Ian Bell interviene su Shift 2

[Guest Uff]

Con alcuni post sul forum di GTPlanet, Ian Bell ha parlato di alcuni degli aspetti più controversi di questo Shift 2: il lag nella risposta dei volanti e l'anti-aliasing. Patch in arrivo? O solo un utente fake?

Input lag

Quick post to say that we've removed the lag internally (well, down to hardware limits) and we're have a blast in testing with the wheels here. Some 'late in the day' asynchronous changes with a view to optimization put things out of kilter a touch. The changes mean that the input is now processed very early on in the frame and filtered through to the physics as quickly as possible.

Big thanks to gtplanet forums and members for the feedback. We do read as much as we can.

Anti-aliasing

Bit of a heads up on the choices we had to make regarding anti aliasing in Shift 2.

The new render engine for Shift 2 as well as having a full HDR range is also completely deferred. I think this is the first of its type in a racer and came with some benefits as well as trade-offs. We were able to go nuts on the night lighting and multiple cast real time shadows because of being deferred but the trade-off is that AA becomes a bit of a bitch to do. You can't run standard MSAA in the normal way. We used morphological antialiasing on the PC and consoles. The PC settings for medium is edge detect and for high also reads depth information. On PS3 we run post processed MLAA totally on SPU.

If we didn't have the night racing we could have gotten away with an enhanced Shift 1 render setup with the increased range and contrast and used simple MSAA (4x on 360 and quincunx on PS3).

Edit, should mention that the PC AA will eat CPU time as it's the only place we can run it on a fully deferred engine.

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Setup

The default tunes are all very soft, intentionally so as we need all cars to be able to handle all tracks. This makes them sub-optimal on the flatter/less bumpy tracks. Given the almost infinite variations available for the cars defaulting a setup per car, per track, per upgrade level wasn't possible.

A few tweaks in the setup menu can make all the difference.

[Guest Uff]

D: Are you guys working with NVIDIA at all for an optimized driver / settings to handle the new AA better and add SLI support for PC?

I purchased a GTX 590 and was surprised that I had to turn off AA to get an acceptable framerate on my Triple Screen @6040x1080 comparable to Shift 1 (Note: SLI is not currently working).

R: Yup, we have engineers at both Nvidia and AMD late on in the project who give us direct feedback.

That is a monster resolution to be fair We do an awful lot of work with cute shaders per pixel that obviously multiplies at higher res.

What CPU are you running? The AA will hit that directly.

I run a 580 here and I do know we worked hard on SLI compatibility late on. I'm not sure we had a 590 though. I'll check with our PC lead and bug list and get back

We're working with Intel to create a more efficient MLAA option that should see almost zero hit on quad core systems. All being well we'll push it out to a patch very soon.

In risposta ad un altro utente si sbottona in merito alle vendite del primo Shift: 5 milioni non sono pochi!!!

We're really happy to chat to the community and the punters who spend their hard earned cash on our work - five million on the last game. We wouldn't be here without you guys. So we thank you

[Taranta]

Blimey Blimey ....

Ci hanno fatto smanettare per anni con GTR2 e continuano a farlo nel 2011 con Shift: ma quando faranno un titolo plug&play??

5.000.000

[Guest Uff]

Anche Ian Bell aggiunge qualche informazione utile.

Is it possible for SMS to release PC patch before console version? So PC users don`t have to wait for MS/Sony approval. I can be your betatester, I`m OK with that:]

The release isn't our call guys. It's EA's and we don't get any input into it. We do the bug fixing of course.

Can not see SMS ever doing a Rallying game like some one in post of last page asked for.

I seem to remember Ian only likes GT style racing,but I could be wrong.

I'd love to do a rally game actually. The problem is getting someone to pay for it. We, like most developers, work hand to mouth at the mercy of publishers when it comes to the money side. We've pitched rally concepts before to publishers and even offered to go half on the funding but still no interest.

I have a cunning plan though... Maybe the community can all buy into a game dev deal, and own a slice of it and the revenues. We build the game together with a huge forum so everyone can input and have complete insight into the development. That would be very cool and we'd all get what we want.

Try the Lotus event. With every support option on, at easy difficulty it's impossible to complete the track, not even telling about getting any good time what so ever. And the things go only worse when you move to A+class cars with Acceleration around 2sec and top speed over 270kph - than it turns to constant struggle and frustration of being miles behind AI.

That Lotus handling is a bit duff in my opinion. So I get the frustration on that. I wasn't happy with it before ship and pressed Doug to check it over a few times but the specs seemed to be correct. I suspect there's a bug in it we haven't been able to spot. I'll give Doug another nudge.

Hopefully the reduced input lag/dead zone goes some way to improving the floaty Lotus handling.

I do recall the physics struggling with very short wheelbase cars actually. So there might be something low level going on that's barfing some numbers when the wheelbase is short. The S2000 is fine though IMO. We struggled to get the kart handling working well when we were doing Kart Attack so this could be related (although we blamed it on the lack of suspension at the time and fudged some chassis flex in).

We have a new from the ground up physics engine on the sidelines which we'll use for future products alongside an updated version of our current tyre model but in the meantime I'll have our guys look into this more.

Any idea on the dev costs of such a rally game roughly

say if RBR was to be reproduced for modern hardware, modern graphics and the best physics engine that can be produced at the moment

(sim physics seeing as we are on a sim site)

At a stretch with todays amount of content and polish, about 5-7 million dollars.

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[delpinsky]

I have a cunning plan though... Maybe the community can all buy into a game dev deal, and own a slice of it and the revenues. We build the game together with a huge forum so everyone can input and have complete insight into the development. That would be very cool and we'd all get what we want.

Beh, sarebbe qualcosa di favoloso, essere parte viva dello sviluppo di un sim game di qualit

[Guest Uff]

Ian Bell intanto continua a dare informazioni utili in merito allo sviluppo di Shift 2 e al futuro del team. Si parla anche di un'ulteriore riduzione del lag, cosa che io non avverto pi