http://palgn.com.au/article.php?id=9225&rss=1&title=Naughty+Dog+Interview+Part+One
Interview de Evan wells pour Uncharted, pas de spoiler à priori. Il n´y a pas de temps de chargement visible et le HDD jour un grand rôle dedans. Ils sont au alentour de 24 Gb de données et ils pensent que leur prochain jeu tiendra sur un BD double couche. Et le BD leur a procuré pas mal de confort. Ils sont fiers de leur système d´animation aussi.
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PALGN: Can you tell us why Uncharted is only possible on the PlayStation 3?
There are a few things. Primarily the whole experience is enabled by the use of the hard drive. If we did not have the hard drive then we could not present the game in the seamless load free way that we are. After you start until you turn the console off and go eat your lunch and come back there is not going to be another load time and you can play the game from start to finish. That was really key to us something that we established with Jak and Daxter and it keeps you immersed in the experience. As soon as you hit those load screens, as soon as you have to take that break, you may put the controller down, you may do something else we really just want to engross you in this experience. So, the hard drive really helped with that. The other thing that we´ve got going for us is the Blu Ray. We filled that thing up to 24 plus gigs, it was right at the end where we were literally running out of place where we were having to start pulling some stuff out, we ended up fortunately finding this unused cache of audio lines we were able to pull out to save some space so we could get everything in that we wanted to get in. I´m not going to stand here and say it would have been impossible to do on DVD but it would have been a different game, it really would have. It could have looked worse, we would have had to make concessions in terms of our compression. We would have had to spend a lot more developer resources focusing on how to get it on the disk when we could have been creating the game, making it more fun, making it more beautiful. So I´m really happy just to have that. We´re still on single layer and this is our first game out of the gates. So I highly suspect that on our future games we´ll even go to a double layer and we´re going to even start putting more than 24-25 gigs into a single game.
The other important thing for us was the use of the Cell processor and how it enabled our animation system to work. Everybody who is working on the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360 gets this increase in the number of polygons they can use, they get an increase in the fact that now we´ve got these really cool pixel shaders and we can do these really cool materials like water and leather and put bark on trees. So you´re going to get an immediate upgrade for free and you just get it with the hardware. But, what´s not going to come for free is your animation and you´re animation if you´ve got these really detailed environments it´s not going to mesh. We wanted to put a lot of our engineering effort into making sure that we had an animation system that would allow, what I think are some of the most talented animators in the industry to really create and have their vision come through and be supported by the technology.
Basically, in Jak I we had somewhere in the vicinity of 300-350 animations for Jak and everyone was really happy with the fluidity of his movement and the response. In Uncharted, Drake has got more than 3500 animations and the difference is we´re now taking the cell processor and we´re taking say two dozen of those animations, like we´ve got his running animations, flinching animations, reloading animations, rolling animations, just dozens of animations all at once being layered on top of each other and then the cell processor recreates on the fly the single frame of animation that you need to be able to play the game at that moment and the fact we can just dump more and more work on that processor and its SPUs just means we can free up our CPU to do more general purpose tasks.
- Le jeu fait un peu plus de 24Gb mais sur la fin du développement ils ont manqué de place et ils ont craint de ne pas pouvoir intégrer certains trucs, ils ont réussi à faire de la place en virant des fichiers audio inutilisés qui étaient passés inaperçu (il dit qu´ils ont eu de la chance de tomber là dessus), et donc ils ont finalement pu mettre tout ce qu´ils voulaient.
- Il ne dit pas que le jeu serait impossible à faire sur DVD, mais ce serait un jeu différent, vraiment différent. Le jeu aurait été moins beau, ils auraient dû faire des concessions sur la compression de données. Et surtout, ils auraient dû mettre beaucoup de leurs ressources sur les problèmes de taille du DVD, plusieurs membres de l´équipe auraient été chargés de trouver comment faire tout tenir sur un DVD, des ressources qui n´auraient pas pu être utilisées pour créer le jeu, le rendre fun, le rendre plus beau (des ressources gâchées quoi). Donc ils sont très contents d´avoir eu le bluray, et leur prochain jeu sera sur bluray double couche.
- Au passage, on sent (enfin il le dit carrément) qu´ils ont dû se débrouiller pour que le jeu tienne sur un bluray simple couche, et que ça n´aurait pas été bienvenu d´utiliser un double-couche juste pour quelques petits GB en trop (question de praticité et de coût de prod supplémentaires surement). (donc on a bien un jeu de 24Gb qui tient sur un bluray simple couche pour lequel ils ont fait attention à ne pas gacher de la place, ils ne se sont pas amusés à le remplir à ras bord pour le plaisir).
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The other important thing for us was the use of the Cell processor and how it enabled our animation system to work. Everybody who is working on the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360 gets this increase in the number of polygons they can use, they get an increase in the fact that now we´ve got these really cool pixel shaders and we can do these really cool materials like water and leather and put bark on trees. So you´re going to get an immediate upgrade for free and you just get it with the hardware. But, what´s not going to come for free is your animation and you´re animation if you´ve got these really detailed environments it´s not going to mesh. We wanted to put a lot of our engineering effort into making sure that we had an animation system that would allow, what I think are some of the most talented animators in the industry to really create and have their vision come through and be supported by the technology.
Basically, in Jak I we had somewhere in the vicinity of 300-350 animations for Jak and everyone was really happy with the fluidity of his movement and the response. In Uncharted, Drake has got more than 3500 animations and the difference is we´re now taking the cell processor and we´re taking say two dozen of those animations, like we´ve got his running animations, flinching animations, reloading animations, rolling animations, just dozens of animations all at once being layered on top of each other and then the cell processor recreates on the fly the single frame of animation that you need to be able to play the game at that moment and the fact we can just dump more and more work on that processor and its SPUs just means we can free up our CPU to do more general purpose tasks.
J´aime bien comment il distingue les progrès techniques des jeux qui sont "gratuits" parce qu´ils sont permis par le hardware, ça ne demande pas un talent énorme de développeur, il s´agit juste de profiter des avancées techniques des consoles next-gen, comme l´accroissement du nombre de polygones dans les jeux ou les shaders pour avoir une upgrade "gratuite" sur les jeux. Il y a une chose qui ne vient pas "gratuitement" avec les progrès du hardware, ce sont les améliorations des animations, là il faut bosser comme des malades, mais au moins c´est quelque chose qui vient d´eux et qui peut les différencier. Il crâne un peu en disant qu´ils ont parmi les meilleurs animateurs de l´industrie (si j´en juge rien que par Jak, c´est probable).
- Dans Jak I, Jak avait aux alentours de 300-350 animations, là Nathan en a maintenant 3500 qui sont gérées par le CELL. Le personnage est capable d´avoir un grand nombre d´animations en même temps, ils affichent donc des dizaines de couches d´animations à la fois en fonction des mouvements du personnage, et le CELL les associe à la volée sur une seule frame d´animation dont on a besoin pour jouer au jeu à cet instant t (et ce 30 fois par seconde donc, je suppose).
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Gros boulot pour les animateurs qui avaient peur au début qu´il n´y ait pas de boulot intéressant et seulement de la mocap:
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PALGN: So this was the first time that Naughty Dog has used motion capture?
EW: Yes, and that was a big change in direction for us. It was of course a big learning process too. We always like to pretend it was easy but it was definitely hard. We went through a lot of ordeals with that like animators being concerned because they do cartoony animation, they thought it was going to be dry. Once they saw what was capable, everyone thought wow this is a brand new challenge. That´s one of the reasons we did Uncharted to begin with, we wanted to challenge ourselves and wanted to teach ourselves new techniques and different parts of game development or even cinematic development that we have never had to use before. The animators really got into it, we worked with some really great actors and we made sure that we focused heavily on being able to do some really cool stuff with the faces and making sure that we get the expression that the actors were expressing on the stage. We wanted to make sure that came across in the 3D models. So, we focused on the mouth a lot, make sure that they could speak the words and that you could really believe that they were speaking aligned. Then we realised that the mouth wasn´t nearly as important as the eyes. I mean the eyes express so much in a person, humans are programmed just to look into a person´s eye and you can read so much expression just through really really subtle changes and differences. I just had to check myself a few times when I was talking to our character modelists and our animators and comment on the eyelashes. It really is important if they look long then you´re breaking the illusion. You pop out of it really quickly if you´re not focusing on these details. We spent a lot of time on that, I can say this because I wasn´t that involved in it but the story and the writing was really top notch I think and something really exceptional for a video game.
- Ils en avaient déjà parlé il y a quelques mois, quand leurs animateurs ont sû qu´ils ne feraient plus un jeu cartoon comme Jak ou Crash et qu´ils passaient à quelque chose de réaliste, ils ont flippé et ont craint de ne plus avoir de créativité, de juste bosser sur de la motion capture. C´est vraiment des gars qui aiment créer eux-mêmes, c´est la même démarche que pour la création des textures ou ils n´ont utilisé aucun photo, tout a été dessiné à la main.
- C´est marrant, ils pensaient que c´était facile de bosser sur les animations à partir de motion capture, mais ils se sont rendu compte que c´est difficile. Ils ont voulu apprendre des nouvelles techniques, et s´imposer des nouveaux challenges. (ce qui a été le cas pour les animateurs qui ont bossé avec de la mocap mais ont pu garder leur créativité (il doit y avoir aussi des animations à la main)).
- ils ont beaucoup bossé sur les animations du visage (principalement la bouche et les yeux) pour retranscrire au mieux le jeu des acteurs réels. Ils se sont vite rendu compte que le boulot sur les yeux était très important pour que les personnages soient crédibles, il y a eu un gros boulot la dessus, notamment sur des petits détails comme les cils (et on a vu sur un vidéo making of qu´ils ont même du self shadow sur les paupières hic ).
Fin novembre dans ma PS3.
