We had a chance to speak with Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games, to get to the lowdown on the Unreal Engine technology demo shown at the PLAYSTATION 3 unveiling, as well as a variety of other topics surrounding Sony's next-generation hardware.
OPM: Can you give us a general timeline for the process of creating the Unreal PLAYSTATION 3 demo?
Mark Rein: We got the development kits about two months before the demo, and we had the engine up and running within the first week. We spent the rest of the time optimizing the demo. For the actual content for the demo, which runs on Unreal Engine 3, we did most of the work on the PC and then copied it over to the PLAYSTATION 3 and just ran it. I'd say it took about two to three weeks for the demo once we got the engine up and running.
OPM: So it's that easy to develop for the PLAYSTATION 3?
MR: Absolutely. The PLAYSTATION 3 Stuff is easy to get up and running because it uses Open GL and Linux, as well as nVidia graphics and Power PC architecture. It's also a testament to the Unreal Engine 3 compatibility. If we wanted to look at a shader and know what it was going to look like on PLAYSTATION 3, we didn't have to learn it on the PS3-we could learn it on the PC, and it really looks exactly the same.
OPM: Did your team have any goal in mind with the demo? Did you want to show off a specific feature?
MR: Well, Sony asked us to do something unique, which is pretty difficult. In that time, we had to create characters and modify the environments. Those characters will be in Unreal tournament 2007. We had to build the content, the shaders, and the characters in time for the demo, so that made it a little complicated. We wanted something with a cinematic feel because we knew we were going to have a limited amount of time on stage and we didn't want to the variability of somebody trying to play [a full game] in real time and screwing up. If you saw the UT2007 demo at Midway, we had a little cinematic and then somebody played the demo. Its a little different every time, so for a demo with this level of importance, we wanted to avoid that.
We knew we were going to create a matinee sequence; Matinee is one of the tools we have in UE3 to do cinematics. It's real time and its done within the engine, but it's prescripted. We wanted a fight sequence that looked really next generation and cinematic, so our art directors and designers came up with the ideas. I thought it worked out really well. The camera work was really good; one guy actually did all of that camera work in a couple of days.
OPM: When we were looking at the other demos, there was some skepticism about them being done in real time on the PLAYSTATION 3 hardware. What did you think of them?
MR: The demos that Phil Harrison did and the demos that Epic and EA did are all in real time. The other ones were obviously shown as movies, but I have no idea how they were created, anytime you have technology on a new system you're going to be facing a lot of hurdles, especially when it's a very early system. We were very proud to show a real-time demo.
OPM: Given what you've experienced with the hardware so far, would you say that the other demos are feasible?
MR: I didn't really look at the other demos enough to say. [But]what will happen later on is that those games will all come out and they'll all look great. They show everything that you remember. Look at Gran Turismo. It was called Vision Gran Turismo, so clearly it was a vision statement, and they wouldn't have said that if it was an actual demo. That is their vision of what GT would look like on PLAYSTATION 3. I saw that and though, I don't see any reason why GT wouldn't look that way on PLAYSTATION 3.
I think what will happen is that when those game come out, unless you were looking closely at that video, you'll remember that they don't look quite as good. In other words, there's the vision that a lot of people try to create versus the practicality of what they can pull off. Will they be able to pull off as many effects as you saw in those movies? I don't know, but when those games come out, you won't think that they didn't [pull them off]
We barely scratched the surface of what the machine can do. We're already running in HD at 30fps and above. We threw a lot of stuff into that demo, but we'll be able to do a lot more once we get to play around with the CELL chip, so we're itching to see what we can do with the rest of that power.
