Pandemic Interview (Focused on Console Graphics)

[Acert93]

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/756/756135p1.html

I like the guys at Pandemic (long live Battlezone 1/2 PC!) and they give a pretty candid interview. You will want to read the 4 page interview, but here are some comments I thought were insightful. A lot of it is very similar to what the developers here have shared.

IGN: As hardware becomes more complex, are the supplied development tools easing the strain on designers as well as programmers?

Adam Myhill: With respect to Sony and Microsoft, I haven't seen very many tools that really understand the craft - at least at the artists' level. There may be better tools at the engineers' level, but it comes down to making our own tools. The teams that have great tools will leap forward; the ones who don't will get left behind. And it isn't necessarily because of the talent of the individuals but because they're hammering away at a crappy pipeline.

IGN: In terms of game development, what is the difference between artistry and good graphics? Is there one?

John Passfield: I personally think that a really important thing is, and this is coming from a background in comics, is consistency. Look at something like The Simpsons and Matt Groening's style in something like 'Life is Hell' - you wouldn't compare it with something like Todd McFarlane's stuff and think, 'oh, that looks like crap'. He has a consistent style and it's recognisable.

Morgan Jaffit: Simple things work well. Strong art direction is absolutely key. Gears does look fantastic, but it also has really strong art direction - if it didn't have that strong art direction, it wouldn't be garnering the attention that it has. Look at a title like Resistance: Fall of Man on PS3 - it doesn't have particularly strong art direction, and hasn't really made the same impact. From a technical perspective, it's very comparable to Gears of War. So why isn't it garnering the same attention? It comes down to the art direction. It looks like everything else.

I can see Steve Balmer right now practicing a new line: "Artists, Artists, Artists! Artists, Arstists, Artists! ..." I thought the comment about asset tools was pretty telling (ie the focus from the big guys seems to be on engineering tools) and is where stuff like UE3 falls into the market. I wonder if MS or Sony will invest heavily in the creation content workflow for next gen. Will we see a buyout of companies like Epic for this purpose?

IGN: The Wii bowed out of the graphical race, whereas the Xbox 360 and PS3 have roughly comparable power. Are the difference in platform capabilities forcing your team to lean towards strictly next-gen style games?

Morgan Jaffit: If we were to do a Wii title, we would want to take absolute advantage of the Wii's abilities. Likewise, if we were to do an Xbox 360 title then we would want to make it as strong graphically as a 360 title can be. But we'd also want to make it something that could easily be ported to the PS3, and vice versa. In our perspective those are very similarly linked SKUs. Particularly when you're looking at a game with a 15 million dollar budget, we would want to be able to make it work on both.

If you look at the on-paper specs, the PS3 doesn't have this mythical, untapped reservoir of power. There's been a lot of talk about that, but it doesn't seem to be there. I have yet to see the evidence of this. It's always hard, a generation out - I'm not suggesting it won't happen, though.

I think it's interesting, in this age of high definition, that a TV's standard definition is 640 x 480 - and it looks real. So what are we doing wrong? The answer is very complex and goes into a bunch of things; but there's no theoretical reason why we shouldn't be making realistic games in 640 x 480.

The 640x480 comment is something John Carmack has stated before. I guess there are always tradeoffs and sometimes you can get a feature cheaper (e.g. resolution) than increased fidelity in fewer pixels. But I wish MS (and Sony?) had left the door open for developers to make this decision.

IGN: Has improved graphics technology and HD resolutions aided the quality of the gameplay in current games?

Morgan Jaffit: I can't think of a game idea I couldn't do because I couldn't make it look good enough. I can't think of a Hollywood film concept that couldn't be delivered at our current graphical level. It's not that I don't think we can use that extra power to make better games - that's not what I'm saying. But I think things look good enough to deliver any game concept.

And for this reason, and the important one tools and art, that we may see next gen be a little less technology focused as some have suggested on the forums. If upcoming games like Crysis are an indication (not that it is an end all, be all) we may be approaching a point where pushing the hardware limits in design may not aid the central goal of design. But then again the consoles last a while, and if the scaling of returns slows down some maybe packing it in tight again would be the right move to plan for something like a 7 year generation (i.e. more untapped potential). I wouldn't be surprised if MS and Sony took different directions next next gen, at least until a time where we begin to see stuff like realtime GI which could be a big help to the design workflow.

 

[bloodbob]

I wonder if my co-worker will ever get a job with pandemic

 

[Onlooker1]

the answer as to why games can't make TV (let alone DVD-movie) images in 640x480 is pretty simple. Realistic lighting, realistic movement, and almost infinite geometry is not being created in an internal "film set" before the 640x480 "camera" gets pointed at it. With enough geometry and procedurally generated coloration you no longer even need textures! Aren't textures just a cheap way of hiding a lack of geometric and individually colored detail.

One of the most realistic, movie-like, game moments I can remember is standing in ICO looking up at the waving leaves of a tree as the sunlight streams through them. For that camera angle, at that particular moment, it looked like real life. It wasn't the textures it was the sheer mass of overlapping geometry, and the lighting tricks, and the realistic movement. Of course the illusion is shattered the moment the camera moves away!

 

[Sethamin]

Adam Myhill: With respect to Sony and Microsoft, I haven't seen very many tools that really understand the craft - at least at the artists' level.

This is the exact problem that XNA is supposed to tackle. They are supposedly coming up with a build system engineered for art assets and content pipelines that supports many different formats but also allows room for pre- and post-processing stages, incremental builds, etc. It will obviously be tailored for PC/360 development, but it's also supposed to be flexible enough to target other platforms, as well. It's still in development (AFAIK), but I don't think the above is a totally accurate statement.

 

[ERP]

The build system is only one part of what he's refering to.
As a point of reference we had over 150 seperate executables in the tool chain of one of my more recent projects. There were also more lines of tool code than game code.

The real goal IMO is to provide a tool chain that makes your creative staff productive but still leaves you with technically usable assets.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

How do the mastering tools like StudioMAX and Maya fit in with the content pipeline? What processes do the models from these have to go through to be used in game? In PC homebrew the content pipeline is 'Load MAX/MilkShape/et al, create model, export, load into (game engine).'

What can MS+Sony (and Nintendo. who for some reason are always overlooked in discussions of development) do to provide content pipeline improvements, especially given the variety of engines and in-house differences that exist?

 

[ERP]

It's basically the same process, but for mdels it usually goes

Maya -> platform independant intermediate format -> long pipeline of processing/optimising steps -> final platform specific binary format.

Commonly there are multiple inputs, not just a Maya file, I need some sort of shader library and either some mechanism to assign from that library in Maya, or some mechanism to associate game materials with Maya materials.

Then I have level layout tools, might be more of Maya, might be something else, Animation processing. Animation Mixing and blending authoring tools.

Some mechanism to attach events to animation keyframes, or colliosion volumes in my level editor.

Some authoring mechanism for game flow.. I pull the lever and the door opens

Audio

Cut scenes

LOD Management

Other Metadata tools

etc etc etc....


MS/Sony can't solve this problem withput providing a complete end to end solution and it's questionable anyone would use it if they did.

 

[inefficient]

Adam Myhill: With respect to Sony and Microsoft, I haven't seen very many tools that really understand the craft - at least at the artists' level.

Oh those artists.

Has anyone met an artist who didn't complain about his tools? I'm sure even Pixar artists complain about their tools.

 

[Darkon]

For a game like Shadow of the Colossus, it had amazing, amazing art direction, but sometimes the framerate would stutter. That was their call. It wasn't doing particularly incredible things with the hardware, but the art direction was there.

And here i thought it was

 

[DudeMiester]

I don't know. I think he meant relative to the X360 or PS3, because when I saw an overview of its development, they were doing some pretty advanced things for a PS2.