Zenji Nishikawa conducted an interview with 2 developers at Namco Nakameguro Developer Center in Tokyo who are the director and the producer of Frame City Killer (Frame City in Japan) for Xbox 360. The topic is about the game and the state of Unreal Engine 3. Here's my translation. Nishikawa interleaves a long tech commentary for readers but I omit it. But it's still lengthy so took some time to translate it... hope you njoy it.
http://www.4gamer.net/news.php?url=/specials/3de/051028_framecity/frame_city_01.shtml
http://www.4gamer.net/news.php?url=/specials/3de/051028_framecity/frame_city_02.shtml
http://www.4gamer.net/news.php?url=/specials/3de/051028_framecity/frame_city_01.shtml
http://www.4gamer.net/news.php?url=/specials/3de/051028_framecity/frame_city_02.shtml
Zenji Nishikawa: Since 4Gamer is a PC-game website, there are readers who are not familiar with Xbox 360 game titles. So first can you tell us what kind of a game Frame City is?
Kentaro Kawashima (producer): The game genre is "Hard-boiled Experience".
Masaki Kunimori (director): Though it says "Action Adventure" in the brackets (laughs)
ZN: Looking in the screenshots in the official website, it looks like a freeroaming mission-based game like GTA3.
MK: Or rather, if I dare to mention a game with a similar image, it'd be the LoZ by Nintendo. There's a big city called Frame City, where the player infiltrate alone as Crow, the protagonist, and does a variety of missions. The goal of the game is stop the ambition of a mysterious terrorist called Kahn who plans terrorism on Frame City. But various kinds of people live in Frame City and have respective problems. You approach the identity of Kahn by involving yourself in small events in Frame City.
KK: Side stories by small quests drive the big main scenario, which is the format. We don't intend to lock users in the story, but when you think it as a game, it becomes troublesome if a player is too free. While guiding a player to a certain degree by the story, it's also possible to do what you want in Frame City, that's the style we organize.
ZN: How about the world view of Frame City? From the public information so far it seems like a modern city in the West.
MK: The stage is China. "A fictional desert island developed as a special economic district in Shanhai offshore" is the city called Frame City. As America, UK, EU, China, Japan and others developed it as the main members, it became a city with multinational atomosphere in which the West and the East are mixed in. Like every metropolitan city, it has the underworld, but complicated by the multinational background. Chinese, Russian, Italian mafia, Japanese yakuza fight for the hegemony in the underworld.
KK: You know it's like an American city. For example in SF there are Chinese towns and Japanese towns, and for security you get a notice like "danger in 3 blocks away". We reproduce an atmosphere like that in Frame City. Though the setting is near future, you can feel it familiar as it's a near future which is an extension of our modern life.
ZN: With these keywords - developed by Namco, for Xbox, a third-person-view hard-boiled action adventure - it reminds me of Dead to Rights. I bought it and it had a unique gun action with a buddy dog (laughs) I heard it was developed mainly by Namco Hometek in the US. This Frame City looks like a similar hard-boiled game if you ask me, is the development led by the US?
KK: This time the development is led by Namco Japan. Even now, in our background, around 100 people are working toward the gold master (laughs)
MK: I think it was a general understanding that games wanted in Japan and games wanted in the West are different. But, as the result of our research, we found there is no big difference between Japanese players and Western players in the sense that they play games by giving priority to what character they want to be and what experience they want.
KK: Though we as developers can't help caring how good technologies and effects are, what users care most are who they can be and what experience they can have. In Japan and in the West. "Game system" and "graphics" are lower in priority. We were enlightened that we don't have to make them separately like for Japan and for the West. As for Frame City, while the real work such as coding are done in Japan, we're designing the story line with Namco Hometek. We are proud that it's become a good title which can pass not only in Japan but also in the global market. Well, to be honest, we are still working on it in the background (laughs)
ZN: Frame City is distinguished as a game developed with UE3. As the in-house titles by Epic Games, the UE3 developer, such as UT2007 and GoW seem to be released in Summer 2006 or later, Frame City will be the first commercial game that adopts UE3. For game fans, the fact that Namco uses UE3 would be sensational by itself, I think.
KK: In fact, the research and the evaluation for UE3 were done almost simultaneously along with the discussion for the game system. So it's not a technology-oriented setup where a game is made out of an idea of using a certain function in UE3. We have the idea on what kind of thing we want this Frame City game to be and what kind of game we want Frame City to be in the first place, then it inspired us to start the research on UE3.
MK: UE3 has an engine design that adds dynamic-LOD on a high-poly terrain and displays it in a low-poly form. It is effective in sightly outdoor scenes such as MMORPG and FPS. Understanding this fact well, we...
KK: Created a city (laughs) It's because Frame City is such a game. Of course UE3 is a general game engine and provides a variety of functions. But there are functions usable for our project and those not usable. It's that UE3 is only a means and we merely used it to realize Frame City.
ZN: Which tool or function was useful in the real development?
MK: First, Material Editor that enables you to do GUI-based shader design. We used it thoroughly. Then, the essential Unreal Editor (UnrealED). It's very easy to use. It can easily import Maya data and we can embed our original tools into it. Data creation and embedding in game engine got far easier than before. In game design from now on, not only graphics, but also work for various contents creation gets tremendous. This seamless GUI IDE can be a weapon in the sense that it can ease graphics development.
KK: Any programmer in our team can do shader design if he/she wants. But, UE3 has an advantage that it allows try-and-err shader design by changing parameters in the IDE.
MK: In fact, there's no special effect programmer in the Frame City development team. Of course Namco has a shader expert and we asked him to write a new custom shader for Frame City, but we didn't set a special effect programmer resident for the team.
ZK: Even in such a situation you could realize programable-shader-based state-of-the-art visuals.
KK: In Frame City, its volume as a game is huge as it's an action adventure. So it'd be impossible to release it in this year if we'd started the development after Xbox 360 devkits were delivered to Namco. In the case of UE3, you can work on PC as it's a cross-platform development tool. Besides, with the level editor you can check game playability on-the-fly while making game missions. We felt UE3 is excellent in this regard.
MK: You know, it's important for games how it's like when you actually play them or what kind of play impression you can get. Even with incomplete graphics details, you can immediately do level design from design documents that say "there's a floor, there are the stairs...", so you can create a prototype in a short time.
ZN: In a short time you can determine if a scene is fun as a game or requires change.
KK: Yes. As you know a game title which is made to be launched with a new game console tends to be a tech-demo. But we wanted to emphasize "game experience" in a next-gen console. However, in reality, we have little time. Frame City takes 20 hours to beat even when you played it straightforward from start to end. Of course it takes more if you go out of the way. We release this massive game in a relatively short time and at the same day as Xbox 360 is released at. UE3, especially Unreal Editor, was big to enable us to do that.
MK: Well, the development is still not over, you know (laughs)
ZN: What exchange was there between Epic Games and Namco? If you allow me to tell my own speculation, for Epic Games, Frame City might be an experimental project for UE3, I think.
MK: It was very early that we raised our hand to say "we want to use it". Well, we were guinea pigs (laughs)
KK: In fact, UE3 is not yet the final version. Isn't it the next summer when it's completed? It's said their own original title for Xbox 360, Gears of War, is released half a year later. Though Frame City is UE3-based, its engine contains many original extensions by Namco with a high percentage.
ZN: Was there a reverse technical offer from Namco to UE3?
MK: Though I don't know how far we can say, there were many conversations where we proposed to Epic Games that some functions should be like this and they replied that's good.
KK: It's like, "if you use our idea can you discount the license fee for the engine?" (laughs) In fact, as the maturity of UE3 is pretty high at this moment, development teams that will start to use the UE3 final version in the next summer will be able to be at ease. It overcame most of troubles.
MK: Anyways, it seems Frame City contributed to maturing UE3 to a high degree.
ZN: While I understand it's not a tech-demo, I dare to ask you what direction the Frame City graphics turns to. In so-called next-gen consoles, as you know thorough shadowing and skin shading are valued so much. NVIDIA and ATI always show such demos. How about Frame City?
NK: Definitely, it has very sophisticated shadowing, though as it's supplied as one of the functions in UE3 I can't tell you details as to when it switchs between stencil shadow volume and shadow map. Not only a self-shadow on a character but also a shadow cast by a building changes, of course extends or shrinks, by the location of the sun.
KK: Also as for character skin it's very complicated when a character is shot up-close in a cinematic scene. Besides, for contre-jour expression, we place HDR rendering effects leaked from edges here and there.
MK: In Frame City, we wanted to represent a 24-hour living city. I think we could make a good "perspective of atmosphere" such as haze.
ZN: In recent events such as GDC and E3, Epic Games did demos that emphasized the superiority of the physics engine in UE3. UE3 uses NovodeX (now PhysX) by AGEIA Technologies for its physics engine. How much is it used in Frame City?
KK: By the physics engine demo Epic Games showed, you mean the one in which a ball is rolling and bumps against various things to activate them in succession, right? But, a physics engine in an actual game is very modest unlike such a demo. It's difficult to show off it unless it's a game specifically developed to exploit a physics engine.
MK: In Frame City, it's mainly used for reaction. It uses the NovodeX car physics in its car behavior control and of course it's used in a behavior in which a car bumps against a box or something and fragments of the box fly off.
ZN: At CEDEC 2005 AGEIA Technologies said something to the effect that NovodeX is designed with multithreading suitable for multiprocessor in mind, but how was that actually?
KK: Didn't they say "in the latest version of NovodeX"? (laughs) As far as I know we did it by ourselves (laughs)
MK: Since the target of UE3 was originally the PC, it was like it's OK if it could run on a PC at first. Of course it was single-threaded, but at the stage we could run on a real Xbox 360 we made it multithreaded.
KK: As UE3 was born on PC, at first Epic Games makes something that works on a PC for a model. Then, as an afterthought, "Xbox 360 is multicore, what can we do? OK, let's make it mutithread" or something like that (laughs)
MK: We experienced that we could get some performance room by multithreading an originally single-threaded part that had been overusing a single core. Though we can't tell you the details, perhaps we may have more techniques than Epic Games to break up various factors in a game engine running on a single core into multiple threads suitable to the Xbox 360 game console that has 3 PowerPC-970-compatible CPUs. (laughs)
ZN: In other words, do you mean multithreading in Frame City was mainly done by the Namco development team?
KK: Yes. But it's not that we broke everything into multithread. The parts that are closely related to game synchronization have scary aspects that you can't know what happens when multithreaded. In this sense, "NovodeX as the physics engine for UE3" was relatively easy to make multithreaded.
ZN: You don't have to synchronize particle behavior calculation for scattering fragments to frame rendring. It's said coarse-grain multithreading is useful.
How about collision? In a NovodeX presentation they emphasized that for a collision detection model it can set a shape that is very close to an actual appearance, not only box or sphere-based.
MK: Indeed it can. But execution gets slower if you set a precise collision shape. As a matter of course, we switch them depending on the situation, for example, in normal movement it has a simple cylinder model while in shooting it does collision detection by more human-like shaped model.
KK: It's like we have a broader range of expressions. That means, we can do very detailed collision detection if we wish, it's not that we can only do box or sphere-based collison detection. In a real game development, we use them case by case depending on game playability, in other words the points such as the balance with execution speed in a game.
ZN: I heard in presentations about UE3 and NovodeX that designers and artists can set a collision shape.
KK: Yes. In our team, an artist staff did it. It's a useful point of UE3 that artist staff, not a programmer, can set it directly.
ZN: In next-generation consoles, the concept about data media has been changing. While PLAYSTATION 3 adopts dual-layer 50GB BD-ROM as the largest 12cm disc media, Xbox 360 adopts dual-layer 8.5GB DVD-ROM. But J Allard of Microsoft exclaims that DVD-ROM is only one of means in media and the network is the primary data media. What about thoughts in a frontline development field such as Namco?
MK: If we talk about Frame City, we filled most of dual-layer 8.5GB. It's like we packed it to the max. But, if you ask me which is easier for the development side, net or disc media, it's definitely disc media. Though it's not very difficult if it's simply about things like adding a new character via network, design gets difficult all at once when you want to realize a game system that changes fundamentally when connected to network.
KK: It increases debug steps too. Namco released a PS2 network RPG named "Venus & Braves - Witch and Goddess and Prophecy of Doom" and 20% of its debug was network related. Honestly, from the development side, disc media is easier (laughs)
MK: But, for a user, it'd be attractive that a game gets more interesting via network. If it's effective as a business model, I think a game design that exploits network deserves to be tried.
KK: Actually, for Frame City, we are going to offer a mission every week for a year on Xbox Live. Yes it's very hard for us (laughs) But, it makes sense if you think about the life cycle as a game software. There are opinions like "don't do network distribution like that, put them all onto a disc media for sale", but if we deliver it periodically via network we can enable users to play a game longer. Also my hunch is that the distance between us and users gets closer if we can offer a new content and let them play it immediately.
ZN: Game has a factor of freshness. Even though it's an interesting game, the sales go down if it gets old. But it can keep its freshness if a new game play for it is always offered.
MK: Belief in a physical thing, or a sense of owning a disc is still seen as more important than getting data on network, which is a difficult point. But, it may change gradually when distribution over network becomes mainstream and new things are taken more seriously.
ZN: For an average gamer, the most important things for a next-gen console are, what's different from the previous one, and what is playable on it. Sony attacks with PS3 with the super high specs that can survive a long-term battle, and Microsoft releases Xbox 360 with normal evolution and emphasis on network. Nintedo, though the spec is still unknown, agitates the expectation that it will be able to do something strange with the strange controller. What will future games become?
KK: This is what I often tell others, the relation between a game console and a game is similar to that of a projector and a movie. In the early 1900s, because of the fact that a picture is moving, a projector got lots of attention by people. But, as a projector evolves, less people are crazed about a projector itself now. It's because public interest moves to how interesting a content of a movie is. Though of course there are still projector maniacs. The point I think a game is superior to a movie is you can experience the content by yourself and feel your achievement at the end. As a developer I want to cherish this point. PLAYSTATION 3 and Xbox 360 can offer such "experience" at last. It makes me think that it's important for games from now on to concentrate on offering experience. We've been developing Frame City on the basis of this concept.
MK: Hence Frame City is a hard-boiled "experience". Some years down the road, it may become common to qualify a game as "... experience" for its genre instead of words like action adventure. Frame City is the pioneer of it (laughs)
ZN: The last question. Since 4Gamer is a PC gaming media, I have to ask you, do you have a plan to release the PC version of Frame City? There are many 4Gamer readers who can buy a 60,000 yen ($507) graphics card but say can't buy an expensive Xbox 360.
MK: From the technical point of view, porting is absolutely possible.
KK: But there's an unreasoning part. Choosing a next-gen console is, in the end, like voting action. Like "I bet on Microsoft, I believe in Sony" etc. It's impossible that a user who chose Xbox 360 doesn't have affection toward Xbox 360. Because of this, we are unwilling to betray them.
MK: But, as a game developer, I want many people to play it as it's a work we struggled to create. This is our real intention. It's absolutely like that.
ZN: It's decided that UE3 would be supplied as an almost standard Playstation development platform. So it's possible to do multiplatform that offers PC and PS3 versions.
KK: In fact, it's possible. What's left is only a marketing problem.
