Posts by AlexM

  • Sony releases open-source Level Editor dev tool

    It's built on ATF a FOSS framework Sony made for developing tools. For instance the uncharted editor was made with it. The benefits of ATF are great. One of the main things it handles is implicit save/load/undo which is a huge bitch to implement correctly.


    Unfortunately the ATF library is a REALLY difficult library to get your head around. I spent 3-4 days with it and I'm still not exactly certain how to interface WPF with it (a GUI framework).


    I think the level editor is a effort for them to show you how you would implement something like a level editor. Or to use as a starting point for your own custom level editor.


    As for being dependant on Windows. They did a 1-2 hour talk on ATF and said that there's nothing in .NET they use that's too tied to windows that they couldn't switch to Mono and make it multiplat. They just havent bothered. I'm fully behind that decision too. Once I stopped focusing on making my gui application multiplatform I got 10X the work done and the quality of my applications went up significantly. Multi-platform native gui's are just huge messes and are terrible to maintain. If I were to go that route again I'd use something that's done in a hardware context so I don't have to worry about generalizing my design across 3 OS's or worse.


    Also if they did port ATF to multiplat then WPF would be out. WPF is absolutely amazing for making game development tools. One of the best things Microsoft has ever done.


    EDIT : Obviously in the case of something like Unity where they are selling the tool to customers multiplat is a valid concern but for a internal tool at a company it's a massive expensive liability. Whenever I use unity I can feel the pain of the GUI programmers there who had to use GTK#.

  • MapCore Job Census

    Quote from Nysuatro

    Congratz Alex!!! We will celebrate with a beer one day!


    definitely! Sorry I missed the siggraph meetup, we were at our busiest time at that point and I was regularly working until midnight+

  • MapCore Job Census

    Well my 6 month contract @ my work is coming to an end (well it's actually at about 4.5 months right now) but they said I was doing really really well and offered me a permanent position at UFG


    Needless to say I took it. Working at UFG has been probably the best job I've ever had.

  • 1080p discussion


    They are certainly becoming more programmable but nowhere near the freedom of the CPU. A couple reasons for this, one is while it's fast to get stuff onto the GPU memory it's prohibitively slow to go the other way. The other is because GPU's are massively parallel doing things like if statements are huge performance drops. Really high performance shaders avoid branching so a warp (a group of processors) can all execute together.

  • 1080p discussion

    They should certainly help if they eliminate having to transfer graphics data from system memory to GPU memory. If we can just give the GPU a pointer and say something like "start here" then that eliminates that bottleneck. Memory speed will continue to be a bottleneck (which is one of the reasons why a lot of developers were happy about the faster ram in the PS4).


    The big advantage to doing that is doing stuff on the CPU should be a lot less of a penalty and you have a lot more freedom on the CPU.

  • 1080p discussion

    Quote from Marcem

    Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't OpenGL 4.5 designed to fix the issues of it being a state machine? From a non-dev's perspective, wouldn't that make multi-plat development way easier, especially when DX12 seems to be doing the same stuff to bring it into line with XBOne DX 11/12? Last generation the PS3, 360, and PC couldn't be any more different. Now all three are x86-64, two use essentially the same rendering API if the Windows PC domination continues, and the PS4 API seems to be familiar territory from what I can glean. Seems to me that we won't be seeing so much quality difference between ports and exclusives.


    In regards to openGL 4.5. I'll have to get back to you after I've actually written some openGL4.5 stuff. In theory it does seem to solve a lot of those issues though and looks like a step in the right direction.


    Even better, Khronos is writing a NEW graphics api that won't have to deal with any backwards compatibility issues.


    It's true the architectures these days are more similar but the consoles still do put emphasis on taking advantage of parallel programming moreso than a computer. This is due to the low per-core clock speed. In most cases with a computer you have these really fast cores so they can push through more easily.


    I actually spent a good deal of my sunday discussing this with other graphics engineers. One point that was made was while being able to prep all your rendering data in a multithreaded environment is nice, submission is essentially a possible bottleneck. Which leads to doing more work on the GPU but sometimes that's not feasible..... Essentially I've now given myself a TON of research test cases I have to try now.

  • 1080p discussion

    Well yeah, targetting one platform will certainly yield better results. Basically if you generalize across a large number of platforms then the performance drops.


    So if you target platforms X, Y and Z and platform Z has some sort of super render feature. It can be hard to take advantage of platform Z's super feature because you don't have an equivalent for X and Y. So usually what ends up happening is the feature isn't used.


    Naughty Dog would be an extreme case of this because of the PS3's architecture. I'm pretty confident if it was a mutliplat game it wouldn't look as good. If you look into some of the stories about the difficulty of porting it to PS4 that will also give some insight. They are lucky enough to have legendary graphics programmer Corrine Yu handling the port though, even she said it was tough.


    As for the opengl thing. Basically opengl doesn't work well with multicore rendering because it's a global state machine. If you did a basic multi-plat implementation where one uses opengl it can be a little tough. It certainly can be done but in the world of deadlines there just might not be the time to do it.

  • 1080p discussion

    Ah the thing about modern pc's is they also have crazy powerful GPU's. I'll have to check but I think even when the consoles came out the power of the high end GPU's was already better. I could be wrong about that though. I have to admit that's more based off of a general instinct than evidence.


    As for the processor side. The processing power of a intel CPU per core I would be willing to say is far better than even the a core of a ps4/xbone when it came out. The AMD setup (can't remember the name) was more lauded for it's low power consumption and many cores than raw power.


    I probably wrote my previous argument badly. I'm sure I could make it more clear. I need to dedicate more time to the point I'm trying to get across.

  • 1080p discussion

    The issue with the new modern consoles is the following


    core count != performance increase


    edit: you have to remember while we have 8 cores they run at a shitty clock speed


    It's fucking hard to scale game performance when you have to do everything asynchronously. Essentially the entire game is as slow as the slowest task you dispatch to another core. It would help immensely if one of the cores clocked at a much higher rate but even then that's merely a bandaid.


    edit 2 : It is possible to start to overcome this but you have to re-work your entire pipeline. It's not simple, it will happen eventually but it takes a lot of work. Especially considering that a lot of companies use engines and engines typically are generalized. Meaning they can't take advantage of any multicore rendering optimizations.


    Include the fact that openGL is still a giant global state machine which means if part of your game targets it then multicore rendering is super hard to do. Borderline impossible.


    My takeaway from this is the next single console focused game will be amazing. Even a game that only considers the xbone and ps4 will be way better than something that has to deal with OGL on the pc end. If naughty dog gets to start again with a single console focused rendering engine it's gonna be crazy.


    essentially old graphics api's on the pc are holding console games back.

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!


    holy crap that is gorgeous. Something about how you composed that map is just so awesome.

  • 1080p discussion

    The question seems to be about 1080p vs 60fps games but the poll says gameplay vs graphics.


    This poll doesnt work because resolution and framerate are not directly related. If you are CPU bound because of say heavy AI calculations then you could have the exact same framerate at 720p and 1080p.

  • Do you enjoy your job in the games industry?


    Feel good story of the year

  • Kickstarter, how and what to do?

    Actually one thing I've always wondered about those physical rewards. Say you pay 50$ and get a tshirt. I bet the amortized cost of getting the tshirt to every backer is around 30$ so you're already blowing 60% of your budget on these tiers just getting the items out to the backers.


    Seems quite counter-productive.

  • Kickstarter, how and what to do?

    Does this studio involve mr.remar?


    edit : dont put the bank account in the US. they have some crazy tax laws other countries dont that relate to charging tax on money made by people even if they aren't currently living there. It might not apply to you but to be safe choose any other country.

  • What's going on with your life?

    Quote from SpronyvanJohnson

    Yesterday was fucking scary. The baby got her first two shots and she didn't respond well to them. Eventually she went out cold and we had to rush to the doctor. Luckily, she came out of it a couple of hours later and everything is fine now. But that nearly gave me a heart attack.


    holy shit that's scary. I'm pretty sure I would freak out pretty hard.