Next Gen bottlenecks (Volition interview)

[Fafalada]

It's another presumed magic wand in my book.

I blame marketting (like usual really) - aside for some youthfull naivete, I doubt you'll ever find a technical person try to tell you procedurals make a good general solution, let alone have results comparable to handcrafted art.

But marketers will happilly take whatever they can get their hands on and run with it...
"delivers a huge, beautiful, detailed world while eliminating loading times.".

To be fair, I've seen some very clever use of procedurals in PS2 gen that had absolutely nothing to do with your run of the mill landscapes and vegetation - but those didn't come from academic research.

Would engines that use procedural techniques help with this problem?

As ShootMyMonkey mentioned - there's no magic wands. Procedurals have their uses, but they are limited in scope - and have obvious quality tradeoffs for many things.
Yes - it's possible to build your game around nothing but procedural content - but that means you have to accept certain limitations at design stage.

 

[Hardknock]

Procedural engines seem to be the wave of the future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

96kb Procedurally Generated FPS demo.

Looks like there's bumpmapping, dynamic lighting when you fire, and a bit of a bloom effects on a resolution of 1024x768 all running at 60-80fps on just the CPU.

There's also sound in this 96kb demo.

Here's some screens:

http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/9050/kk1qx5.jpg
http://img461.imageshack.us/img461/7572/kk2vq7.jpg
http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/3584/kk3ov9.jpg
http://img70.imageshack.us/img70/2865/kk4xy3.jpg
http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/5753/kk5ln9.jpg
http://img488.imageshack.us/img488/1193/kk6nw7.jpg

 

[AlNom]

btw, that tech demo is pretty old....wave of the future? I don't think so... It's certainly not worth the loading trade-off! But hey... I guess we can all go back to floppy disks (5.25" style of course )


Question: What's the speed of the PS3 drive if it's reading DVDs? (Supposing a developer chooses not to use BD media)

 

[Arwin]

Disk capacity isn't quite the issue for load times. It's filling up the RAM. The Xbox only has 64MB to fill up. The Xbox 360 has 8x that much to fill but only with a drive rated 3x faster. Even if you don't need to fill up the entire 512MB to start playing, a fair chunk of it would likely still have to be loaded due to increased texture sizes.

So? There's no more room on the DVD for bigger textures, making developers having to rely on higher compression and such. Games aren't going to be much bigger in size, so except for the initial 512mb, you're going to have similar amounts of data streaming from the disc, imho. Unless of course your design is crappy.

@Hardknock: please remove those pictures again. We all know that demo. It will be a long while yet before you can create a lot of realistic looking textures like you see in Resistance. Sure, this will have its uses, but as the same wiki entry mentions, it also has clear limitations. You won't see any publisher recreate London using procedural textures for a while yet, for instance. But a world like Oblivion's on the other hand, can benefit from it (although as far as I remember, it doesn't - the procedural part was used at design stage, not live).

Procedural engines will help lighten the load here and there. But I honestly don't think it will be that necessary. Good streaming should do well enough.

 

[Platon]

btw, that tech demo is pretty old....wave of the future? I don't think so... It's certainly not worth the loading trade-off! But hey... I guess we can all go back to floppy disks (5.25" style of course )

That game is done as a pure tech demo for kompetitions were they are trying to make games or whatever under a certain amount of kb. But there is atleast one game that will be comming to XBLA called Roboblitz http://www.roboblitz.com/site.html that is using procedural textures from Allegorithmic http://allegorithmic.com/v2/ProFX_1.htm which they have intergrated to UE3 which they use to make the game...

 

[Platon]

Turner explained. Even with games like Saints Row utilizing 90% of the 360's processing power, even with advanced development tools not available to true first generation 360 titles...

Does he mean with this quote that Saint Row is a first gen title?...

 

[Hardknock]

That game is done as a pure tech demo for kompetitions were they are trying to make games or whatever under a certain amount of kb. But there is atleast one game that will be comming to XBLA called Roboblitz http://www.roboblitz.com/site.html that is using procedural textures from Allegorithmic http://allegorithmic.com/v2/ProFX_1.htm which they have intergrated to UE3 which they use to make the game...

First I've heard of this game. The graphics look outstanding for an XBLA game. Nice!

 

[AlNom]

So? There's no more room on the DVD for bigger textures, making developers having to rely on higher compression and such. Games aren't going to be much bigger in size, so except for the initial 512mb, you're going to have similar amounts of data streaming from the disc, imho.

No more room for bigger textures? Explain all the Xbox 360 games so far compared to Xbox.

Similar amount of data? How? Graphics are improved between generations, not kept the same.

Consider a 256x256 texture, compare to 2k x 2k texture. It will naturally take longer to load the higher resolution data, unless you prefer the texture popping while you play. Better load times than the Xbox? Maybe if you were loading the same game.

 

[pipo]

First I've heard of this game. The graphics look outstanding for an XBLA game. Nice!

Check this: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=28875

 

[Platon]

Actually I think that XBLA will be an excellent testing ground for procedural technologies, in the procedural world 50 MB is huge, imagine Fable like games for the XBLA. There is no doubt in my mind that handcrafted textures will awlays be better but for XBLA games I think the requirements are a bit lower on what you expect and it also seem that procedural technologies are advancing and for many people I would assume that procedurals will not look that much different from handcrafted textures...

 

[Arwin]

No more room for bigger textures? Explain all the Xbox 360 games so far compared to Xbox.

Similar amount of data? How? Graphics are improved between generations, not kept the same.

So? Say that an average Xbox 1 game was 2-3Gb. A 360 game, provided it sticks to a single disc and I'm assuming they'll try to do so as long as possible, can only be 2.5-3 times larger. The 360 can show much nicer textures sure, but you'll just have to compress them better, or sacrifice other stuff on the disc. In the meantime, there's a ratio between the amount of data on the DVD for an Xbox1 game and for an 360, that cannot exceed the ratio between the Xbox1 and 360's DVD player speed ratio.

With 2-3Gb I've actually taken a pretty low number (see the list below) because I'm assuming that not all data on disc is actually 3D and textures - there might be some movies.

Here's a nice list for reference:

http://fileforums.com/showthread.php?t=43604

 

[Guden Oden]

Are you suggesting that there's no reason for modern games to have more content?

I don't see where I said such a thing.

I just pointed out if these devs have data throughput problems then they're doing something wrong. I'll point anyone curious as to my reasoning in the direction of warhawk, a game where the devs claims a seamless, 'levelless' world where you can walk, drive, fly around freely. So obviously it IS doable.

Perhaps it is hard to do it. Perhaps even very hard. Well boo ho, run home to mummy and cry some more! Consoles have always been bitches to program, I don't know of a single piece of hardware where devs claimed it didn't have at least some sort of PITA quirk... It's always something! Even original PS that was often said to be easy to program had small RAM and a GPU that would not draw polys that had vertices outside the screen, etc.

Maybe it takes some special kind of maniac to do streaming worlds on 360 or PS3, but there's already at least ONE coming for PS3 scheduled right for launch... Maybe more than one, who knows, Lair for example might do streaming too for all we know.

Oh wait... I keep forgetting, there's this magic wand we have called compression, and it performs miracles. Nothing up my sleeve... presto! Oblivion fits on a floppy disk.

Ha ha. Can't you hear me laughing?
Warhawk. Nuff said.

Sounds more like he wants 4+ GB of physical RAM so that streaming isn't really necessary.

He also wants console prices twice what they are today then... If even that would cover the increase, not to mention what it might do for hardware availability. The 360 might still be in short supply if they all had 4GB of 700MHz GDDR3 in them. It's one thing what programmers want, and another thing altogether what's realistic - but you know all that already.

Oh, and I'm sure everybody would just love sitting there for 20 mins while the console preloads half the DVD into its 4GB of RAM each time you switch it on.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Hardknock, you've been here long enough to know not to post frame-breaking pics. As for procedurally generated games being the future, please link me toa game with procedurally generated cars and towns and people, and then I'll start paying attention. Sci-fi shooters where the graphics can look as smooth and uniform as a procedure don't give any indication at all how the average game can wield procedurally generated content. It's also worth noting that the loading time for KKrieger is far far far worse than any game reading off a disk as the game assets are procedurally created. Consuming that much processing power to generate graphics that won't look a fraction as good in most cases doesn't make sense. Procedural content has it's place, but it isn't a cureall. It's best use will probably be in adapting human-created content, such as loading a generic human model and some clothes models, and then shifting vertices to change the person into different sizes, shapes and faces and dress them in different clothes. That isn't going to fix the issues in streaming detailed worlds where you want every building to look different and have 1,000 buildings in the city that you're free to wander round.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Procedural engines seem to be the wave of the future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

96kb Procedurally Generated FPS demo.

Correct me if I'm wrong but this game uses procedurals as a kind of compression, right? They have to pre-calculate and store all the textures on your hard drive before running the game, because these calculations can probably not be done in real time.

This would not be a fitting solution for a console game however. Executing the procedurals would probably take more time then decompressing data, so while load times would go down, the player would still have to wait a lot for each level's preprocessing. Without a HD, results couldn't even be cached. And it wouldn't look as good as manually created artwork.

 

[Platon]

I just pointed out if these devs have data throughput problems then they're doing something wrong. I'll point anyone curious as to my reasoning in the direction of warhawk, a game where the devs claims a seamless, 'levelless' world where you can walk, drive, fly around freely. So obviously it IS doable.

Just Cause is another, maybe even better, example...

 

[Gubbi]

Correct me if I'm wrong but this game uses procedurals as a kind of compression, right? They have to pre-calculate and store all the textures on your hard drive before running the game, because these calculations can probably not be done in real time.

Not on the harddrive, but in main memory.

This would not be a fitting solution for a console game however. Executing the procedurals would probably take more time then decompressing data, so while load times would go down, the player would still have to wait a lot for each level's preprocessing. Without a HD, results couldn't even be cached. And it wouldn't look as good as manually created artwork.

What they do is record a list of commands from the tools used to build the textures in the first place. This list can be heavily compressed, to re-construct the texture they then execute the commands with the built in graphics library.

Yes, it would probably be prohibitive to do a large number of textures in a full scale game. And today we see a lot of photo-sourced textures in games as well.

But in general the idea is valid. It's just another way of compression, so you'd evaluate it as every other compression scheme:
1. Compression ratios
2. Decompression time/size

1) divided by 2) is a good rule of thumb to give an idea of how good a compression algorithm is.

Cheers

 

[Fafalada]

This would not be a fitting solution for a console game however. Executing the procedurals would probably take more time then decompressing data, so while load times would go down, the player would still have to wait a lot for each level's preprocessing.

You'd have to do some seriously uber-complex algorithm for it to approach speeds of external drive (or conversely, some seriously uber badly written one, or some combination of the two).
It may not be a way eliminate load pauses - but you have a very good chance to reduce them considerably.

People forget just how damn slow external storage devices are - PS2 has a pretty damn slow general purpose CPU and it can still decompress common lossless algorithms over an order of magnitude faster then DVD can read.

 

[MrWibble]

Not sure anyone outside Sony knows what exact model number of harddrive will be, but a 40MB/platter drive's going to be pretty damn pathetic as far as transfer rate's concerned. At least by modern standards. And we're talking 5400RPM spindle speed too I'll wager, not 7200. There's even slight loadtimes on the 360 when starting up certain arcade titles...

Just a minor point, but Sony already said you could upgrade the HDD yourself with a standard model. So you'd have to assume some people will put the cheapest available 4200rpm drive in there...

Generally TRCs forbid us from making too many assumptions about drive performance anyway (optical drives included) - we have to leave a lot of head-room.

 

[pipo]

Just a minor point, but Sony already said you could upgrade the HDD yourself with a standard model. So you'd have to assume some people will put the cheapest available 4200rpm drive in there...

Good one! I should have thought of that.

 

[Graham]

It seems odd. I would have thought Saints would be a good example of a game that easily fits streaming. It's very predictable what resources will be needed, and the faster you move the less important how high quality those assets are. You only need full resolution content when you are slow enough to see it.

get a good list of assets required, sort them first into time priority groups, then sort into read order groups on the physical disk location... How hard is it to get, say, 50% of the drives theoretical performance?

I would also assume microsoft provides disk access simulation software with the dev kits?

As for warkhawk, do we know if you can actually see one island from another?