Creative director Dan Greenawalt on the next-gen, Kinect and why fans should trust Turn 10.
Following a thorough run through of what's new and great about this October's Forza Motorsport 4, Turn 10 creative director Dan Greenawalt took a short breather then rattled through as many questions as possible in the time allotted by Microsoft's time keeping overlord. Read on for talk of the benefits of single-platform development, why we don't yet need next generation systems and why fans should trust Turn 10 not to dumb down the franchise for Kinect.
Q: With Auto Vista, is there some semblance of preparing for the next generation. Obviously those models, you can't throw them around the track as they are too detailed. Now you have the models will they be useful in the future?
Dan Greenawalt: Well, you know, I think what's most useful is the approach to lighting. Yes, there are always things for the next generation, what with the models how many polies can you model and what have you. But the polies have actually become somewhat irrelevant. What we get from the polies in Auto Vista was all of the 'opening', there's not actually a lot more polies in the outset than you have right here in the driving. The difference is, you can open up the doors and the windows and get inside. What really makes Auto Vista unique, actually, is all the interaction and moving around the cars, and learning about the cars. But I think what we learnt most, about any engine we're going to build, is about this new lighting. The IBL, and also the new shaders for carbon fibre and things like that those are very cutting edge shaders. And they don't have to be expensive. So actually working on the box, I've had people ask "How can you make it look so good running on the same box?" It all comes down to being clever with how you optimise, but also clever with how you set up your shaders in general how you approach the problem. Actually, the longer you get into a piece of hardware, the more you learn about how to trick the hardware into doing things right. And when you actually get new hardware I used to work on PC you very rarely optimise your code. So you end up putting in new features, and never making them really sharp. You just throw them in and think "Hey, if it doesn't work, put in a new graphics card and it'll work." But there's actually a nice aspect to staying on the same console, because you get really clever with your math, and can deliver things that Hollywood has to deliver in overnight servers.
Q: Does 360 have anything more to give?
DG: Absolutely. It always does. It's like when you're moving from one apartment to another, and you pack up the van, and you unpack the van, and then you re-pack it, and magically you have an extra metre of space. Then you'll unpack it, and you'll repack it, and you'll find and extra 10 centimetres. You unpack it and then you repack it and then you get another 5 centimetres. So you do reach a limit, but you always find more because you keep optimising, and optimising and optimising. But it's the approach. So the IBL is not necessarily more expensive or less expensive. It's just how you approach the problem.
I think people think of it as the power that gets you the features, but it's not the power - it's the creativity and the cleverness of the problem-solving. You can throw power at a problem, or you can throw intelligence at the problem. And I actually find the intelligence gets you more than the power. The power gets you the initial "Wow! This generation is crazy!" but what gets the games to look really amazing is when people finally tame that power and get really clever. We also share techniques, so we work with the guys from Epic, from 343, we work with the guys from Bungie and we trade secrets. So it means you've got multiple development communities all with really smart, clever people saying "Hey, have you ever tried to use your shaders in this way?" because we're all working on the same platform. So you know what's going to happen? All of our techniques are going to be shared with everybody else, and all the games in the next few years are going look better after this, but they're also going to keep learning things that will make us better. So yes, we're reaching the limits where's there's less we can optimise, but there's always smart people doing smart things.
Q: You mentioned power isn't really a problem with the Xbox. But in the next couple of years, we'll see a new Xbox. If power is not the option, what does the next generation of consoles need?
I don't even know where to start. I mean, honestly, we're launching Forza 4, and the things we're doing in this game are really things that have not been delivered in any other game. So when you look at changes between Forza 3 and Forza 4 on the same console, you can imagine that the sky's the limit. But honestly, I think the sky's the limit on the same console, because there's always little things to be done. We've got a very strong vision, and we have very clever people. I'm not saying we're the most clever people in the world, but I think we do have a track record at trying to excite our customers and bring innovation into the racing genre.
