Regarding Insomniac's PS3 engine...

It'd be a waste of resources to model those mountains if the player can't get any closer to them. Static backdrops are a smart choice for many a game, even if it's just a sky box. As for the game looking close to that, have Insomniac ever misled in that respect? The original RFoM images were true to the final game, were they not?

I wasn't trying to degrade anyone's work, just stating the impression I received from those screenshots is all. They look absolutely fantastic. Too good for me to believe initially.
 
Someone should be assigned to go to this session at GDC and write a report.

Unless Mr Acton swiftly will bless us with the slides.

I found this comment the most interesting

what steps are being taken to continue in a direction that we keep Insomniac on the competitive edge and prepare the studio for future platforms

No surprise but possibly first public confirmation that PS4 will be based on Cell Next.
 
Future platforms can mean anything, but I guess they do think ahead, having learnt a lot from releasing a launch game on PS3 and still probably making money from it, they no doubt want to make good use of those unique lessons to benefit even more next time.
 
No surprise but possibly first public confirmation that PS4 will be based on Cell Next.

Well, certainly Mike would be in a position to know before most folk... but in reality, I don't think he was alluding to Cell 2... or even PS4 per se.

I think honestly he's just referring to programming models that will benefit all of the "next generation" platforms, being defined loosely here as simply systems in which increasing parallelism play a role. Data-centric and such; the Acton mantra. Of course with him lurking around, you'll no doubt hear me corrected if I'm wrong.

Or maybe... he is referring to the PS4/Cell... and you won't hear him at all! :p
 
I think honestly he's just referring to programming models that will benefit all of the "next generation" platforms, being defined loosely here as simply systems in which increasing parallelism play a role. Data-centric and such; the Acton mantra. Of course with him lurking around, you'll no doubt hear me corrected if I'm wrong.

Ok. I'll bite. Yes, this is exactly was I was referring to. Nothing specific to any particular next-gen console, but in general concentrating on the things that will continue to be (ever-increasingly) important:

1. Properly designing data
2. Organizing the runtime around a data-transformation model, not an imaginary world-domain model.
3. Minimizing the energy (i.e. CPU/memory-access) required to transform the data.
4. Minimizing points of synchronization so you can get the maximum amount of things running in parallel.
etc.

Mike.
 
Ok. I'll bite.

Too easy... :cool:

Anyway for newer members interested in the "SPU Shading" referred to in the presentation blurb, feel free to check out this overview article:

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/497

... and the thread on the subject in the CellPerformance section:

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=44542

I will ask that it not be bumped though unless truly for a post directly on the subject and to the level. No directly Insomniac-related stuff there.
 
Future platforms can mean anything, but I guess they do think ahead, having learnt a lot from releasing a launch game on PS3 and still probably making money from it, they no doubt want to make good use of those unique lessons to benefit even more next time.


I guess it was the fact that the rest of the quote was fairly SPU Centric that made me jump to a conclusion about which future platforms were being considered but thanks Mike etc for correcting me.
 
No surprise but possibly first public confirmation that PS4 will be based on Cell Next.
Having presumably spent several years learning how to code for CELL, if Sony dropped it from the PS4 there would be a bigger outcry from when they put it in the PS3.

Anyway, I don't think there is any doubt a version of CELL will be in the next Playstation, hopefully Nvidia will still do the GPU too.
 
Hello Mike,

I have a question that has been on my mind. Will your company's game engine for Resistance 2 support dynamic radiosity or some type of global illumination?

The screenshots of Resistance 2 are looking fantastic by the way. I think it's awesome that you have almost doubled your texture budget due to streaming from the HDD.

Thanks!
 
I'd be willing to check out Mike's presentation and take notes for the crowd here if I can fit in the door.

Oninotsume
 
Mike's put up an 'SPU Shader' slide presentation on the Insomniac site for those interested in checking it out:

http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/articles/0108/files/spu_shaders.pdf

The further into their PS3 development / optimisation these guys are, the less I understand of their technical presentations as an outsider. I don't know whether that's because they're having to drill down to fairly low-level systems, or because these presentations are primarily aimed at their internal talks.

After that presentation I still don't *really* have a clue what these fragments do and I agree with Shifty that the "shader" moniker is misleading.

"Forced to think about data layout and synchronization — (But that's a good thing)": Very true, but I'd still prefer if it ran quickly enough without having to bother... :p
 
Hi AlStrong,

Yes, I'll be attending a bevy of conferences from the 20th to the 22nd. I haven't locked everything down yet. I'm hoping to gather information from the Insomniac presentation and pass it on in Japanese to my co-workers. It never hurts to get more Japanese programmers into the Western fold;)

Oninotsume
 
Hi AlStrong,

Yes, I'll be attending a bevy of conferences from the 20th to the 22nd. I haven't locked everything down yet. I'm hoping to gather information from the Insomniac presentation and pass it on in Japanese to my co-workers. It never hurts to get more Japanese programmers into the Western fold;)

Oninotsume

Preech!

The more Eastern Devs we see raising there technology the more it reflects on the quality of their products we all love so dearly.. :D
 
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