s announcements go beyond Unreal Engine 5. Epic is opening up the online infrastructure that powers Fortnite to any developer who wants it, even if the game itself doesn’t run on Unreal Engine and even if it’s Steam-only. This includes access to Epic’s server infrastructure and cross-play functionality that’s officially sanctioned by all console platform holders. But it’s the ‘Lumen in the Land of Nanite’ technology demo running on PlayStation 5 that’s going to attract the biggest headlines and the most attention – and it’s not surprising.

With some level of disappointment in the wake of last week’s Xbox Series X gameplay reveal – which didn’t seem to feature Series X or indeed much in the way of gameplay – there was some concern about the future of next-gen gaming: to what extent would the new consoles deliver a dramatic leap over the games we play today? The Unreal Engine 5 tech demo gives us an emphatic answer – a new level of detail and fidelity we’ve never seen before – and apparently, there’s much more to come. Hardware accelerated ray tracing will be supported in Unreal Engine 5, for example, but it’s not a part of the PS5 tech demo revealed today. We’ll have more soon on this remarkable piece of technology, but in the meantime, enjoy this first taste of what the next generation can really deliver.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/05/see-unreal-engine-5-running-on-playstation-5-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=see-unreal-engine-5-running-on-playstation-5-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

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ismael37olson · 6 years

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The Power of Love Can Make a Zombie Too!

It's hard to believe it's over. It was five years ago that I set out to write The Zombies of Penzance. It seemed so perfect, so deliciously fucked up, and the process of "translating" the story , the changing of Gilbert's pirates into zombies, hardly disturbed the plot at all (though I later made some larger plot changes). I know you want to ask, so yes, I was seriously stoned when I thought of the idea. I immediately loved everything about it. I already deeply loved The Pirates of Penzance. I love zombie movies. I love mashups. Plus, I quickly decided that my approach would include an elaborate, though entirely false, backstory about the creation of The Zombies of Penzance. In fact, that meta-layer became an important part of the humor. We tell the audience Gilbert wrote these zombie lyrics, but then throughout the evening, we keep smacking them with anachronisms, four-letter words, and other morsels that Gilbert would/could never have written -- including every reference to zombies, which hadn't entered the awareness of Western culture yet. I loved all of that. The inherent wrongness of it all. More than anything what I loved most was the fundamental idea of telling a horror story in the language of English light opera, possibly the most "wrong" storytelling form imaginable for this content. That was the appeal for me, more than anything else. I love things, particularly art, that are obviously wrong or fucked-up. That's so interesting, and often, so funny. I also loved the idea that this would be New Line's second zombie musical, since we did the very serious Night of the Living Dead in 2013. And its our seventh horror musical, following our productions of Rocky Horror, Sweeney Todd, Bat Boy, In the Blood, and Lizzie. Should we also count Urinetown...? Throughout the time I've been working on this, I was always mindful of the fact that no matter how funny or meta-ironic my text was, it had no real value on the page. It's only a zombie operetta when it's live (dead?) onstage. I needed lots of people to make it into live theatre. That's true of all our shows, but since this was an awfully odd experiment, it was constantly in my awareness. When I talked to friends about it, at some point I'd always throw in, "...if I ever finish it, and if we produce it..." We held a public reading in January. To my amazement, 150 people showed up, and to my greater amazement they followed the plot easily and fully embraced my multiple layers of meta, my blatant anachronisms, and the four-letter words sprinkled throughout. The audience really loved both the ways in which I had stayed true to Gilbert & Sullivan and their traditions, and also the ways in which I violated that. It's actually a fairly complex piece, and I was delighted that many of the reviewers noticed and appreciated that. Paul Friswold wrote in his Riverfront Times review:

Scott Miller and John Gerdes are the responsible parties, tinkering with Gilbert's lyrics and Sullivan's music to create something more than the sum of the parts. The two St. Louisans have added modern references, profanity and a careful adherence to the spirit of the original operetta. Portraits of George A. Romero and Queen Victoria hang above the old-fashioned stage and its working footlights, hinting at the twin forces at work here. Romero is the godfather of zombies in popular entertainment, and Victoria led the society that simultaneously embraced Gilbert & Sullivan's jaunty work and harbored a morbid fascination with life after death. All of these elements come together on stage, to strange and often comic effect. . . . But it's not all fun and pop-culture riffs. Despite his lethal nature, the Major-General has a most troubled conscience. The second-act song "When the World Went Bad" cracks open the show's candy coating to reveal the darkness within. Stanley sings of his fears about the forces bringing the dead to life, and worries about the coarsening of his soul. Is he less moral than the Zombie King, who spares some people (albeit under false pretenses)? The Major-General kills them all, and then shakes with terror and remorse late at night. Is he worse than what he hunts? It's a question that harkens back to Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend, which was Romero's own inspiration. The book also informs the finale, which is preceded by a delightfully ridiculous brawl between the Stanley daughters, who are in their bloomers and bearing cricket bats and nunchucks, and the zombie horde. Things become very dark indeed. But you know what they say: It's always darkest before the dawn of the dead.

Some people reflexively dismissed the show -- without seeing it of course -- as a stunt, a bastardization, a one-joke show. I'll admit that my new Major-General lyric is a stunt, but so is Gilbert's original. That's what patter songs are. Beyond that, The Zombies of Penzance is an experiment in form and content, it's a big over-arching meta-joke about lost and discarded works, and it's a translation in terms of cultural context and also in terms of themes. As I wrote in another blog post, The Pirates of Penzance is about how absurd and arbitrary class distinctions are. But though I changed the basic story very little, the substitution of monsters (zombies) for "monsters" (pirates) changes more than you'd expect. The Zombies of Penzance is about the Other-ing of those who are different from us, particularly by those who claim the moral high ground.

And also, because I cut the policemen from the story, and gave their songs to the Stanley daughters, who are now trained zombie hunters, it's also a story about women standing up for themselves, fighting back, solving their own problems. I was honestly shocked at how empowering it apparently felt for women in our audience when the daughters marched on in their zombie hunter clothes in mid-Act II, particularly I think for women who know Pirates. The journey's been five years for me, but it's also been two years for John Gerdes, who adapted the music and orchestrated it. He adapted and orchestrated all the music for our reading last January, then he orchestrated Yeast Nation for us, then he came back to Zombies, finished his work and incorporated my rewrites from the reading. And then John and his wife Lea played in the band for the show. So I suspect John will have some zombie withdrawal as well. This amazing cast has been working on this show since last November, when we started rehearsals for the reading. They have worked so hard on this score, both musically and conceptually. I realized early on that we had to apply the lessons of Little Shop, Bat Boy, and Urinetown to The Zombies of Penzance. The more seriously we take it, the funnier it gets; and in parallel to that, the better we sing the music, the more seriously we take that, the funnier the show gets. This isn't Evil Dead. To maintain the crazy meta-story, our audience had to believe this was intended to be performed at the Savoy Theatre in 1879. The more legit the music, the funnier the show.

And likewise, the better the craft -- rhymes, scansion, etc. -- the funnier the show. The Major-General's big patter song, "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Era Zombie Killer," is funny partly because the craft is good. Really, I guess all this is a lesson Gilbert and Sullivan learned long before Little Shop of Horrors. Almost all their shows are inherently ridiculous stories (about inherently ridiculous aspects of Western culture) which they present utterly straight-faced. No matter how wacky Gilbert's text gets, Sullivan's music is always straight-faced. This has been such a wonderful experience for me, bringing two of my greatest loves together, G&S and zombies. To quote my own lyric:

Hail, zombies, thou heav’n-made dead! Forsaken by the God we dread. Great metaphor for all we fear! All hail the end of all that we hold dear!

I was very lucky to find a cast full of really strong, funny, talented, fearless actors to bring my show to life, and almost all of them have stayed with the show since last November. I am very grateful. And then to get such warm, overwhelming responses to it! Look at some of these press quotes:

"Another triumph for New Line. . . a hilariously inspired joke." -- Calvin Wilson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch "The funniest show that New Line Theatre has ever mounted." -- Judy Newmark, All The World's a Stage "Both a nightmare and a delight — let's call it a delightmare." -- Paul Friswold, The Riverfront Times "Uproarious." -- Jeff Ritter, Critical Blast "It's amazing. . . so much fun." -- Kevin Brackett, ReviewSTL "A wonderful whirlwind of apocalyptic delight." -- Tanya Seale, BroadwayWorld "Reverently irreverent and witty. . . a delightfully fun, pointedly funny musical." -- Tina Farmer KDHX "Let the wackiness ensue." -- Lynn Venhaus, STL Limelight "In terms of humor and sheer musicality, it’s remarkable." -- Michelle Kenyon, Snoop's Theatre Thoughts

But our show has closed and my zombie journey ends, for now. We've already gotten a couple requests for rights to perform the show, so the Zombie King may live (die?) on. But for all practical purposes, the ride is over. I will miss these characters and this beautiful music, and this extraordinary cast. It was so thrilling every night when they sang the a cappella chorale late in Act I, "Hail Zombies!" -- such a massive, gorgeous sound (due in large part to music director Nic Valdez)! John and I will be cleaning up / correcting the script and score, and then we'll publish them on Amazon, so they'll be available soon. And I won't swear to it, but we also may be releasing a live cast album. And yes, we will license other theatres to produce it.

And don't tell anybody... but I'm already working on another "new" G&S show. No promises, but I may end up writing a G&S horror trilogy before I'm done. I can hear the heads of G&S fans exploding as I type this... Suggestions are welcome for source material for the third in the trilogy. I'll leave you with one of my favorite bits from Zombies. Thank you, St. Louis, for once again, taking a chance on us and totally embracing the insanity we've wrought. We owe you so much!

My zombie hunting habits, though a potent, little metaphor, Are really more subversive than the critics give me credit for. In nineteenth cent’ry operetta, comedy or thriller, I am still the very model of a modern-era zombie killer!

Long Live the Musical! Scott from The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-power-of-love-can-make-zombie-too.html

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