Under the Bonnet: SHIFT 2 Unleashed - 2
Slightly Mad talk AI, Helmet Cam and capturing the thrill of the race
When it comes to tech, we always look at it from the player's perspective... how is deferred rendering going to affect my gameplay? In the case of SHIFT 2 Unleashed it means you get a truly terrifying, realistic, and beautiful night racing experience. When it comes to backend servers and the messaging to and fro between players via Autolog it means you play the game socially even when your friends aren't online.
I think the key to developing a successful franchise is community and innovation. With each iteration you have to keep the great stuff and enhance it, cut the stuff that didn't work or no-one is playing, fix or balance the existing stuff that's been nagging you, and then add a whole bunch of new stuff that your players are crying out for or has never been seen before. Get it in early and playtest/polish it until release then support the community after release and include them in discussions moving forward.
If you're only ever adapting existing ideas then you'll constantly be playing catch-up and players will simply see version 2.0 of a feature they've seen before.
When it comes to tech, we always look at it from the player's perspective... how is deferred rendering going to affect my gameplay? In the case of SHIFT 2 Unleashed it means you get a truly terrifying, realistic, and beautiful night racing experience.
Dynamic time of day and weather were both in our original wish list for SHIFT 2 Unleashed but were postponed early on since they snowball into other features we would need dedicated time on to deliver to a 10/10 standard; if the weather changes for example during a race then you'll need to change your tires. That means pit stops need to also be included.
If dynamic time of day is available then it allows us to have really long endurance races (which also require pit stops) where we can more accurately simulate real series that require the swapping of two drivers. That then hints at some sort of team management therefore where it'd be great to add qualifying too. So they've been discussed definitely but didn't specifically fit this particular title.
When it comes to 3D, the original Need for Speed: SHIFT supported 3D on PC with the aid of the GTX series of NVIDIA cards. Racing games are perfect for this extra dimension due to their nature of the player moving rapidly through the environment in the z-axis. When viewing from the cockpit perspective particularly you get that extra spatial awareness of the interior and your proximity to the wheel, dashboard and the world beyond.
Processing power on PS3 is split between the SPUs and a dual thread CPU. We have a cross-platform small jobs system that is specifically designed to send tasks to either extra cores/threads on 360/PC or the SPUs on PS3. The SPUs are exceptionally fast but not all sections of logic are suitable candidates to run on them which in turn puts extra load on the single PS3 CPU that can be problematic. On 360 and PC we can send these larger jobs to other cores and run them with little difficulty though.
Ideally from a developer perspective, we'd prefer a more consistent architecture across all platforms to help reduce development time and platform specific issues, such as the multiple core approach used by 360 and high end PCs. Keeping the SPUs is fine but having a better balance between them and traditional CPUs would be better.
On PS3 and 360 we would like to see more memory and for it to be faster memory too. 512MB of memory is not enough compared to the capabilities of current console hardware. Also a lot of time is spent making sure assets fit into this restriction, time that could be better spent on polishing the game, especially considering the relatively cheap cost of memory.
From a rendering point of view I think right now the main thing we'd like to see is a bit more performance headroom on the GPU side of things as we're approaching the limit of what we can push on the hardware of the current gen of consoles. This would allow us to consider more costly approaches to things like anti-aliasing and introduce more transparency on vegetation. Ultimately it'd be wonderful if the next generation of consoles allowed for efficient rendering through a fully programmable pipeline but it feels a little early to say what could be achieved with this on modern hardware (certainly things like bokeh, order independent transparency and better reflections come to mind).
The nice thing with the current gen is that after so much time by so many developers spent on them we're really getting a lot out of the hardware and with a similar amount of time on DX11 class hardware we'll achieve some amazing results.