Mercenaries 2 and SPU Utilization

[casualkiss]

Finally, some good news.

Mercenaries (one of my favorite games) is coming to the PS3 and IGN has a preview.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/705/705305p1.html

They also discuss how Pandemic is using the SPUs:

Even stealing a car will have a consequence in this game, a feature that Brown explained will test limits of the AI. To remedy this, Brown stated, the Pandemic team will be leveraging every SPUs of the Cell processor, even tasking individual processors to take varying loads for physics and AI calculation. "Our world is very dynamic and open, and things change a lot -- this thing gets destroyed, these things move around, this faction changes its opinion of this other one -- there's a lot of dynamicism and what that presents is a lot of challenges for the AI," Brown mentioned. "Our AI needs to be so flexible and so able to negotiate its way through the world -- we have to have our AI be able to problem solve on the fly. So we're actually moving a lot of our AI processing onto the SPUs to enable us to do an enormous amount of data processing. The AI does a lot of probing of the world, building a mental map of how the world works, and that's something that we've designed from the ground up to fit on an SPU really well."

When asked about what it was like to program the PS3, Brown had praise for the system, saying, "It's awesome. The PS3 is an amazing machine. We have two more hardware revisions, both of which give us significant performance upgrades, so this is not the final graphics hardware by any stretch of the imagination. The hardware is going to get a little more powerful, and we're also really finding ways to tap into the depth of it. It's a pretty inspiring machine. It's hard to work with -- it's a challenging machine to get the power out of, but it's in there, that's for sure."

Even though the game had some moments of slowdown, Brown mentioned that this was due to the fact that they were currently GPU bound, but they hoped to remedy that in time for the demo at the show. He also mentioned that they were currently programming without a firm strategy for the hard drive because the hardware they were currently working on didn't have those specs in place; however, he noted that the team would probably use it to help stream the environment and ensure diminished load times in the seamless world. Regardless, there were a lot of nice visual touches, such as the game running in 720p with fully implemented time of day cycles and dynamic shadows based on the position of the sun in the sky. In fact, Brown stated that objects in the world are so highly rendered with the shadow feature that every single bullet has its own shadow as well. Characters look a lot more detailed as well -- Mattias' character model in particular, with both arms tattooed and a higher, more spiked Mohawk this time around. We also noticed that one of the guerilla leaders bore a striking resemblance to Che Guevara, complete with beret and cigar. It was an impressive demo, and we're looking forward to getting a chance to see what new features have been made in the E3 build.

[Red_Eyes]

Every single bullet has it's own shadow. Wow. That's Hope it'll be good.

[Garfunkel]

yay! devs that dont winge!

[casualkiss]

All real in game demo. No tricks!

Why the hell didn't they show this at their key note? Is Sony TRYING to shoot themselves in the foot?

Oh, here is another great quote for the game Coded Arms

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/706/706680p1.html

Running off the Unreal Engine, Assault's trailer was significantly longer than the one shown at the Sony press conference last night, and showed off actual gameplay footage. While many were speculating that the mini-trailer shown last night might have been CG, we can confirm that it was definitely all done in real-time, and it looked fantastic.

Whoever organized Sony's conference should be fired and offered a job with the Bush administration (vote Quimby)

[Z]

Whoever organized Sony's conference should be fired and offered a job with the Bush administration (vote Quimby)

who ever organized Sony's conference should be staked and burned alive in TIme Square. the show was so horrible, there should be laws banning it.

[cliffbo]

i hate this not knowing where everyone is!!!! this looks a promising game even though i can't get the full sized pics. i reckon a lot of us are deflated so far lets hope things step up over the coming days and perhaps we'll get to see Motorstorm! theres a full length vid of MGS going up on Gamespot later by the way. i think we'll get to see killzone too but the reason they never showed it at the conference (IMO) is that they didn't want to oveshadow the PSP version. anyway i'm of a-looking see you all later. two different versions of PS3 (bummer)

[chrismt]

Sony went out of its way to underwhelm (PERIOD). They could have cut from the boring 10 minute demo of GTHD for this at least. Then I could have perked up.

[cliffbo]

Sony went out of its way to underwhelm (PERIOD). They could have cut from the boring 10 minute demo of GTHD for this at least. Then I could have perked up.

agreed. do any of you get the impression though that something is going on behind the scenes. i mean there wasn't that much about online. they could have wowed us with GoW. there were options. so why underwhelm like this? the games looked sweet though. something isn't quite right and i've been trying to read between the lines for the better part of today.

[chrismt]

Maybe they are showing some amazing things behind closed doors, or will have everything great at the booth. The latter is highly doubted, but the playable demos seem like WIN!

[Z]

o any of you get the impression though that something is going on behind the scenes.

yeah, bullshit.

Maybe they are showing some amazing things behind closed doors

'behind closed doors' demos never look good for the general consumer. that is why the are private. look at the first expressions of the very first UT07 demo. the stupid mags and sites said it looked so horrible, and added: "oh, yeah, they said this demo was strictly for showing the technology behind the game, not the game itself. they made it that basic so we can focus on what is important". so why comment on the bad graphics idiots?

[koldfuzion]

I do get the impression that Sony is not one big happy family right now. I somehow doubt Kaz, Phil and KK are best of friends, and I have a feeling howard stringer is squeezing KK's balls pretty hard. Despite KK's comments about PS3 being "too cheap" I have a feeling he was under a shitload of pressure from up top to keep the price up and recoup the R&D cost as quickly as possible. Not sure what if any intrigue is going on b/t Kaz and Phil, but I have a feeling the Sony team is not exactly all rowing the boat in the same direction, and I bet there were some major fights internally about the two SKU tard/non-tard version internally, inclusion of HDD and, if I had to guess about allocating full 20 mins to GTHD. (I mean if someone didn't jump up and down about that stupid idea they should ALL be canned) I have a feeling at least one of them (maybe Phil) felt they were putting lipstick on a pig. But whatever, I'm just guessing.

And whoever was responsible for assembling the presentation should be shitcanned. It was horrid. And for God's sakes Kaz is just a terrible speaker. Why they don't let Phil run the whole show is beyond me. I mean it's ok guys, not all managers are good speakers, let them run the buz.

[BahnNZ]

We should put together an Sony E3 Press conference for ourselves, do a much better job than Sony.

Mercenaries is one of my favourite games last gen. It's terrific. Awesome news.

On the subject of bad speakers, I'm watching the Microsoft one. God Bill Gates is boring... Great conference up to then. Zzzzzzz

[chrismt]

I suppose devs didn't respond positively to providing demos of their games? It could be a possible reason for the filler. Kuturagi likely pushed for the HDD. And I got a strange mental picture of KK's balls being squeezed

On topic, I wonder if this news moots the point of devs only using a few SPEs for launch games...assuming this is launch. I still need to play the first one.

[satriales]

At least all the poor looking games still have plenty of time to improve. I just wonder what would have happened if the PS3 really did launch in spring.

[Z]

okay, let is move the conference discussion to its thread and keep this on the highly anticipated game

on topic:
first thing comes to mind: PLEASE fix the silly vehicle physics. the previous game's looked very silly. it was like driving bouncing rubber balls.

other than that, the game lookes very good.

[my name is Nobody]

you can see the shadows of bullets wow thats kinda neat.
The first game was fun not much to it but still fun. With 2 more hardware
revisions to go this game could easily be awesome can't wait to see it in action.