Epic’s Spring Showcase, DLSS Plugin for Unreal Engine 5

Epic Games Store Spring Showcase

The Epic Store Spring Showcase is more than just a sale, it’s also a platform for announcements about the Epic Game Store both as a shop and a platform.

The spring showcase launched with a live Twitch stream featuring a bunch of news, including new exclusives.

Exclusive Hearts: Square-Enix's long-running Disney x Final Fantasy crossover Kingdom Hearts is finally coming to PC on March 30th, only on Epic Game Store. The whole series will finally be available on PC complete with funny titles and confusing storylines, and you can preorder it right now.

Sale on: The sale includes big names like Star Wars: Squadrons, Cyberpunk 2077, Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Hades, with discounts ranging from 10% to 75%. Keep an eye on the rotating spotlight for sweet deals.

What Street Fighter game was the only one to use digitized actors?

a) Street Fighter: The Movie
b) Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight
c) Rival Schools: United by Fate
d) Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix

The answer will be revealed at the bottom of today's issue. Join up with our community on Twitter and Facebook to discuss what the answer could be.

It’s Animal Forest o’clock

Dobutsu no Mori was the first entry in the spectacularly successful Animal Crossing series. Directly translated, the title means Animal Forest and the game was meant to use the Nintendo 64 disk drive, but the plans changed since the peripheral flopped.

The disk drive would enable the game to use the peripheral’s internal clock to match the game’s time to real-world time. Since the game ended up shipping on a typical cartridge, you would need to set the time when you launched the game so Dobutsu no Mori would know how to present itself.

Join our community on Twitter and Facebook to discuss today's fact.

Nvidia’s DLSS plugin for Unreal Engine 4

Nvidia has released a DLSS plugin for Unreal Engine, making it much easier for developers to support the AI-assisted anti-aliasing technique.

DLSS uses machine learning to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution ones, and while it initially required a special model to be constructed for each game that all changed when DLSS 2.0 launched last year. Now the technique is fully generalized, and looks set to become one of Nvidia's big sales points.

Upscale: “With DLSS, developers can enjoy great scaling across all GeForce RTX GPUs and resolutions, including the new ultra-performance mode for 8K gaming,” said Nvidia. DLSS makes 4K and even 8K resolutions much more viable for cheaper GPUs with less VRAM, such as RTX 2060, 2070, 3060 and 3070.

Upsides: DLSS is a variant of temporal anti-aliasing mixed with a deep-learning model accelerated by Nvidia's tensor cores. Games like Control, Cyberpunk 2077 and Death Stranding are great examples of how the technology can boost performance without compromising image quality that much.

Ocarina of Time 3D in 4K at 60 FPS

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D was a pretty impressive remake of the Nintendo 64 classic, but through the magic of emulation the modding community has taken the game several steps further.

Fans have worked together to remaster the game content for 4K and unlocked the frame rate cap to enable 60 butter smooth frames per second. It's a pretty drastic improvement to the already classic game, although there are still some hitches left to smooth out.

Manual framerate: The game is playable from start to finish, and there's nothing stopping you from having a jolly good time in Hyrule – but you need to enable the 60FPS hack every time you enter a new scene. The mod maps this to a button on the controller for convenience, but it still requires manual input to enable.

• Stardew Valley update 1.5 is now available on consoles, adding the “largest amount of content” since launch
• Warhammer: Vermintide 2, NASCAR Heat 5 and Space Crew free on Xbox via the Xbox Free Play Days promotion
• Street Fighter V devs talk season 5 content in the Winter Update 2021 video about upcoming changes
• Controversial tactical shooter Six Days in Fallujah is back with an official announcement trailer for the game based on one of the worst atrocities of the Iraq war
• Day one patch for Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury fixes “various issues” according to the very sparse patch notes

What Street Fighter game was the only one to use digitized actors?

ANSWER: Street Fighter: The Movie!

Street Fighter was never a particularly realistic series, full of fire balls, green electric mutants and stretchy yoga masters – but that didn’t stop Capcom trying to make a version with digitized actors. Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game was a tie-in for the Hollywood cheesefest adaptation, with Mortal Kombat-style digitized graphics based on actors from the movie.

While the arcade version has a bit of a cult following, the console versions for PlayStation and Saturn are disastrously bad, complete with low frame rate and bad animation. That’s probably why Capcom never tried the whole digitized actor thing again, and turned the Street Fighter series into a traditional animation showcase.

Today's issue of DailyBits was written by Gavin Herman, Erlend Grefsrud, Simon Priest, and Jamie Davey.