"Everybody has the exact same console, the exact same booster box, the exact same screen on their eyeballs," Griesemer said. "So a lot of the messiness and lack of optimization that you have to have on the PC so it will run on everything? We just can get that right here. Also, Unreal Engine is awesome." The Highwire team has been in contact with Epic Seattle on a special VR rendering mode that helps with optimization, and it has Alex Dracott, who worked on Infamous: First Light, Second Son and PlanetSide 2, "hand writing and shaders and hand-keying the lights." It's not enough to make sure the team has a beautiful game. It has to make sure the game runs at a constant 90 frames per second in both eyes.
I caught up with Nick Whiting from Epic Seattle, who talked a bit about Golem.
"With VR development still so new for everyone in the industry, we've taken a very hands-on approach with teams using Unreal Engine 4," Whiting said. "With Highwire, they were one of the first PSVR projects on UE4 that we were able to take this approach with, thanks to them being located very close to our Epic Seattle offices. We'd send them early builds and improvements for PSVR as soon as we'd finish them, and they'd try them out in their project, and let us know how they worked. From there, we'd iterate back-and-forth a little bit, and in the end, both our product and theirs were mutually improved."
