Digital Foundry tech analysis channel at Eurogamer

[liolio]

To achieve zero loading times everywhere (level startup, restarts, menu openings, menu transitions, etc) we load all the game textures, models and materials to Xbox 360 memory at the game startup and keep them there. The 210 megabyte game image uncompresses to around 400 megabytes of run time usable content in memory. Our data structures (physics world, visibility culling tree, graphics g-buffers & post process buffers, game logic structures, replay recording buffers, etc) use the remaining Xbox 360 memory. We have reserved some memory for DLC packs also. Fortunately our levels take only 8 kilobytes in compressed format, and tournaments only around 100 bytes. We can fit 128 new levels in one megabyte of system memory.

Really interesting the whole (and more) fit within the RAM

I may have more question but I'll wait till granmaster article

 

[grandmaster]

Memory usage is something we didn't cover, but that's solid gold stuff from sebbbi, so I've added it to the intro

 

[liolio]

I just read in the :drool: HD58xx thread that the next alien versus predator will support tesselation.
It happens that it runs on UE III I wonder if it's the work of Epic or if the devs team in charge of the development came with their own implementation. I would like to hear about it and especially if Epic consider bringing tesselation to his 360 rendition of UE III.

 

[AlNom]

I just read in the :drool: HD58xx thread that the next alien versus predator will support tesselation.

Here's hoping it makes it over to the 360 edition.

It happens that it runs on UE III

Was this confirmed (And please, no remarks about the look of a game. )

I would like to hear about it and especially if Epic consider bringing tesselation to his 360 rendition of UE III.

We do know they've done some work with the tessellator for Gears of War 2 (the fluid simulation). Would be neat if they integrate that into the character pipeline. It's a good fit for crowd rendering too...

 

[tuna]

Sorry if this has been covered, but any plans for a PS3 port?

 

[liolio]

Here's hoping it makes it over to the 360 edition.

That would be neat even if only seems to affect character (not that straight corridors need it anyway ).

Was this confirmed (And please, no remarks about the look of a game. )

Now that you ask... I remember read this here but that's all. I also find it somehow ahs the EU3 look. I will do a search.

We do know they've done some work with the tessellator for Gears of War 2 (the fluid simulation). Would be neat if they integrate that into the character pipeline. It's a good fit for crowd rendering too...

Exact I read this presentation about the gore effect

 

[AlNom]

That would be neat even if only seems to affect character (not that straight corridors need it anyway ).

The alien infestation does! That would be pretty slick.

 

[scently]

That would be neat even if only seems to affect character (not that straight corridors need it anyway ).

Now that you ask... I remember read this here but that's all. I also find it somehow ahs the EU3 look. I will do a search.

Exact I read this presentation about the gore effect

Can you give me the presentation link please?

 

[liolio]

Can you give me the presentation link please?

I hope it's this one, by the way you should bookmark this page, Alstrong gave the link a while ago and it's a really interesting one, content keeps growing

 

[AlNom]

All they describe is just that the fluid surface is height-field tessellated with the vertices generated on-the-fly. Nothing in-depth at all there.

Would have been nice if they experimented with displacement mapping for the creatures, considering how bumpy they already tend to be such as those rock worms or even the non-humanoid creatures.

Hey grandmaster, think you'd be able to get an interview with Epic?

 

[liolio]

Nope (about nothing in-depth at all) I go through it quickly again only to find one line at the end of the presentation (+100 pages... jeez geekyness hurts... ). Anyway we can't say epic relies extensively on it.

But they will consider it at least on PC. Last ATI presentation made clear that using tesselation (at least on their directx11 gpu) is cheaper than extensive use of normal, bump parralax mapping.
It would indeed be interesting if Granmaster investigates how far Epic is wiling to enhance their UE3 engine before their switch to its next rendition, info on the 360 case would be interesting too.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Any clarifications on tiling?

"We did not use tiling at all, as I wanted to save some performance."

The answer regarding tessellation was interesting, because I hadn't really understood the implications from a content standpoint.

Oh, and fantastic interview. Thanks, Grandmaster and sebbbi.

 

[upnorthsox]

Any clarifications on tiling?

"We did not use tiling at all, as I wanted to save some performance."

The answer regarding tessellation was interesting, because I hadn't really understood the implications from a content standpoint.
Oh, and fantastic interview. Thanks, Grandmaster and sebbbi.

I think it's less a matter of a different asset type (curves etc.) and more a process and resource change. If an artist doesn't have an accurate x360 tessellation emulation tool then he's going to need to run his assets thru a dev box, guess what adjustments need to be made, make them in his editor (Maya, whatever), rinse, repeat. Even if he has an emulator or his own dev box, there's little idea what the final performance hit will be for the scene. Times that by 50-100 artists for a big title and you can see why it gets used so little.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Very interesting read. I found this bit particularly interesting...

The anti-aliasing hardware inside the eDRAM is one of the most important performance advantages of the platform. With the anti-aliasing hardware we could speed up our soft shadowing algorithm dramatically, and we could replace lots of usually pixel shader-heavy post-processing steps (blurring and downsampling) with cheaper alternatives. These hardware specific optimisations required down-to-the-metal code, but in the end I must say that the eDRAM hardware was a key feature in making our game run at constant 60FPS.

I hadn't been aware you could use the AA hardware to do anything other than AA. And it's cool to see a dev actually coding down to the metal on X360.

Regards,
SB

 

[AlNom]

Yep, there are a couple shadowmap techniques that are linearly filterable and can take advantage of sub-samples e.g. VSM, ESM... I think what sebbbi meant was that they could reduce the res of the shadowmaps and use the AA hardware in a similar manner as particle effects or even reflection maps that we've seen in other games (Lost Planet, KZ2, Uncharted, Burnout Paradise etc). It's not perfect, but effective. KZ2 and Uncharted 2 make use of the different sample positions for their shadows as well.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I hadn't been aware you could use the AA hardware to do anything other than AA.

Well, that's the marvel of hardcore, creative coders, who can make hardware do things it wasn't designed to do. This is an extension of the notion of GPGPU in a way, using the same hardware to achieve different results. The best example I'll always remember is a hardware one, where the officially abandoned 'clock port' of the Amiga line of computers intended for RAM and a clock but never used officially, was used for all sort of expansions like adding USB or audio cards.

This is why programmability seems the most important thing to provide developers, more so than brute force performance. Software techniques have more room to progress than hardware designs.

 

[grandmaster]

Tomorrow on DF, I'll hopefully be running a 60fps PSP video of Gran Turismo I've spent the day making. With the limited time available I wanted to make the trailer they should have run at E3

In theory there's no reason why I can't make the Eurogamer video player run at 60fps (I encode my own vids and bypass their backend completely any way)... but I'm also gonna do a 30fps clickthrough in case the CPU requirement is a bit much for some people.

It's all 100% authentic footage direct from my PSP-2000 and it looks pretty impressive actually

 

[Iron Tiger]

The best example I'll always remember is a hardware one, where the officially abandoned 'clock port' of the Amiga line of computers intended for RAM and a clock but never used officially, was used for all sort of expansions like adding USB or audio cards.

Or using the magnetic drive expansion ports on the N64 and Dreamcast to rip games. They even used the Gamecube's ethernet adapter for ripping and loading ISOs via LAN.

It's all 100% authentic footage direct from my PSP-2000 and it looks pretty impressive actually

Are you capturing from component, or do you have some way to get a digital direct feed?

 

[grandmaster]

From component.

 

[Arwin]

Tomorrow on DF, I'll hopefully be running a 60fps PSP video of Gran Turismo I've spent the day making. With the limited time available I wanted to make the trailer they should have run at E3

In theory there's no reason why I can't make the Eurogamer video player run at 60fps (I encode my own vids and bypass their backend completely any way)... but I'm also gonna do a 30fps clickthrough in case the CPU requirement is a bit much for some people.

It's all 100% authentic footage direct from my PSP-2000 and it looks pretty impressive actually

Cool! The GT series is one of my favorite racing series ever and I expect to spend more hours on playing this on my PSP than any other game (which includes about 50-60 hours of Lumines 1+2 ). And with the link with GT5 option for unlocking cars, there's some good motivation to unlock as many cars as possible before GT5's launch too. And finally, I have so many days off, I'll be working 3 days a week for the rest of the year ...

So, greatly looking forward to this (and pretty jealous that you're already playing it ...!)