Resistance: Fall of Man update! More of your questions answered!
Hi everyone,
Today is Gamers' Day for Sony Computer Entertainment America. We have another opportunity to show off Resistance:Fall of Man to a crowd of both consumer and enthusiast journalists. Our plan is to present a cool tech demo that helps explain what the PS3's SPUs are doing in the background during some of our larger battle scenes. We’re using a Manchester, England environment where about 15 of your allies are under heavy fire from around 20 or so Chimera. There are bullets flying everywhere, explosions going off left and right - basically chaos. During gameplay I plan to pause the action in mid battle and begin stepping through the game frame by frame, moving the camera around the scene to check out lots of stuff that players will almost certainly miss when playing real time. I’ll talk about the many processes we send to the SPUs where they're all taken care of at the same time (physics, navigation, collision checks, lighting calculations, special effects processing, etc). I’ll also explain how running these processes in parallel simply allows us to do much more per frame than we could do in the past. And doing more per frame means more details and moving parts in the scene. Supporting these details in the game helps make the action more vivid and creates a greater sense of immersion.
Just as important though, we’ll be showing the finished game. Yes, we've wrapped it up and it is now taking the final steps toward becoming an actual packaged game on the shelves during the launch. That's just a month away!
And now that we're finished with the game I have some more updates for everyone - updates that were the result of the final weeks’ of work on the game.
Update on disc size
I'm probably adding fuel to the fire by bringing up this issue again. But the debate over Resistance's size on disc has been raging for a while and I want to give you guys the final number. Earlier I gave some very specific reasons why we were over 20Gb - all legit then and now. And I've also been careful to say publicly that this size was the current size of the game whenever I brought it up. And this week on Neogaf’s forums the topic was brought up yet again as part of the thread on an interview Phil Harrison did.
As we moved into the final week of finishing up the game we made two big changes which dropped the size of the final disc to just over 16Gb – still pretty large nonetheless. What were the changes? We removed PAL movies and further improved our data compression. It turns out that the NTSC movies (not HD, but NTSC just in case Lachamania is reading this) could be converted on the fly to look really good on PAL TVs and therefore we saved space by removing them. It's something that was a pleasant surprise. Why did we bother when we had so much space to work with? It simply saved us time when burning discs. When you're making revs every day and distributing them to a large test team, saving burn time is crucial. We could have left the PAL movies on disc and not improved compression to keep the size around 20Gb but that would have been inefficient and a little disingenuous. We don’t want to pad the disc just to get it to a certain size. Whatever the game needs is what we put on the disc. Still, having a lot of space on Bluray means that we’re including things we wouldn’t have been able to include if we had had to use dual layer DVDs: higher res game assets and more of them, HD movies, higher fidelity sounds, more dialogue, all languages on one disc, etc.
And of course, as others have pointed out in the many threads on this topic, the debate over disc size is a little silly. What really matters is whether your experience in the game is fun.
720p versus 1080p
We’ve gotten a few questions about whether Resistance will be running in 1080p or 720p. In fact, AssassinX01 brought this up in his comments on my last blog.
READ THE REST AT
http://blogs.ign.com/Comments.aspx?blog=Ted-Insomniac&entryid=34235
Hi everyone,
Today is Gamers' Day for Sony Computer Entertainment America. We have another opportunity to show off Resistance:Fall of Man to a crowd of both consumer and enthusiast journalists. Our plan is to present a cool tech demo that helps explain what the PS3's SPUs are doing in the background during some of our larger battle scenes. We’re using a Manchester, England environment where about 15 of your allies are under heavy fire from around 20 or so Chimera. There are bullets flying everywhere, explosions going off left and right - basically chaos. During gameplay I plan to pause the action in mid battle and begin stepping through the game frame by frame, moving the camera around the scene to check out lots of stuff that players will almost certainly miss when playing real time. I’ll talk about the many processes we send to the SPUs where they're all taken care of at the same time (physics, navigation, collision checks, lighting calculations, special effects processing, etc). I’ll also explain how running these processes in parallel simply allows us to do much more per frame than we could do in the past. And doing more per frame means more details and moving parts in the scene. Supporting these details in the game helps make the action more vivid and creates a greater sense of immersion.
Just as important though, we’ll be showing the finished game. Yes, we've wrapped it up and it is now taking the final steps toward becoming an actual packaged game on the shelves during the launch. That's just a month away!
And now that we're finished with the game I have some more updates for everyone - updates that were the result of the final weeks’ of work on the game.
Update on disc size
I'm probably adding fuel to the fire by bringing up this issue again. But the debate over Resistance's size on disc has been raging for a while and I want to give you guys the final number. Earlier I gave some very specific reasons why we were over 20Gb - all legit then and now. And I've also been careful to say publicly that this size was the current size of the game whenever I brought it up. And this week on Neogaf’s forums the topic was brought up yet again as part of the thread on an interview Phil Harrison did.
As we moved into the final week of finishing up the game we made two big changes which dropped the size of the final disc to just over 16Gb – still pretty large nonetheless. What were the changes? We removed PAL movies and further improved our data compression. It turns out that the NTSC movies (not HD, but NTSC just in case Lachamania is reading this) could be converted on the fly to look really good on PAL TVs and therefore we saved space by removing them. It's something that was a pleasant surprise. Why did we bother when we had so much space to work with? It simply saved us time when burning discs. When you're making revs every day and distributing them to a large test team, saving burn time is crucial. We could have left the PAL movies on disc and not improved compression to keep the size around 20Gb but that would have been inefficient and a little disingenuous. We don’t want to pad the disc just to get it to a certain size. Whatever the game needs is what we put on the disc. Still, having a lot of space on Bluray means that we’re including things we wouldn’t have been able to include if we had had to use dual layer DVDs: higher res game assets and more of them, HD movies, higher fidelity sounds, more dialogue, all languages on one disc, etc.
And of course, as others have pointed out in the many threads on this topic, the debate over disc size is a little silly. What really matters is whether your experience in the game is fun.
720p versus 1080p
We’ve gotten a few questions about whether Resistance will be running in 1080p or 720p. In fact, AssassinX01 brought this up in his comments on my last blog.
READ THE REST AT
http://blogs.ign.com/Comments.aspx?blog=Ted-Insomniac&entryid=34235
