HS questions
Thought it worth pointing out that under the comments for Atomic Cache Unit, I’ve answered a few questions that various readers have posed about Heavenly Sword.
Comments don’t appear on the front page, so might be missed if thats what your here to learn about.
Maybe I should do some summary posts? With various comments about HS and Playstation 3 that i’ve made over the years…
Thursday, May 24th, 2007 @ 11:02 am 
Heavenly Sword, Playstation 3
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May 24th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
I think thats an excellent idea. I’ve been summarizing your Q & A and placing them on various forums to get the good info out.
May 24th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Great idea Deano. If you have time that is!
AI in HS write up would be great, plus all your ps3 stuff. Very interesting.
May 24th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
hey, i want to be a game programmer. Im graduating outta high school this year and going to Georgia Tech–MIT of the south i guess..lol
should i stick with CS, or go with Electrical Engineering or something different?
Thanks
May 24th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
Erm whatever you do, try and play around with games stuff, mods, xna, linux ps3 or whatever.
Most graduates we’ve employed have been CS and usually with a demo.
HTH
Deano
May 25th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Deano,
I’m a distributed system developer who greatly appreciates parallel architectures and HPC.
I would love to try some things on the PS3 and CBE. Yet, it seems Sony is keeping all the development tools.
When you are an individual who can’t afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to Sony for access to their tools, how do you get to learn?
I would love to crank up some networking code on that machine…
May 26th, 2007 at 12:29 am
The Cell SDK is available for PS3 Linux (I think it comes as standard with the YDL distro). That includes all CBE functionality including SPUs so should give you access to everything you need.
HTH
Deano
May 26th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Hi,
Thanks for all your candid insight into Heavenly Sword and the PS3 development behind it. A summary would great. I’m looking forward to the PSN demo.
May 26th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Hi Deona,
Thanks again for talking to everyone wish there were more developers like you around…
My question is do you think the CELL processor has been underestimated by alot of the press and developer’s that haven’t spent time with it, as more developers spend more time with it will it help PS3 stand out as a platform against it’s competitors?
Also is there anything that has surprised you about the RSX, some have said it’s quite a known quantity but it’s good at texture work?
How has the EDGE software been taken by developers, will it make 3rd party’s lifes alot easyer?
Any round figure of when the demo could be coming? (I know you probably can’t answer that
Good luck in there future with everything that Ninja theory does, you seem like a great group of guys and gals and that’s showing in your work as a studio and i’m one of many who are really looking forward to heavenly sword.
Cheers
May 28th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
I found Heavenly sword really beautiful both from technical and artistic point of view.
HS can be considerated a first gen of software, what do you think about the 2nd/3rd generation of software when the utilization of the SPU will be predominant.
Thanks.
May 29th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Just a quick question bet your back at the office now, in a recent comment you said your working towards beta stage does that meen the heroes footage and what was shown at sony’s gamers day was more alpha, is the game looking even better now that all the graphical touches are being added on, I dread to think how beautiful this game is going to look by the time it’s released, really good job guys them spu’s must be singing over there now and it gives me alot of hope for the other 1st party games…
June 3rd, 2007 at 6:53 pm
Deano! Do a summary post please! I want all the juicy details about the Cell from a guy who actually worked on it, not some 360 fanboy who thinks he’s a developer…
As for HS, I’m sorry if this was already asked but are you considereing some sort of online mode?? If so, will the US version of the game deny me access to European servers? I certainly hope not cause I intend to import it from the US.
Can’t wait for this game!
June 4th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Deano,
I have a pet peeve to submit…
Games that do text or button overlays have a nasty tendency to do so with poor resolution graphics.
Please make sure this doesn’t happen with Heavenly Sword.
Do you know what I’m talking about?
You have this gorgeous game and suddently, because a contextual action must be triggered, an ugly (low-res, jagged, smearing) X or O button gets overlayed on top of the frame…
It was the case in God of War and many other games. I think it’s too bad.
June 4th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
First and foremost, the blog is super and all.
Now then… perhaps it was already mentioned and I don’t know where else to put it so I will just fire away.
Why do you think that it is OK for a melée combat game like Heavenly Sword to run with 30 frames per second when every other decent game in that category (Devil May Cry, Onimusha, Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, God of War, Legacy of Kain: Defiance) runs with 60? Who the… heck cares if you motion capture your facial animations that I will skip the second time I play the game anyway, when the game itself doesn’t run as smooth as 6 year old equivalents on last generation hardware?
That’s a make or brake feature for me, so it’s the single reason I won’t buy the game.
June 5th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
I think the game runs at 60. Lair will run on 30.
But this is nothing you’ll notice. Movies run on 24/25/29 FPS (depending on region) and you don’t notice anything there, do you??
30 is still OK and it’s nothing to whine about. You’re just being melodramatic. “Single reason” pffftt…
To the guy above him, God of War’s CSS were great! What are you talking about, “Low-res graphics”?? Go play the game again.
June 5th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Deano other ninja theory dev’s are saying that the team is currently working on VRAM optimisation, what do you think of VRAM? How much more is there to learn on it? How much of a positive impact will it have?
June 5th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
I hate when what was once a place of knowledge and fan appreciation becomes a boxing ring for people with nothing good to say.
June 5th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Our overlays seem quite good, I raised a similar point a little while ago and it looks quite nice now imho
30 fps for us, why? Cos that’s what was decided a long long time ago. So we’ve been trying to fit as much pretties and AI in that frame rate.
60fps mean half the time to do stuff in.
Anyway your really concerned with input latencies not frames per second (which is how long from a button press before the result is seen, very very different from frame rate).
As for VRAM its not a case of learning the VRAM budgets have been set a long time, its simply that at the end of project the artists are less generating new content and have more time to go back over stuff. You’d be surprised how much can be saved once everything in and cameras are known etc.
June 5th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Deano, can you specualte when we’ll be playing that sweet demo???
June 6th, 2007 at 12:01 am
Deano can you tell us how old the build was that was running at Sony’s Gamers day? Was it the same build as the one on heroes? when was it put together?
Just so we can have an idea of how much more progress has been made?
thanks for clearing up my vram question by the way…
June 6th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Sorry can’t comment on dates, sure you understand.
Heroes build was quite old (least 6 months… probably more), the gamers day was the latest from a few weeks before the event. It was the snapshot of the demo at that point.
Lots of balancing and polish has gone on since. We had a play test the other day, where we invited some people (friend of friends kind of thing) to play and get some feedback.
June 6th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Ok, can you answer a yes or no question??
Will the demo be out this month?
lol
June 6th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Hey Deano, I was wondering if you all are going to be implementing motion blur in the game by the time of its release. It’s the one effect I’ve seen missing on the past few gameplay videos of HS that’ve been released. Also, how would you assess Sony’s developer tools and support from when you started on PS3 (2005) to where you are right now? And also, do you know when 3rd party developers are going to be receiving the EDGE tools that Phil Harrison announced at GDC?
June 6th, 2007 at 11:21 pm
Deano,
Thanks for being kewl and sharing with the community. Some of the technical stuff you guys have done is really exciting and it will be great to see the artistic results in a few months.
Cheers,
Kurse.
June 7th, 2007 at 10:54 am
Hi again Deano! About the frame rate issue:
I am a programmer myself and although not as experienced or knowledgeable as you are, I know that 60fps means half the time to do stuff in and I know what I am concerned about. I am concerned about the smoothness of the game and its animations.
“Cos that’s what was decided” was not the answer I was looking for. I was hoping more of an answer in the line of “we are not aiming for 60fps because…
- I can’t see the difference
- I think most people can’t see the difference
- I think that prettier surfaces and lighting in the game are more important than prettier animations
- I think that people think that prettier surfaces and lighting in the game are more important than prettier animations
”
Most of my (hardcore) video-game-playing friends can see the difference. Most of the developers making similar games (mentioned above) think that 60 fps is important. Here is a vocal one from Tecmo:
http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200704/N07.0406.1421.46109.htm
“When you’re only looking at screenshots, people like to compare us with Genji. But the fact of the matter is that you see that game actually running, we’re running at 60 frames versus their maybe 30 frames, and they even have slowdown and things like that, and I think that once you see the game in motion and play the game, you’ll see how much of a difference there is. The first Genji for PlayStation 2 was running at 60 frames. So you have to ask yourself why did they drop it?”
Why indeed?
June 7th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
Interesting question… I expect an equally interesting answer, Deano. Don’t let us PS3 fans down!
June 8th, 2007 at 1:02 am
Finally Nariko on my PS3 in HD
Ive just downloaded the HS PSN trailer and watched for the 10th time.
I must say I am really really hyped about this game.
I need to be honest, can I?
I really hope that the textures come out looking better, I know its early days yet but every thing looked “flat”.
Is there going to be any form of bump, displacement mapping ? (sorry i am used to doing renderings using 3d studio and Vray so my terms my not relate to game development)
I wont cite any examples but im really hoping that it gets done, I have faith in the Ninja’s
June 8th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Paschalis:
Its not we can’t tell the difference, simply our lead designer (Tameem) made the choice that isn’t important to our game. It’s not necessarily even my point of view… You and other developers are welcome to disagree but that’s what was decided at long time ago.
The consquence of that is that, it looks prettier and has more time for AI and Physics calculations (and no we don’t soak up all our physics time on “boob bounce”
). Also our animations look great, we have massive blending system to get it to look good. Thousands of anims, sometimes 20+ on Nariko at once. If it was as easy as 60fps anims = better then we would. Getting good animations is a lot more than FPS.
When its out or when you download the demo, play it and then judge. We have a combat engine and massive number of combos across the stances which I’d hope any hardcore combat gamer will find some fun in.
Only time will tell if Tameem choice was right or not?
June 8th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Flat…
We have bump map with parallax mapping in the engine. All the light calculations are per pixel including the SH lookup.
Textures or lighting, are still being optimised so…
Motion blur:
Nope sorry, we have a special motion blur but not general MB. Simply one of the things that never got off the wish list.
June 8th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Sounds Great!
Can’t wait to see the demo
A lot of pressure is on this game, I sound like a scratched record but It’s the reason I bought my PS3, when I saw it for the first time It’s as if you guys asked me what kind of game I wanted.
Cheers
June 10th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Hey Deano,
Did Sony buy Ninja Theory? I mean, is Ninja Theory a 3rd party company, indie or are you officially under Sony?
Sorry if it’s an ignorant question I just couldn’t find anything official.
June 11th, 2007 at 9:48 am
Ninja Theory is an independent company, with Sony publishing Heavenly Sword.
June 11th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Thanks for the quick answer!
At least now people will shut up with their “He works for Sony ofcourse he’d say that” BS.
June 11th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Hey Deano Killzone 2 is using Deferred rendering techniques, that’s very ambitious isn’t it surely it’s the CELL that is making it possible because RSX is quite a known quantity.
Were all very excited to hear this news and it’s a good step forward for PS3, what are your thoughts on this and is this something that can be also added for Playstation Edge?
Will Guerilla share this information with everyone?
RSX + CELL seems to be a mighty combination!
June 11th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
You can do deferred lighting on RSX why do you think its got anything to do with Cell?
I published an article over 3 years ago about it using a ATI 9700Pro…
The only thing you can’t do under Dx9 is MSAA cos of no access to the video memory directly but that just an API issue.
I’ve chatted to them a little and there doing some clever stuff don’t get me wrong but assuming that RSX can’t do it, is underselling RSX.
June 11th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
Thanks Deano you know more than me obviously…
So Deano i’ve heard about draw backs of the technique there using, but they seem to be overcoming these, i presumed this was from the performance of CELL clearing out the delays, why don’t all dev’;s use this technique if it equals better results?
Quote:
“We’ll show how we utilize PS3’s SPUs for fast rendering of a large set of primitives, parallel processing of geometry and computation of indirect lighting. We will also describe our optimizations of the lighting and our parallel split (cascaded) shadow map algorithm for faster and stable MSAA output.”
This has also started off talks about the RSX being alot better than it was given credit for would you agee with that, I think the closest people have said is a custom G7800?
They never did release official specs for it…
Or am I just totally on the wronge wave length with this one lol…
Thanks again…
June 11th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Deferred lighting has pro’s and its has cons. Some games use it already (GRAW2 does I believe and Shrek on the Xbox1 did, HS and Gears of War (Unreal3) both use a form of deferred shadowing). The big cons for full deferred lighting is transparency and thats it eats fill rate for breakfast…
RSX is pretty well known, what people seem to get confused with is how powerful these level of GPU are when you treat them right. Which almost nobody does on PC cos the API (Direct3D and OpenGL) keep you so far from the hardware that its hard to tune it well.
June 12th, 2007 at 12:09 am
Thanks Deano for the explanation hope it works out right for Guerilla i know they pushed the boundaries with PS2…
Deano is there alot more that you can get out of the cell in the future? obviously multi core processing is new to everyone, would you say Sony is right in saying that technically they are twice as powerful hardware wise as there nearest competitor? If the RSX is a known quantity why it be the CELL that really pushes the PS3 infront of its competitors?
June 14th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Deano, we’ve got a good discussion going at the PS3Forums right now regarding deferred rendering and MSAA in the upcoming Killzone for PS3. Nao has put in some input in the thread, and I think it wouldn’t hurt to have some from you as a user (gcfan2k5) there seems to have some misconceptions regarding RSX and exactly what it’s capable of. Here’s the link: http://www.ps3forums.com/showthread.php?t=77437&page=12
June 21st, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Deano, any new information regarding the bug-fixing stage and polishing phase of the game ?
Anything you fixed/added-as-a-last-touch that you feel enthutiastic that it will influence the gameplay positively ?
Good Luck
June 25th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
I’ve got a good question…
Will we see a new build at E3 or new level’s, or will it be the same one shown at Sony’s Gamer’s Day?
June 29th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
DEANO!!! That is some really cool shit!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skjw37keeZ8
I gotta say – bravo, man! BRAVO!
November 13th, 2008 at 12:02 am
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