In a previous blog post I talked about Capcom’s CEDEC 2006 technical presentation on the MT Framework engine as used in Lost Planet. Well, it appears Capcom had another presentation this time at CEDEC 2007 on the same topic, yet again with good information about what they’re doing in their engine. Again Beyond3D comes to the rescue for those of us who only read Japanese using Babelfish, with commentary in these two news articles.
The first thing I noted was the monster machines Capcom has equipped their artists with! 8 CPU PCs, 8GB of RAM (running 64-bit Vista to be able to access all that memory), and the SLI version of the 8800 GTX. Over at Sony Santa Monica we felt we were a little bit extravagant when we opted for 8800 GTXs (non-SLI) for everyone in production, but now I feel like we skimped! And we most certainly don’t have any 8 CPU, 8 GB monsters in the office! Time for a poll! What machine setup is used at your dev studio for production machines? Anyone?
It is also interesting to note that Capcom is repeating that adding motion blur greatly helps bridge the visual gap between 30 fps and 60 fps, which is something they stressed already in their first presentation. I guess it’s not much of a secret to mention that we noted the same thing in internal tests we did in the past. In fact, in the rendering tests that we performed, the majority of the people strawpolled ranked 30 fps with motion blur as looking better than 60 fps without! (Yes, really!) It came as a surprise to many of us, in particular to myself and Tim who have always been a bit 60-or-die. I guess you can learn old dogs new tricks.
Additional detail on how Capcom do their motion blur is given in this slide. The Capcom presentation coverage over at 4Gamer.net, has some additional info (such as this slide). More 4Gamer.net coverage is here.
Additional CEDEC coverage can be found scattered around both Watch-Impress and 4Gamer.net. Here are some links I gathered:
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20070928/cedlink.htm
http://www.4gamer.net/games/032/G003263/20070928048/
http://www.4gamer.net/games/017/G001762/20070928051/
http://www.4gamer.net/games/000/G000000/20071001016/
http://www.4gamer.net/games/000/G000000/20070927040/
http://www.4gamer.net/games/000/G000000/20070926041/
I tried finding the actual CEDEC slides for download, but it appears they’re nowhere to be found. Does anyone know if they can be downloaded from somwhere? Seems CEDEC needs to learn from GDC to make the slides available from their website.