r/MGSV

I’ve been grinding ranking up my platforms through mainly free-roam extraction … I spend my PF points on resources exclusively.

It’s been the most incremental grind to also run 10 Combat Deployments all around the clock, having soldiers in the Sickbay at all times … I know many people exchange FOB points for S++ soldiers but I can’t because my platforms are so backed up basically … with soldiers always both in the Sickbay and Brig.

This haul of S++ soldiers is a god send. It’s finally the break I needed. As of right now, I have nothing to develop except a Rank 8 Brennan … I’m full on resources and need to upgrade my Platforms expeditiously to have an opportunity to spend my resources … damn.

Anyways, toast to the largest treasure I’ve ever had in 488 hours playing this game on Xbox Series S!

Never seen this in all my years of playing

There are 3 aspects about Fox Engine that I wanted to highlight as they are in important in explaining why MGSV still holds up in terms of visuals even today.

Fox Engine uses Material IDs to enhance the realism of many objects in the scene. During the lighting stage, Fox Engine skips the 24-bit Base Color Information part as an optimization. For specular lighting, the shader will identify the material ID and use the LUT to figure out what properties a given pixel would need (specular color, fresnel, hair, etc). No big G-buffer required. The albedo and diffuse lighting are later blended together in the resolve stage. This is an incredible optimization that the developers made and I simply wish that more games could take advantage of something like this.

The engine is able to maintain a very stable exposure by focusing only the lighting elements of a scene. Downsampling the diffuse only buffer (which excludes dark material attributes and emissives) is the mechanism that they use to get this effect.

MGSV’s tonemapping has very similar on screen results when compared to the Gran Turismo tonemapper. The tonemapping curve itself lacks a bit of contrast. Fox Engine counteracts this by using color grading via a LUT to raise highlights and add that missing contrast without completely blowing out the image. 

TLDR; In Fox Engine, Material IDs determine a pixel’s specular color without a big G-buffer, the auto exposure system purposefully excludes dark areas to remain consistent, and a color graded LUT enhances the game’s tonemapping.

Resources that were extremely helpful in trying to understand Fox Engine:

https://youtu.be/aB5qxp6SPPQ?si=Y0hEH7tY-9U6qIMv

https://youtu.be/WsmxBE9Gw6A?t=2793&si=DOoZbMuOlsyiElKX

https://youtu.be/SnNm7rSSvlg?t=4052&si=IOJPKnBgo8hkogdO

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/tcSyDy

https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2017/12/15/mgs-v-graphics-study/