[Gamasutra] TGS: Developer Conversations

K

kaching

"GAF's biggest wanker"
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20041022/sheffield_01.shtml

You need to open an account with Gamasutra to access this I believe, but its free.

Good set of interviews - 2 from Konami, 2 from Koei (one working on DW PSP and one working on DW DS), one from Yuji Naka and one from Fumito Ueda.

Not sure how much mods will let anyone copy and paste from this site, but its an absolute field day for DS fans :)
 
TT: There were many problems. For instance, you can't use the exact same models. With the specs, it should work the same as it does in the PS2, but on this hardware it doesn't. So we had various problems like this. We also had problems with the library that Sony gave us. There are still quite a few bugs, and they haven't fixed them yet.

[...]

GS: How easy is it to port a game straight from the PS2 to the PSP?

TT: Of course, ports are easier than making brand new games, but that's not to say that it's easy. The graphics make it tough. The PSP can't keep the framerate high enough. We like to keep the framerate at 60 fps for the PS2, but you can't do the same with PSP. It's very difficult to get it that fast with the lower polygon models. So, in order to get it (Sengoku Musou) fast enough, we lowered the polygon count of the models, and broke up the stage maps.
Click to expand...

Interesting.

First of all they saw 32 MB of RAM on the specs and then realized that the actual RAM available to games is lower (models do not fit): they would have had to do much more swapping from the disc which would have lowered frame-rate and decreased battery-life.

That is what I get from "With the specs, it should work the same as it does in the PS2, but on this hardware it doesn't".

It is also true that as far as un-textured fill-rate the PSP is not as fast as the PlayStation 2 and a lot of cool looking PlayStation 2 games have been designed with this in mind: the GS is fast drawing untextured polygons, but slower at drawing textured ones. So, developers on PlayStation 2 want to play with tons of alpha-blending and multi-layer effects.

Kinda like the problems Konami encountered porting MGS 2 to Xbox in terms of frame-rate.
 
Interesting Koei comments on PSP/DS...


Dynasty Warriors PSP
-Developed by Software Department 4 (Formely Omega Force)
-Finshed in 6 months
-Based off DW4 PS2
-PSP libraries have some bug issues still unresolved
-PSP not as powerful as PS2 (lower quality models & broken up stages mentioned for DW)

Dynasty Warriors DS
-Developed by Software Department 2
-All new game
-Scheduled for Q2 2005
-Happy with DS libraries, enviroment further along than PSP
-Simpler looking/playing than PS2/PSP versions
-Soft Dept 2 handling all DS games
-DS capabilities are crude for 3D, relying more on 2D for DS games


...I wonder if Koei's considering maybe porting Winback to DS & PSP?
 
Panajev2001a said:
Kinda like the problems Konami encountered porting MGS 2 to Xbox in terms of frame-rate.
Click to expand...
I think that had a lot to do with KCES handling the PC/Xbox ports though... here it's the same exact team on PS2 & PSP. And they didn't really have any problems when porting DW to Xbox either.
 
Interesting comments, and great interviews overall. I really liked the interview with Ueda. However, KOEI people are not exactly the ones I want to listen to when they talk about graphics and programming. DW games are some of the ugliest I've ever seen on the PS2, and the PSP version obviously looks even worse...
 
Panajev2001a said:
First of all they saw 32 MB of RAM on the specs and then realized that the actual RAM available to games is lower (models do not fit): they would have had to do much more swapping from the disc which would have lowered frame-rate and decreased battery-life.
Click to expand...
Along these lines, but I would have imagined it's more like: not encouraged to stream -> use more RAM for non-gfx game data -> less RAM available for models/textures.
 
Give them a little credit, Marconelly. I'm sure they're not achieving the pinnacle of all that's possible on the PSP, but they have been working with it just about as long as anyone else has at this point.
 
-PSP not as powerful as PS2 (lower quality models, lower framerates, broken up stages mentioned)
Click to expand...

I think there are two main reasons:

1) RAM: on PlayStation 2 you have about 31 MB of RAM availabe to the application (the OS steals the rest). On PSP you likely have less than 30 MB for the application (the OS steals more RAM I think). More streaming would mean amongst the other things lower frame-rate.

2.) PlayStation 2's GS is a untextured fill-rate monsters and games are designed around it. PSP from what we have been hearing is more balanced: single cycle bi-linear filtering which means that textured and untextured fill-rate are the same.

Even scaling because of the lower resolution the PSP screen has, 664 MPixels/s of untextured fill-rate are less than what the GS has available.

If you divide 664 MPixels/s by 480x272 you get a peak overdraw of 84.76x at 60 fps (PSP). If you divide 2.4 GPixels/s by 640x448 you get a peak overdraw of 130.208x (PlayStation 2).
 
Give them a little credit, Marconelly. I'm sure they're not achieving the pinnacle of all that's possible on the PSP, but they have been working with it just about as long as anyone else has at this point.
Click to expand...
Their comments are certainly telling (not the same amount of memory on PS2 vs PSP, less polygon drawing power) but I just don't think they are very good in graphics side of the things, that's all. Hell, even on Xbox, their DW games look terrible.
 
Dynasty Warriors PSP
-Developed by Software Department 4 (Formely Omega Force)
-Finshed in 6 months
-Based off DW4 PS2
-PSP libraries have some bug issues still unresolved
-PSP not as powerful as PS2 (lower quality models, lower framerates, broken up stages mentioned)
-Probably does not look all crappy

Dynasty Warriors DS
-Developed by Software Department 2
-All new game
-Scheduled for Q2 2005
-Happy with DS libraries, enviroment further along than PSP
-Simpler looking/playing than PS2/PSP versions
-Soft Dept 2 handling all DS games
-DS capabilities are crude for 3D, relying more on 2D for DS games
-Most likely looks all crappy

Seriously, I hope they don't take the 3D route for the DS version, or else it'll be Ridge Racer all over again.
 
Marconelly said:
Their comments are certainly telling (not the same amount of memory on PS2 vs PSP, less polygon drawing power) but I just don't think they are very good in graphics side of the things, that's all. Hell, even on Xbox, their DW games look terrible.
Click to expand...
To be fair to Koei, DW2 and Kessen were among the best looking early PS2 games though.


Sho Nuff said:
Seriously, I hope they don't take the 3D route for the DS version, or else it'll be Ridge Racer all over again.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I'm getting the impression that DWDS will probably be 2D from the interview (maybe 2D with 3D models like Goemon DS). Earlier interviews implied a more strategy focused game too, which would be a nice switch and really emphasis the difference between DS & PSP versions.
 
-PSP not as powerful as PS2 (lower quality models, lower framerates, broken up stages mentioned)
Click to expand...
They actually said that they wanted to achieve 60FPS on the PSP and because of that had to scale down stuff like you mentioned. So in theory, if I understood what they said, DW should run at 60 on PSP.

To be fair to Koei, DW2 and Kessen were among the best looking early PS2 games though.
Click to expand...
Were they? I never really saw those, but I was shocked at how bad DW4 looked when I saw it.
 
Marconelly said:
They actually said that they wanted to achieve 60FPS on the PSP and because of that had to scale down stuff like you mentioned. So in theory, if I understood what they said, DW should run at 60 on PSP.
Click to expand...
Actually they said 60fps was hard to achieve even with the lowered models.

"It's very difficult to get it that fast with the lower polygon models. So, in order to get it (Sengoku Musou) fast enough, we lowered the polygon count of the models, and broke up the stage maps."

...sounds like they lower polycounts even more and broke up stage to get the framerate where they wanted. The original lower poly models were likely due to RAM constraints. But yes, it does sound like they got it to 60 fps, I'll edit. :)


Marconelly said:
Were they? I never really saw those, but I was shocked at how bad DW4 looked when I saw it.
Click to expand...
Yep, DW2 was amazing when it first released with it's huge amount of characters fighting on screen. So was Kessen.... the problem is that the games haven't really progressed too much visually since 2001. Koei seems more interesed in churning out a DW sequel and various expansion packs annually than going back and revitalizing the formula.
 
GS: What is the team's goal with the games? Is it an interesting narrative style, trying to scare, or just make people feel something?

AY: The market for videogames is still expanding, such as the DS hardware, but Silent Hill is not really targeted at kids. That way, we can put in a difficult story, more of a human drama. The main thing we want to do is to entertain - for adults specifically.
Click to expand...

Uhh, you put Silent Hill on GBA. GBA is a younger audience than DS. I hate how developers pigeonhole consoles BEFORE they go on sale. Anyway, I think he meant SH is not meant for handhelds.
 
Panajev2001a said:
I think there are two main reasons:

1) RAM: on PlayStation 2 you have about 31 MB of RAM availabe to the application (the OS steals the rest). On PSP you likely have less than 30 MB for the application (the OS steals more RAM I think). More streaming would mean amongst the other things lower frame-rate.

2.) PlayStation 2's GS is a untextured fill-rate monsters and games are designed around it. PSP from what we have been hearing is more balanced: single cycle bi-linear filtering which means that textured and untextured fill-rate are the same.

Even scaling because of the lower resolution the PSP screen has, 664 MPixels/s of untextured fill-rate are less than what the GS has available.

If you divide 664 MPixels/s by 480x272 you get a peak overdraw of 84.76x at 60 fps (PSP). If you divide 2.4 GPixels/s by 640x448 you get a peak overdraw of 130.208x (PlayStation 2).
Click to expand...


*cues Jarrod* :P.
 
It will be interesting to see how framerate is prioritized in general on PSP. A lot of console titles have unstable framerates. Will PSP developers aim for a stable 30 fps or even 60 fps? Will they be willing to make the necessary sacrifices to in order to achieve a stable framerate?
 
PSP not as powerful as PS2 is not really a surprise,specs are clear,PSP has half the polygonal raw power of the PS2 and as Panajev said,even considering the lower resolution the PSP GPU has to handle,the fill rate is inferior.So there's no wonder that Koei had to use scaled back polygon models.But this does not prevent the games to be very good looking.
Rather than polygonal detail I'm more concerned about the difficulty to have high frame rates,this is something that I've noticed in both Ridge Racer and Need For Speed.Sense of speed is absent and it would be horrible if the games came out in that condition.
 
From the videos I've seen it seems slower than GT3 played with last class cars ;)
And Need For Speed is even worse.
It's not that the game has slowdowns,it' always terribly slow.
 
From the video I've seen is seems slower than GT3 played with last class cars ;)
Click to expand...
I don't know, that's not what I saw. If you read some impressions from people who played it at TGS, it's pretty telling at how well it was done. Pretty much everyone agreed that it looked better than RRV on PS2, except that it didn't have any cars on the track yet.
 
Elios83 said:
PSP not as powerful as PS2 is not really a surprise,specs are clear,PSP has half the polygonal raw power of the PS2 and as Panajev said,even considering the lower resolution the PSP GPU has to handle,the fill rate is inferior.
Click to expand...
GameCube has lower specs in those areas as well but the system still offers overall better performance. PSP is higher clocked and renders smaller frames. You even have F5 telling Matt that they could do better looking versions of their Cube games for PSP if they wanted to (whatever that means). But potential is one thing, the other is what you do with it.

I think because of poor battery life, increased focus on framerate, smaller budgets etc. most PSP games are going to look visibly worse than their console counterparts. It would also appear that there are issues with dev environment which could also explain why most PSP games look the way they do.
 
Elios83 said:
PSP not as powerful as PS2 is not really a surprise,specs are clear,PSP has half the polygonal raw power of the PS2 and as Panajev said,even considering the lower resolution the PSP GPU has to handle,the fill rate is inferior.So there's no wonder that Koei had to use scaled back polygon models.But this does not prevent the games to be very good looking.
Rather than polygonal detail I'm more concerned about the difficulty to have high frame rates,this is something that I've noticed in both Ridge Racer and Need For Speed.Sense of speed is absent and it would be horrible if the games came out in that condition.
Click to expand...

Half-the polygonal power, but ask yourself how much VU1 pushes (about 18 MVertices/s with 4 parallel lights and textures). In that case the PSP GPU is actually faster yet less flexible.

The EE pushes ~33-35 MVertices/s with 4 parallel lights and full perspective projection and texture coordinates calculation.

VU1 peaks at about 18 MVertices/s in those conditions.

PSP's GPU Hardwired T&L unit is rated at ~33 MVertices/s and I am not mistaken that includes a number of parallel lights (4 parallel lights IIRC, not very computationally expensive to handle in Hardware). That is about the the performance of the T&L unit inside GCN's Flipper.
 
cybamerc said:
GameCube has lower specs in those areas as well but the system still offers overall better performance. PSP is higher clocked and renders smaller frames. You even have F5 telling Matt that they could do better looking versions of their Cube games for PSP if they wanted to (whatever that means). But potential is one thing, the other is what you do with it.
Click to expand...

Give me that quote, because it sounds weird: I am not aware that the PSP has the same per-pixel shading capabilities as the GCN has even though with the smaller resolution they might do it with multiple rendering passes (you have the same texturing fill-rate as the GCN, but you are rendering at 480x272 instead of 640x448 or 640x480).
 
Marconelly said:
I don't know, that's not what I saw. If you read some impressions from people who played it at TGS, it's pretty telling at how well it was done. Pretty much everyone agreed that it looked better than RRV on PS2, except that it didn't have any cars on the track yet.
Click to expand...

I haven't played the game at the TGS and I don't know how it looks directly on the PSP's screen but judging from the videos I've seen I can tell that it has a better texturing than RRV,a few new lighting effects,a lot of details missing in the tracks compared to RRV,sense of speed is really low or absent,car detail and how many cars will be in a race is still a mistery.
 
IGNcube mailbag 19 October:
"At least one high profile GameCube developer I recently spoke with said that it could get a better looking version of its GCN title running on PSP, if it wanted to, which is pretty amazing."

IGNcube mailbag 20 October:
"Let me just restate this because I saw some skeptics on the message boards too: a developer did in fact tell me that it could make a better looking version of its GameCube title on PSP, if it wanted to. This is true. I'm not vouching for the accuracy of the statement. But the claim does come from a highly capable software house, if there ever was one."


The PSP's featureset may not match the GC's entirely but I'm sure there are workarounds.
 
Yeah, but can they create a game with teh same resolution with PSP hardware and still have it looking like better than the GC counterpart. I think that was silly statement to make to be honest.
 
Panajev2001a said:
Half-the polygonal power, but ask yourself how much VU1 pushes (about 18 MVertices/s with 4 parallel lights and textures). In that case the PSP GPU is actually faster yet less flexible.

The EE pushes ~33-35 MVertices/s with 4 parallel lights and full perspective projection and texture coordinates calculation.

VU1 peaks at about 18 MVertices/s in those conditions.

PSP's GPU Hardwired T&L unit is rated at ~33 MVertices/s and I am not mistaken that includes a number of parallel lights (4 parallel lights IIRC, not very computationally expensive to handle in Hardware). That is about the the performance of the T&L unit inside GCN's Flipper.
Click to expand...
Aren't you mixing real world PS2 performance with PSP spec sheet figures though? I thought SCEI rated PS2 at ~66 MVertices/s overall?
 
Mashing said:
Yeah, but can they create a game with teh same resolution with PSP hardware and still have it looking like better than the GC counterpart. I think that was silly statement to make to be honest.
Click to expand...
Everything's relative of course. It'll be interesting to see what their PSP title looks like. I think they will probably focus a little more on framerate.
 
cybamerc said:
IGNcube mailbag 19 October:
"At least one high profile GameCube developer I recently spoke with said that it could get a better looking version of its GCN title running on PSP, if it wanted to, which is pretty amazing."

IGNcube mailbag 20 October:
"Let me just restate this because I saw some skeptics on the message boards too: a developer did in fact tell me that it could make a better looking version of its GameCube title on PSP, if it wanted to. This is true. I'm not vouching for the accuracy of the statement. But the claim does come from a highly capable software house, if there ever was one."


The PSP's featureset may not match the GC's entirely but I'm sure there are workarounds.
Click to expand...

Depends on which title. :P I am sure PSP can make a better cubivore. ;)
 
My guess is Thornado. I know Matt says it's not happening but Julian has in the past insisted that it would be finished. With PSP and GC being comparable in performance and F5 already having done a lot of work on it it just makes sense. Also it's cheaper than making a new game which is perfect for a portable. And they can probably finish it before the next-gen consoles come out.
 
jarrod said:
Aren't you mixing real world PS2 performance with PSP spec sheet figures though? I thought SCEI rated PS2 at ~66 MVertices/s overall?
Click to expand...

That is the figure counting both VUs in a bandwidth-limited scenario (GIF-to-GS) doing very simple Vertex transformations without perspective projection, lighting or texturing. the loop they used for this calculations takes 5 cycles on VU1 and 7 cycles on VU0.

The computational peak of the EE is about 102.85 MVertices/s.

Peak performance of the EE with T&L (4 paralell lights are included in the calculation) and Textures is around 33-35 MVertices/s: normally VU1 is used to carry the T&L load hence why I said ~18 MVertices/s.
 
cyba:
Yeah, Thornado would make sense. Hopefully F5 can find a willing publisher this time around, I'm amazed Nintendo never offered to pick it up themselves.

Pana:
Okay... but what is that 33M Vert/sec reflective of in PSP then? Is it similarly peak performance, limited screnario or reflective of real world applictation results? Is it fair to say PSP is roughly half as powerful as PS2 when it comes to 3D goemetry potential?
 
There's a chance he's a gimmick account made by this other guy there. I questioned that after he made his first post a while back.
Then again, even further back someone posted about seeing Metroid Prime 2 being worked on YEARS AGO and correctly identified the power-ups, multiplayer and even the release date. But then again, that could also be dumb luck.
 
Project Midway said:
Why? Winback (PS2) sucked. IMO.
Click to expand...
Well, it'd be a relatively easy port... and there's already a base version for each machine (N64 for DS and PS2 for PSP) to work from.
 
I haven't played the game at the TGS and I don't know how it looks directly on the PSP's screen but judging from the videos I've seen I can tell that it has a better texturing than RRV,a few new lighting effects,a lot of details missing in the tracks compared to RRV,sense of speed is really low or absent
Click to expand...
I seriously don't know what video you were looking at, but look closer or find some other videos and actually compare them with RRV. There were people on this board, and others, who compared RRV closely to what they saw on PSP, and nothing is missing (except obviously for cars) and what is there actually looks better (lighting, no jaggies)
 
My anonymous source told me that psp can destroy cities and you better believe it because this source is a developer and they have made some games before!
 
jarrod said:
Pana:
Okay... but what is that 33M Vert/sec reflective of in PSP then? Is it similarly peak performance, limited screnario or reflective of real world applictation results? Is it fair to say PSP is roughly half as powerful as PS2 when it comes to 3D goemetry potential?
Click to expand...

The PSP GPU's T&L is hardwired: going by the clock-speed and the quoted number...

166 MHz, 33.2 MVertices/s gives you 5 cycles per Vertex which is about the same number of cycles Flipper takes for each Vertex.

That figure should include basic transform with perspective projection and lighting (4 parallel lights processed by the Lighting unit).

Calculation of ST coordinates (the set-up the T&L units does) consist of only a simple MUL: you already got Q ( which is 1/w ) for perspective projection and you only really need to take the ST coordinates (stored ina register) and multiply them by Q.

In games people want multiple textures, point-lights, etc... high-resolution textures, multiple rendering-passes to do certain effects, you have to help the GPU in doing clipping (the GPU onlu does front-plane clipping, the other plane are not really taken care of... very brute-force) and the T&L unit will not always run full-speed (sometimes, making it work with the VFPU will waste a bit of time moving data around... time in which you lose efficiency).

You have quite a lot of processing performance in the GPU, but you have lost the flexibility you had in VU1 when doing T&L (bye-bye branching in T&L code, bye-bye Vertex creation and deletion in the T&L code, etc...) on the GPU (you have the VFPU on the CPU side to help to do custom T&L... just like you do on the GCN with Gekko and Flipper).

Look at the Elan T&L chip: only 100 MHz and 10 MTransistors and it pushes (it sustains) 10 MVertices/s with 6 point-lights (very computationally expensive) plus doing set-up work for DOT3 calculations, etc...
 
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