Capcom's "Framework" game engine

[nAo]

I understand they are talking about diffuse texture compression, not necessarily NM, what has 3Dc to do with it?

my bad then, for some reason I thought they were talking about normal maps..

 

[assen]

I agree, it's not bad at all, but it's still 4x time slower than 'advertised'..at least in this game

Errrr WHAT? 20% slowdown is 4x slower than 5% slowdown? That was cheap :-/

 

[nAo]

Errrr WHAT? 20% slowdown is 4x slower than 5% slowdown? That was cheap :-/

Yeah, this is basic math (4 x 5 = 20!!) , any problem with that?

 

[Jawed]

One, thanks for your very valuable effort.

Jawed

 

[assen]

my bad then, for some reason I thought they were talking about normal maps..

Sorry, my bad after all, in the expanded translation by nAo it's clear they talk about normal maps. I should know better than replying before reading the entire thread :-/

 

[Capeta]

I thought LP was X360 exclusive?

 

[Hardknock]

I thought LP was X360 exclusive?

It is.

 

[AlNom]

Thanks One.

160MB textures are in memory at one time. 60-80MB are backgrounds. Loading is seamless for Lost Planet.

Is that 160MB of textures in total, 60-80MB of which are for the backgrounds? I initially read that as 240MB in total.

 

[Dr. Nick]

Tru, But what alot of people around here neglect to remember when they make statements like this:-



Is that video game technology isn't all about rendering and displaying pretty pictures. Granted maybe my arguement probably wasn't given very well but I simply disagree that one can simply say something like "Japanese devs are behind when it comes to the technology" because as far as we know they could have very powerful and advanced tech for doing many other tasks unrelated to rendering..

I understand the statement was probably made in the context to graphics which I guess is to be expected around here since that seems to be what invokes the most interest in threads in the tech forum but by saying "Capcom & many other Japanese devs" Dr Nick is infering that somehow the fact that these developers are Japanese is somehow linked to the fact that they are not on the forefront of computer games tech.. What about all those non-Japanese developers that aren't producing UE3 like visuals?
If he'd have said "Capcom and many other devs" then I wouldn't have had a problem to be fair..

Yes I did mean graphically and if you haven't played the game yourself what do you have to go by? For most of the period between the time a game is announced and when the game is finally released most of what we have to go by is screenshots and words typed out on a web page. I have Lost Planet and while it does some crazy things, graphically it still doesn't scream next gen to me and same thing goes for most of what is coming out of Japan doesn't. On the western front I am seeing more devs making use of graphical techniques that push what many would call Next gen graphics. Even EA seems to be doing a decent job this gen it just remains to be seen if they will keep it up through out this generation. On both the PS3 and Xbox 360 I am seeing this. Outside of what Sega, Kojima and LO, and FF most of the titles that I've seen from premier devs don't really scream next gen me. So you are probably right and I was wrong about saying technically they seem behind because their tech probably is on par or maybe even better but graphically I'm not seeing it.

 

[one]

Is that 160MB of textures in total, 60-80MB of which are for the backgrounds? I initially read that as 240MB in total.

Ah, it's 160MB total including backgrounds.

 

[Capeta]

It is.

Then how come...

Awesome stuff - Thanks one!

notes I found interesting:

-xenon ~ 3.2GHz P4EE dual core

-vertex performance of the Xbox 360 GPU can match that of NVIDIA GeForce 8800

-3million poly/frame @ 30fps - 90million poly/sec

-10-40k poly per char 500k poly background

-160mb textures at one time

-dynamic 4x-0AA dependant on frame rate

-multiple physics engines (Havok + custom multithreaded engine)

-60fps next gen graphics "will be difficult" => 30fps + motion blur helps hide their lower frame rate

-only 5 developers built the MT Framework Engine (adding help to transfer to ps3)

-game is currently in development for ps3

-Devil May Cry and Resident Evil will both use the MT Framework Engine

Yes I did mean graphically and if you haven't played the game yourself what do you have to go by? For most of the period between the time a game is announced and when the game is finally released most of what we have to go by is screenshots and words typed out on a web page. I have Lost Planet and while it does some crazy things, graphically it still doesn't scream next gen to me and same thing goes for most of what is coming out of Japan doesn't. On the western front I am seeing more devs making use of graphical techniques that push what many would call Next gen graphics. Even EA seems to be doing a decent job this gen it just remains to be seen if they will keep it up through out this generation. On both the PS3 and Xbox 360 I am seeing this. Outside of what Sega, Kojima and LO, and FF most of the titles that I've seen from premier devs don't really scream next gen me. So you are probably right and I was wrong about saying technically they seem behind because their tech probably is on par or maybe even better but graphically I'm not seeing it.

The UE3 is nice and it allows very next gen looking stuff but I'm not sure it could do everything LP is doing without major framerate issues and still look like GOW. Of course with more processing power it wouldn't be a problem. I do agree that the MT Framework engine is not on equal footing in terms of graphics as UE3 or what EA is doing with Army of Two.

 

[TheChefO]

Then how come...

In the PS3 version which is currently under development, the parallelism implementation is fairly different due to asymmetric cores. In the job queue, job threads are implemented as software threads. In a job function, a part of processing is offloaded to a co-processor. Until the work is done, it's switched in another software thread. In a co-processor, it fetches data by DMA and process it, then store data by DMA.

I interprited this as LP but it could be the engine itself. The engine is afterall designed for multiplatform development.:smile:

Any clarification on this One?

 

[LightHeaven]

Hopefully this info isn't too redundant. Stole it from a forum that stole it from another forum.

*As for multi-core optimization, the session mainly discussed methods for symmetric multi-core (Xbox 360). Since parallelization per module or loop which are often seen in parallel programming is not suitable for a game engine, parallelization per task including player character, enemy, bullet, camera, effect generator etc. is mainly used in the engine.

*To suppress parallelization bugs such as dead lock, they made 2 clearly separated rules called "parallel update" which has no dependency and "synchronized update" in which each task can refer to and update other tasks. Task relationships and synchronization update intervals are adjustable on a GUI tool to make it easy to find parallel processes against the rules.

*The performance for 1 thread vs 6 threads is, 2.6x in Dead Rising, and 2.15x in Lost Planet (under development). The CPU load is 80% for the main thread, 70% for rendering and sound, and 50-60% for other parallelized tasks.

*There were only a few parallelization-related bugs against the rules in thousands of bug reports in the bug-checking period of the Dead Rising development, which shows totally parallelized application doesn't necessarily equal a bug-hell and they can realize stable parallelization thanks to the parallelization techniques and the strict rules in the Framework engine.

*As for hi-def graphics, they pointed out "frame rate, fill rate, texture quality and size are more problematic than shader." Because of their estimation that 60fps is impossible for next-gen-esque imagery, they added lightweight 2.5D motion blur to make 30fps look smoother. Besides MSAA mini buffer is used in effect drawing to gain more fill rate (with the premise that GPU can use MSAA mini-buffer without cost). For better texture compression, they do original texture compression which appropriates an alpha channel for an extended information area and decompress it with programmable shaders.

I'm pretty sure this was stolen from this very thread, but it was stated on the first time the engine was presented, aparentelly there was some changes from there...

 

[Johnny Awesome]

IMO Lost Planet is 80% as impressive as Gears of War, but for different reasons. The scale is larger, the particle effects are off the hook, the anti-aliasing is better, and the color palette is richer.

 

[one]

I interprited this as LP but it could be the engine itself. The engine is afterall designed for multiplatform development.:smile:

Any clarification on this One?

The article and the presentation by Capcom is about the engine... (editing the summary)

 

[Jesus2006]

I interprited this as LP but it could be the engine itself. The engine is afterall designed for multiplatform development.:smile:

Any clarification on this One?

Isnt the engine already in use in DMC4?

 

[Capeta]

IMO Lost Planet is 80% as impressive as Gears of War, but for different reasons. The scale is larger, the particle effects are off the hook, the anti-aliasing is better, and the color palette is richer.

Agreed actually I'd say 90%, I'm just wondering if the MT Framework engine will allow near UE3 like level of modeling detail which from what I've seen so far doesn't seem possible. We'll have to wait for RE5 to see how the MT Framework holds up in smaller environments.

 

[pipo]

OK so my looooong summary translation for Nishikawa's new article... :smile:

Cheers one!

 

[archie4oz]

I have read, not sure if it's been discussed here, but this engine stuff from Capcom is a major change for Japanese developers. Previously they had built games from scratch each time, shunning the Western practice of engines such as UE3.0. So I just think that aspect is very interesting.

Well for starters, "engines" aren't a Western practice. To add on, from my own experience at 2 (technically 3) different Japanese studios, the notion that games are built from scratch each time is pretty much absurd... Occasionally? Yes. Each time? No... (and even then there was often extensive code reuse at lower levels)

I have Lost Planet and while it does some crazy things, graphically it still doesn't scream next gen to me and same thing goes for most of what is coming out of Japan doesn't. On the western front I am seeing more devs making use of graphical techniques that push what many would call Next gen graphics.

And just techniques would those be?

 

[liolio]

Cheers one!

Yes, thanks a lot, very very nice of you

It has really help against the awful babel fish translation...
this should have been time consuming, and I've to say that it's much appreciated.

can someone give more clear explanations of the reverse AA thing?