Xbox One A 3D Environment Artist's Perspective on Xbox One

[FordGTGuy]

A 3D Environment Artist's Perspective on Xbox One + Sound Designer

I've been doing game environments for the past 13 years. In that time I have worked for 4 major game studios in the US. I don't see the 3D artists perspective voiced much during next gen discussion and I want to give mine. I also want to explain why I am supporting the XB1.

On current gen consoles (512mb ram) we would be lucky to have 200mb available for art at any one time. That means 200mb per load. Some engines like GTA or Red Dead constantly stream data, (no load screens) but there is still only about 200mb loaded for art at any one given time. When I say art I mean all the environment meshes and textures, vfx, characters, vehicles, 1st and 3rd person weapons, light maps, custom skins etc...Audio would get around 75mb, UI around 10mb and the rest of the memory would be spread out through dozens of other systems. Each engine is different but from my experience 200mb has been pretty standard for art.

Continued in link, please continue reading it's a fantastic read.

http://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/1gh0ja/some_perspective_from_a_3d_environment_artist/

as a sound designer, there are actually quite a number of improvements in that area, too. The X1 has some dedicated audio DSP circuitry that we can take advantage of that allows us to run complicated processing at no cost to the CPU (they're calling it the SHAPE system as I understand it). The X1 also has dedicated XMA decoding (think of that like an mp3 player converting to analog that gets sent to the headphones, except in this case it's digital>digital translation from XMA to PCM) on a dedicated chip, too. So audio can in the grand scheme of things do more awesomeness with less CPU taxing. Given that the X1 is multicore, it will be interesting to see how the cores are divided up among audio, video, and game across different titles. Oh, the X1 is going to be promoting 7.1 in a big way, too, so if you already have a 7.1 system, you'll really enjoy what's coming down the line.

The kinect itself is also very interesting, as it handles all of its audio (and video, I believe) processing within itself.

I haven't heard anything about the audio situation on the PS4 yet but if it doesn't seem to carry the same off-processor dedicated hardware then I wonder if the difference in clock speed becomes less noticeable.

I'm not an artist, but more qualified than most people on cloud technologies -- specifically IaaS and PaaS. It's basically the current big thing, and is only going to get bigger. If any "qualified" individuals say otherwise, they are not working for any Fortune 500 IT department or provider. Nor have they read anything about the IT world in the last 5 years.

I will just go ahead and address the IaaS that Respawn is using for Titanfall. Remember all those online games that are absolutely miserable for the first few days due to traffic? Respawn's rep said they will "spin up" instances on demand to accommodate traffic. "Spin up" is industry jargon for provisioning a new virtual server. So demand never surpasses supply.

There are many other features that a public cloud can offer that is often cost prohibitive for gaming servers where publishers are not held to an SLA. This is high availability, fault tolerance, load balancing to name a few.

As far as scale, that is the beauty of a public cloud. You can have 10 servers or 10,000 and you pay only for what you use.

 

[VlaudTheImpaler]

Yeah, but who cares about developers and their families? Used games no DRM, lending, Disk Forevew, PS4 is the Gawd Masheen!!!!

But seriously, I think it's such a shame that Devs and their opinions get so overlooked when it comes to financial issues when they are the ones making the things that provide us with so much entertainment. They literally put their lives on the line to make these games for us and we point our fingers at everything but ourselves when looking for a solution to the problem.

 

[BlackSolaris]

And still, some developers manage to work with what they have and create wonderful pieces of software. I don't think that blaming the shortcomings of a console is an excuse that could ever be used, it's all about how you use what you have. People might think that i am wrong, but if developers just start creating things half assed and abusing the "cloud technology" all we are going to have is data movement that could have been prevented by good coding.

 

[FordGTGuy]

And still, some developers manage to work with what they have and create wonderful pieces of software. I don't think that blaming the shortcomings of a console is an excuse that could ever be used, it's all about how you use what you have. People might think that i am wrong, but if developers just start creating things half assed and abusing the "cloud technology" all we are going to have is data movement that could have been prevented by good coding.

Dude are you honestly going to sit there and call developers lazy for using cloud computing?

That is not only one of the worse arguments but offensive to developers I've read.

Cloud computing is to help off-load data which will allow the CPU and GPU do more and it's not to just let them become lazy.

Did you even read what the guy is even saying?