[PS3] God of War III Pre-Release

Thanks for that article, very interesting to know that the game executable was only 1.5 MB, sounds ridiculous when you look at a game like God of War.

Sony has really done well to find itself such a host of technically excellent first party studios.

 

I wouldn't call it intelligent as the game doesn't decide camera positions in realtime only based on complex level geometry and user inputs, but it's still slightly more intelligent than camera designers placing cameras for each possible positions. I would expect, it's likely based on a few pivotal camera positions (angles and settings) set by camera designer (which is what I meant by a set of parametrized curves), and the rest of the "curves" are interpolated in real time based on user variables.

Also I wonder what game you think has "better" camera system with as much degrees of freedom, whatever better means for you. As I said, it's the best I have seen.

This may very well be the case (replacing "looks far better" with "has far better tech"), but it's not like GoWs are the only Western developed "action" games, still I have not seen anything that comes close, in my search for a new hack and slash game. And believe me I even tried some licensed games which were nothing less than torture.

Thanks for the link, indeed a great read. Also glad to see Jaffe's target audience was officially labeled "casual hardcores".

 

Lol. These guys are great but your comments about camera and western devs are silly to say the least

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I do not know whether thi video is already posted here. FOr those who have seen it must check out this interview
http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/action/godofwariii/video/6204646/god-of-war-iii-interview?hd=1&tag=videos;hd;1

 

Why does the game executable size matter?

 

New GoW III Lead Programmer interview (Short one )
[gt]45802[/gt]

 

From a coding perspective it just equates to a tightly written piece of code, no slap dash bloat ware. It's something to be applauded these days.

 

I read in an article (french magazine) that the game loads during cutscenes. Does this mean that the cutscenes will be prerendered like in the first two or Uncharted ?

Are there games with fully realised realtime cutscenes that manage to effectivelly load in background ?

 

the immediate response to that is, why bother? Why go to the effort of creating a loading system that can render full framerate content while simultaneously replacing that content with the new stuff, when you can just play a video clip instead? It's just making unnecessary work for yourself.

 

Dynamic cut scenes might be useful. It's always kind of distracting when a pre-rendered cut scene doesn't properly reflect the dress or weapons of your character. You walk into a room with a machine gun but the cut scene shows you with the default pistol.

Dynamic cut scenes might open up new avenues for developers as well. If the game could assess the paths you took to reach somewhere, who has lived or died in your story so far, etc., the scenes could change. Instead of always entering this room, by this door, after triggering these exact switches, the scenes could tell a different story.

 

Pretty positive this fellow is talking about Tim Moss in his mention of GOW III's engine lead, as Moss was GOW II's lead programmer.

Moss was primarily responsible for the team optimizing for a 60 refresh rate in the previous two titles, so I'd say him being GOW III's engine lead is a pretty good indication that the shipped product will run--or aspire to run-- at 60 fps.

edit: There's a French PS mag that has a GOW III blowout and it's claiming GOWIII will run at 1080p/60 fps.
Though didnt beyond3d's own Mazingerdude prove that the recent trailer was 720 native?

 

I'm pretty sure the first two titles used a combination of Real time in engine cutscenes, recorded in-engine cutscenes (to mask loading) and CG cutscenes for some events.

I would assume the 3rd will more than likely do this as well.

Reference to the frame rate and resolution, I'm pretty sure they'll be aiming for 720p as the "chosen" resoultion with 60fps, but will scale to 1080i/p similar to KZ2 (basically, if 720p is available, that is what the game will render at).

 

Cutscenes like that do exist. MGS4 had Snake wearing pink in plenty of cutscenes I saw . But that's independent of background loading in a new area. eg. You're playing GOW3 in a night-time forest. PS3's RAM is completely filled with high-quality assets. There's a story-based cutscene and the next area is a brightly lit Greek town. How can you replace the forest assets in RAM with the Greek town assets while still rendering the forest scene, a job that needs the forest assets you're replacing with town assets! Whereas a video just needs enough of a buffer freed up from RAM to stream the prerendered video.

 

In the cutscenes in MGS4 if you shake the sixaxis he will change the camo to the default which was pretty cool.

 

Well, the beauty of a non-interactive realtime cutscene is that you can direct the experience very specifically and change camera angles as you see fit. So, toward the end of the scene, you can isolate the area with the fewest rendered assets, and place the camera in that spot. This will allow you to wipe everything else, and begin loading in assets for the next scene. For the next scene, you can also place your camera in a spot that shows as few assets as possible, continue with some dialog, and then continue to load in assets and pan out to gameplay.

It can be done, but the cutscene would have to be directed in a very specific manner, so much so that, as you said, it would be rather ridiculous to do it this way if you can simply use video footage.

 

1.5MB is very small for an elf. most games are in around 4-6 MB. That is not just from efficient code (I doubt their code is 4x as efficient as others) but a sign that they have a very simple code base.

from game design through to techincal design they have made decisions that simplified the tech and passed a lot of work onto art and level design. A lot of coders I know would be horrified by this as they don't trust anyone, especially LD's!

The camera system is a great example. They don't try to make the camera system too complex. It does no collision detection, so if it passes through a wall, or a column gets in the way, the LD has to move it.

Extra work for LD's and Art, but:

1) their time is cheaper
2) changing art or camera placement is a lot more robust and less likely to impact other areas of the game than trying to come up with an all encompassing tech solution.


Although I can't stand the game, there is a lot to like about their development process.

 

There are existing current gen games that already do this. One advantage to realtime vs pre-rendered is that you can have varying cameras/lights/etc with realtime and hence mask loading with a variety of looks, whereas with pre-rendered videos you are always stuck with the same video over and over again, which eventually makes them become a load screen once you've seen them multiple times.

Didn't the PS2 God Of War games do this also? My memory is a bit hazy on their design, but I thought they had split the PS2s 32MB of memory in half. In one half was the level you were currently playing. In the second half it would start loading in the level you were headed towards, and would only do this as you walked down designated 'hint areas' in your current level. It did this in the background while you were playing, so it effectively masked loading during realtime gameplay.

 

They had two level chunks, with an arbitrary boundry between them. So the current room plus the next room are loaded. since the boundry was not fixed, the relative size of the chunks can change from room to room.

They also had I think 4, 1MB chunks for Enemy characters. If necessary they could combine two chunks for a more memory intensive character e.g. boss characters.

 

1UP has a 3 page preview up, mentions the plane of the levels will shift altering gameplay (ala Prey).

From the accompanying screens the game still looks rather plasticky though, like a high res, high poly, high texture GoW2.

http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3172781&p=37

 

That was a waste of a perfectly good explanation, I know perfectly well what the advantages of realime cutscenes are
But you say there are games that load in the background of a fully realised (a.k.a not simple conversations) realtime cutscene, so which games are those ?

 

The original Metal Gear Solid on PSX, for one. Going up the elevator, there is a reason it takes so long. It's not because it's a long trip, lol, it's because they're using that segment to deliver some dialog, and at the same time, load up the next area.

There are instances like these in many gamers, where the character is put into a situation where there is little going on, story / cutscene begins, and the game loads up the next area accordingly. Future MGS titles, God of War, and I think there are some areas in DMC titles that do the same. I'm sure there are plenty of examples outside of these few games that also use these methods.