The Last of Us PS4 Dev Explains Pop-in Bugs; Promises to Ship Better Game and Engine Inspired by Fans

The Last of Us PS4 Dev Explains Pop-in Bugs; Promises to Ship Better Game and Engine Inspired by Fans

Giuseppe Nelva August 1, 2014 5:50 PM EST

If you’re playing The Last of Us Remastered, you possibly noticed that the game suffers from pop-in issues in certain areas. Basically when you walk close to some elements of the environment they just “pop” into view. Other items “fade” into view and more flicker between being visible and invisible. All those glitches, while minor, can be a little disturbing.

If you didn’t notice them, you can check out a few examples at the bottom of the post, courtesy of NeoGAF user SolidChamp.

Naughty Dog programmer Corrinne Yu, who is well known for being an industry-wide expert in graphics coding, gave an in-depth explanation on Twitter.

These are aggressive fade out distances. : ( A bit of Remaster development history: TLOU took over 67 ms per frame as of weeks before we ship Remaster GPU bound. We took GPU down to 16 ms or less per frame by the time we hit 60 fps on the GPU, our engine now likely can handle much farther fade distances than this, but it became too late and too dangerous to risk de-stabilizing changes. We should and we will absolutely do better! Unfortunately it is very download time expensive to patch “data” as the fade out distances are embedded in the grass artwork. This means any patch we put on updating all the fade distances of all the art will take too long to download over the net : (

Yu also ementioned that she learned a lot about the GPU of the PS4 while coding the Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End in-engine trailer we saw at E3, and even more with The last Of Us Remastered.

I learned a lot about the PS4 GPU coding U4 E3 in engine teaser, and learned more PS4 shipping TLOU Remastered!

Finally, she had words of praise and thanks for the many fans that are sharing screenshots of the game, mentioning that they inspire her to create an even better game and engine.

Thank you Arran and thank you everyone who took TLoU photos. They inspire me so much to ship a better looking game and engine!

We can only hope that Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End will also come with a photo mode, so we can work on inspiring Corrinne and the rest of Naughty Dog some more. Nothing exists that can’t be improved, after all.