I decided to start a thread about what the Guerrilla Games dev team is talking about on another board, since we have our own team here giving their side of programming on the PS3. The following quotes are going to be questions from posters and answers from the devs. After reading please don't start a KZ2 isn't real or PS3 vs. Xbox 360 flame war!
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Originally Posted by poster
I know you cant give any specifics on PS3 info that Sony hasnt released yet, but i was wondering: Are you creating the online for KZ3 or is this outfit,
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/jobs.ph...=EUROPE&action
=view&job_id=22257 ? I was wondering because it would be cool ofr you to be able to keep your mind on the game and let them take care of that for you.
GG dev: Nope, all in-house. London offices are making their own games which will be online on PS3. I can't say much, but I will say that Online is going bleeping great.
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Also I just wanted to know if the E3 presentation of Killzone 2 was in real-time or if it was just cg. Because I know a lot of people who say that the video is fake and I really want to prove them wrong.
GG dev:
As for the E3 presentation, it was not running live on Dev Kits, as the final spec dev kits did not exist for E3. It was created to the specs of the PS3 and represents what we feel is achievable on PS3.
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Originally Posted by poster
1 more thing if i may, Will there be any KeyBoard/Mouse support for the next gen KZ???
That would be great to have the extra accuracy a KB/M allow's
GG dev: Keyboard / Mouse support is a difficult one because of the balancing issues. First, you have to tune the game separately - once for controller and once for keyboard / mouse. Then, you also have the problem of keeping online fair - i.e. not letting the players using keyboard / mouse have an advantage over those using controllers in the same game.
It's a tricky problem - We do realize it is a requested feature, however we are not committing to anything at this time.
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Originally Posted by poster
Question 1. Do you know how you came to "feel" that was achiveable?
Question 2. If you just looked at theoretical specs, did you take into account that you might not get all of it?
Question 3. Accept for the uber-high polygon count, you also seem to have effects that would not be achievable in realtime, like the hypervoxel smoke (atleast that's what people say you have in the trailer)
Question 4. Have you recieved the final devkits? Do you feel confident about it by now?
GG dev: Answer 1. Our experience as game developers
Answer 2. Yep!
Answer 3. I've seen some amazing effects done real time by not only Guerrilla but other PS3 dev teams. As these teams continue to push what the PS3 is capable of - then we'll see just what is achievable in real-time.
Answer 4. Not allowed to answer that one.
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Originally Posted by poster
Whats goin on Ferret. I have one for you conserning the vehicles, though I don't believe you can answer it. In the ew game, will there be vehicles in multiplayer? (kind-of like those guys at Zipper did in Socom3)
GG dev: Unfortunately, we can't confirm or deny this at this time. However, this is on the official suggestion list.
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How do you feel, personally, about next-gen development? Is it exciting for you as a developer to really unleash what you have always wanted and envisioned?
GG dev: The scale of the whole project has gotten tremendously huge and daunting. The team sizes have grown to such an extend I don't know at least 15 of the people here anymore. During Killzone 1 I knew if someone made a bug in a certain level I could go to the person directly and talk to them about it. I knew immediatly where they sat, what their MSN was and now I don't even know their first names....It is all very exciting and scary at the same time, and the risk-factor for all new games seems to have gone up quite a bit. But the chances for making things that were previously not possible due to hardware limitations is really cool
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PS2 had very little HARD-WIRED graphical effects and so they had to implemented via the software route in the Emotion Engine, has this learning curve helped you become more efficiant at coding for architectures like the EE ( i.e MULTIPLE CORE ).
GG dev: Well, for KZ1 we had to code a lot for all the cores in the system (R5900, IOP, VU0 and VU1) and we spent a lot of time making sure the communications between the cores was as fast as it could be.
Now we're working with the Cell chip, which is a whole different ballgame. It's easier in some respect (easier to program for), but it's also a lot more complex, so a lot more cores to keep busy at the same time.
But in the end, yeah, programming a PS2's EE will give you a leg up programming for multi-core architectures, especially the Cell. Hope that answers your question! If you have any more, shoot!
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Originally Posted by poster
So, what I would really like to know is, how does one go about organizing their objects in C++ to utilize the SPEs as efficiently as possible?...We've heard many times that programming for Cell requires one to "think differently" but by the sounds of some of your earlier comments it really seems that programming on the Cell is not quite as daunting as the rumors would have you believe.....Gabe Newell said in an interview on G4 that Naughty Dog was really far along with multithreaded programming. Now that you guys are a part of Sony, have you found it a good experience working with the Devs over at Naughty Dog?
GG dev: More of these low-level questions on the board. Yeesh, are you guys coders, or what?!? I think I have to err on the side of caution here, NDA's and confidentiality with regards to Cell are still quite tricky. Cell is definitively different from anything else. With parallelism people often think 'multithreading'. But how good will it be, running threads on tiny CPU's like the SPU's, really? It works, but it won't be optimal. If you think of it more as a network of small computers sending each other packets of data, it all starts to make a lot more sense.
We've had some good contact with the devs in Europe off late and we're planning gettothers(personal comment: Ninja Theory maybe? DeanoC or nAo do you know about this?). We haven't had a lot of time yet to meet up with the US devs, but that's underway too. It's all pretty new to us too, we were close to Sony before, but never really part of the group. It's definitely cool being part of the gang, Sony has some really talented people working for them.
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How do you feel about the Killzone PSP title you have been developing?
GG dev: Well, without getting in trouble - I can say that the PSP title is something I'm really excited to be working with the team on. Uh, don't know how much else I can say... Really, really excited!
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Originally Posted by poster
One aspect of the Cell (and your game put me on to this with that E3 demo) that really interests me is physics calculations. One thing I'd like work with when I get my PS3 and a GCC compiler or two is some dual precision physics formulas. I wonder if it would be possible to run or store data on another SPE and program a routine for one SPE to reference a location on another SPE? That EIB looks like it has bandwidth to spare for such an operation, but I bet it would have to be massively complex. Real early on when the PS3 was announced with the Cell BE is that SPEs could run applications independantly or in synchronization somehow.
GG dev: I can't tell you much more than you can deduce from the public specs from IBM, but I think you're on the right track. No SPE in the Cell is a slave to the system, so they can all move data around on the EIB. It would be wasteful for one SPE to use memory of another (why would you? each SPE has its own), but for physics you could have different SPEs doing different parts of the world - in parallel. Or you could have a few SPEs doing collision detection and others doing collision response.
Does that make sense?
On the massively parallel thing, there are actually developments in that direction. IBM has got something in development, called Octopiler (
http://www.research.ibm.com/cellcompiler/compiler.htm), but I have not taken a look at it myself yet. But if you're on the case, you might want to check it out.
There's also loads of nice articles floating around on the net off late (on Gamasutra and other game-dev sites) about parallel programming, although most of the tend to be on threaded programming and not specifically Cell.
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Originally Posted by poster
posted on the Playstation website and some other gaming job websites leads me to believe that Sony is actually going to create a better, more cohesive online service
GG dev: I'm am so treading on the line of NDA here. Um... we as developers are very aware of the features Xbox has for it's online service, and many of these features are things we believe are neccessary for our games. We do 1st party games for Sony, but there are lots of 3rd party developers as well - and these are the folks that Sony Computer Entertainment as a whole has to work with to create any kind of platform-wide system like Xbox has.
We don't have much insight into what discussions take place with 3rd party developers and publishers - but I can at least say that the SCE World Wide Studios (of which we are a part) is very committed to providing the necessary online features in our future games. We realize the direction online gaming is going, and we very much want to provide these features in our games. How this will come about is not something we can talk about.
Unfortunately, that's as much as I can say without seriously getting in trouble.
And that's it (so far). I will keep posting what the Guerrilla devs say about Killzone for the PSP and/or PS3, PS3 game development, and the video game industry as a whole. Again I love the Ninja Theory guys and want them to keep posting here, but I just wanted to show the love to Guerrilla too, because if it was up to B3D you would think Guerrilla doesn't talk about their videogames.
So please comment on anything that sounds relevent to you about Killzone 2 or PS3 game development. Again please don't start a KZ2 isn't real or PS3 vs. Xbox 360 flame war!
Thanks for your time.
