Dead or Alive 6 with a different game engine

[Lorenzo Buti]

Ok I know that Dead or Alive 5 has already got the best Soft Engine of all-time being used for their 3D Fighting game ever made, but what if Dead or Alive 6 were to use Nioh's engine instead of the shitty Dynasty Warriors 9 engine for most of it's development? I can tell that the body designs for the characters were a lot more different in terms to their hands and feet designs, I'll always choose Dead or Alive 5 for that. But honestly, I think Nioh somehow borrowed a bit of the Soft Engine for their surreal violent action RPG. If Shimbori wanted to use a "cool image", he could've gone with Nioh's engine because the characters in that game already looked realistic in surpassing the style. Dynasty Warriors 9 looked like garbage even while the designs aren't as cool as what Shimbori thinks. Trust me someone who can recreate a DOA fighter using Nioh's style should make it even more for Dead or Alive 7.

 

[Rikuto]

Soft engine is about as real as sega genesis blast processing and people need to start realizing it's just a marketing lie. It doesn't exist, it never existed, please don't perpetuate the lie. It's nothing more than a set of physics values for booba bounce that can applied to any engine capable of reading them. They claim its a special engine because when people believe the lie, it gives their product inflated value.


Moving on, yes the DW9 engine is ass and nobody likes it, KT included.

 

[HHH816]

that dw engine is perfect for the game

almost no clipping, in 5 if you pause the game you can see hand get through body, costume clipping though body

in 6 clipping almost non existant

 

[Rob]

Ew no. All the characters look bad in the DW engine outside of maybe Rachel and Christie. I hate the lighting also, probably the biggest offender of the engine. However I do like how leather looks though. Kasumi's NG suit looks great.

 

[Rikuto]

that dw engine is perfect for the game

almost no clipping, in 5 if you pause the game you can see hand get through body, costume clipping though body

in 6 clipping almost non existant

We have 8 frames of delay on PS4. There's actually somehow more on PS5.

It's not a good engine for anything and clipping is an issue resolved through various methods, the least of which being this game's engine.

 

[HHH816]

KT ain't using any unreal engine soon because you need to pay for royalty once the game sold a certain unit

 

[Rikuto]

One of the only reasons DOA 6 was allowed to be made was because they wanted TN to optimize their terrible engine for them. It was not a successful venture, so they will ultimately have to do something eventually.

Of course, that something might well be compounding their errors since KT aren't exactly ones for common sense. You'd think a publisher as massive as KT could afford what every other dev on the planet can apparently afford and just use UE, but here we are with their stubborn cheapness.

 

[rjqnraos19]

that dw engine is perfect for the game

almost no clipping, in 5 if you pause the game you can see hand get through body, costume clipping though body

in 6 clipping almost non existant

It's hard to see clipping but it because doa6's costumes have no cloth physics or downgraded from doa5.
and sadly still there are clipping in doa6. it's not fixed at all. actually it's worse than doa5.

 

[deathofaninja]

It's hard to see clipping but it because doa6's costumes have no cloth physics or downgraded from doa5.
and sadly still there are clipping in doa6. it's not fixed at all. actually it's worse than doa5.

I guess if you are pausing frames, it's noticeable, but other than that, it's tough to spot IMO. I can't think of one 3D game that doesn't have any clipping at all if I look into it hard enough.

 

[Matt Ponton]

Yup, definitely no clipping at all in DOA6. They solved the formula for the entire game industry by not having clipping when characters interact with anything...

Nioh 2 looks great, if you can get all the content unlocked to mess with character creator.

 

[Lorenzo Buti]

Soft engine is about as real as sega genesis blast processing and people need to start realizing it's just a marketing lie. It doesn't exist, it never existed, please don't perpetuate the lie. It's nothing more than a set of physics values for booba bounce that can applied to any engine capable of reading them. They claim its a special engine because when people believe the lie, it gives their product inflated value.


Moving on, yes the DW9 engine is ass and nobody likes it, KT included.

I wouldn't consider the Soft Engine a lie, I actually think it's the most fascinating game engine used for a 3D Fighting Game even to this day. I mean look at other games around that time like Tekken 7, it doesn't look all that impressive on the character faces or other details. Dead or Alive 5's design on everything still looks smooth and great. And of course you can tell that the developers who are working on Dead or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation still use that soft engine for their game, even while making new girls for their lineup.

 

[Matt Ponton]

I wouldn't consider the Soft Engine a lie, I actually think it's the most fascinating game engine used for a 3D Fighting Game even to this day. I mean look at other games around that time like Tekken 7, it doesn't look all that impressive on the character faces or other details. Dead or Alive 5's design on everything still looks smooth and great. And of course you can tell that the developers who are working on Dead or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation still use that soft engine for their game, even while making new girls for their lineup.

He says it's a lie because the Soft Engine was just adding Sub surface scatter and Tessellation to their DirectX engine, which came in when they upgraded from Direct X 9 on the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3/PC to Direct X 11 on the Xbox One/PlayStation 4. It also provided additional effects for them to use such as the costume transformation and light explosions for danger zones.

The lie comes in that the Soft Engine is somehow separate and unique from what Direct X did to the Direct X features.

 

[Lorenzo Buti]

He says it's a lie because the Soft Engine was just adding Sub surface scatter and Tessellation to their DirectX engine, which came in when they upgraded from Direct X 9 on the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3/PC to Direct X 11 on the Xbox One/PlayStation 4. It also provided additional effects for them to use such as the costume transformation and light explosions for danger zones.

The lie comes in that the Soft Engine is somehow separate and unique from what Direct X did to the Direct X features.

Well lie or no lie, I still appreciate the Soft Engine a lot more than any other 3D Fighting Game engine. Honestly look at other games like Soul Calibur, their feet designs don’t always improve, and Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown just used the Dragon Engine made for the Yakuza games. I bet if Dead or Alive 6 had a better engine, it would go directly to Nioh.

 

[Sotherius]

Nioh 2 (at least the beta) had 3 frames of input lag according to Noodalls on twitter ( he runs several tests of input lag in games). So it really does sting that they have somehow an engine that allows them for making good looking games and with a better input handling than the DW9 engine they were forced to use in DOA6.

 

[deathofaninja]

Nioh 2 (at least the beta) had 3 frames of input lag according to Noodalls on twitter ( he runs several tests of input lag in games). So it really does sting that they have somehow an engine that allows them for making good looking games and with a better input handling than the DW9 engine they were forced to use in DOA6.

Just on PS4. Nioh 2 and Dead or Alive 6 should have been released on current gen from the start.

 

[Lorenzo Buti]

Nioh 2 (at least the beta) had 3 frames of input lag according to Noodalls on twitter ( he runs several tests of input lag in games). So it really does sting that they have somehow an engine that allows them for making good looking games and with a better input handling than the DW9 engine they were forced to use in DOA6.

Ugh, for such a company that would be forced to use the god awful DW9 Engine should've rethink their own thoughts towards how successful their Nioh game was unlike Dynasty Warriors 9 which did so poorly. Now with newer titles such as Stranger of Paradise: Final Fanasty Origin and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, they knew their Nioh engine could be used for their action RPG lineup but not even Dead or Alive and a possible newer Ninja Gaiden game could've still work their way with the Nioh engine just wish they still did.

 

[Rikuto]

Well lie or no lie, I still appreciate the Soft Engine a lot more than any other 3D Fighting Game engine. Honestly look at other games like Soul Calibur, their feet designs don’t always improve, and Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown just used the Dragon Engine made for the Yakuza games. I bet if Dead or Alive 6 had a better engine, it would go directly to Nioh.

Again, the "Soft Engine" isn't an engine. No amount of team ninja calling it an engine is going to magically make it an engine. And let's be honest here, you probably don't even know what it does. So don't let them sucker you into thinking they are space wizards or something, they aren't.

Calibur is still using model assets from 2008 due to lack of budget. Nothing to do with the engine and everything to do with Namco being cheap and throwing that series under the bus.

All of these engines can pretty much do the same things visually, there isn't one engine inparticular showing off next-gen effects that the others lack in any significant way. Calibur is on unreal, and it can have the exact same breast physics and visual fidelity of DOA if it wants to. The reason it doesn't look exactly the same is because it is made by different people with different priorities, different artistic vision and different budget.

The only thing that separates these engines in any meaningful way is how well they are optimized for performance. And here is a spoiler -- The DW9 engine that DOA runs on (meaning its actual engine, not the fake soft engine), has the worst performance by a mile.

 

[Rob]

Again, the "Soft Engine" isn't an engine. No amount of team ninja calling it an engine is going to magically make it an engine. And let's be honest here, you probably don't even know what it does. So don't let them sucker you into thinking they are space wizards or something, they aren't.

Calibur is still using model assets from 2008 due to lack of budget. Nothing to do with the engine and everything to do with Namco being cheap and throwing that series under the bus.

All of these engines can pretty much do the same things visually, there isn't one engine inparticular showing off next-gen effects that the others lack in any significant way. Calibur is on unreal, and it can have the exact same breast physics and visual fidelity of DOA if it wants to. The reason it doesn't look exactly the same is because it is made by different people with different priorities, different artistic vision and different budget.

The only thing that separates these engines in any meaningful way is how well they are optimized for performance. And here is a spoiler -- The DW9 engine that DOA runs on (meaning its actual engine, not the fake soft engine), has the worst performance by a mile.

This is a word salad.

The Soft Engine IS an engine, and it is different from the DW9 engine.

You can SEE it in the way the games look.

Sure, not all engines are made equally. In theory what runs in the same hardware can produce the same results. But the people who make these engines have different objectives and their pipelines are different, their concerns are different and even their abilities are different.

IDK who told you any of the above, but it is absolutely not true.

A fake engine? What even is that?

 

[Rikuto]

Something that isn't classified as an engine in technical terms. It's not running anything that the base engine isn't already capable of. It's just something Team Ninja came up with as marketing claptrap, like I said before its similar to SEGA's blast processing from the 90's -- another thing which wasn't real in any meaningful way, but they kept repeating it anyway and nerds on every school bus would brag about it to their SNES-owning counterparts.

It worked then, and evidently that same gimmick works now. Because here you guys are, repeating the term over and over when it means absolutely nothing.

And no, you can't see it in the way the games look because it never did anything special in the first place. Cranking the bloom and vibrancy up to 11 so all detail is lost isn't something unique to Team Ninja, and that isn't even a property of the "soft engine". I could slap an ENB filter on a 13 year old game and get the same result. Wouldn't make ENB an engine, but ironically that would actually be doing more work than the "soft engine" does.


Listen. If you had an open world game, and you added a massive tree of programming logic to it that dictated physics of vehicles and how they handled, you could file those physics values under the term engine. Because that isn't something the base engine was doing on its own, it had to be created under a new umbrella so the rest of the game's logic didn't make it feel like shit. What the soft engine does is not something that was created. It was something that was branded.

If that still seems like word salad to you, I can't help you.

 

[Rob]

If you can't see the differences in 5LR and 6 then I can't help you. ("you added a massive tree of programming logic to it that dictated physics of vehicles and how they handled, you could file those physics values under the term engine" and that is exactly part of what the soft engine does, as it handles the breast physics - set the breast motion to the "LR" setting on PS4/X1. The difference is night and day compared to PS3/X360 DOA5)

Modern engines look different, not just cause of graphics API, but rendering techniques too. If you wanted an engine to look like 5LR you'd have to do a lot of custom work because the game is stylized.

By default, taking Unreal as an example, it has these “realistic looking” shaders and it’s just faster and more convenient to use those, than to develop your own effects. Same thing with Unity games, they have a look to them because they also have these default assets.

Also, on some older hardware you'll notice a lot of games using similar-ish looking effects because you couldn’t really program the GPU to do anything else. Those features were hardwired into the GPU. For example, do you remember how every DX7/DX8 game had this weird specular sheen on metallic surfaces? That was a feature of the hardware.

BTW Sega wasn't wrong. The Motorola 68000 had a higher clock speed. That was it. That was the whole blast processing thing.