MTV Multiplayer had a chance to talk to Insomniac’s Ted Price about several things, in three parts. The third part, I feel, was the only interesting one. Here’s a snippet:

Multiplayer: How does it compare to “Halo 3″ in the amount of content that it has? Because it seems like this is an attempt to one-up the insane amount of content in “Halo 3.”

Price: Not necessarily. We were not looking at “Halo 3” or looking to one-up anybody at all, other than we wanted to push multiplayer content. With multiplayer we saw an opportunity to up the game to 60 players with not a whole lot of pain on our end. The challenge for us is not technical at this point. It’s design. We’ve got to make sure that when you’re in a 60-player game it doesn’t feel like unmitigated chaos.

So we’ve been spending a lot of time analyzing and trying out different techniques to make sure you know what you’re doing, even though you’re in this massive battle, and it’s working. And it’s fun.

For the rest:

Ted Price Pt 3: Justifying 60-Player ‘Resistance,’ Competing With ‘Killzone 2′

Recently we were given the opportunity to ask Naughty Dog, the creators of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, some interview questions. Here are the results.

Questions 3 and 4 answered by Pal Engstad, Lead Rendering Programmer. The others were answered by Evan Wells, the Co President of Naughty Dog

Q1: What kind of Home integration are you planning for Uncharted?

A1: Rather than each individual treasure, the Medals in Uncharted are more likely going to turn into Home trophies. We modelled the detail into the treasures just to increase the satisfaction in finding them. We also went to great lengths to make sure that they were authentic items that were from the right time period and location. We will have to come up with new 3D models to represent the trophies when the time comes.

Q2: What kind of tools (software packages) did your programmers and artists use to create the game?

A2: A lot of our tools were designed and created at Naughty Dog including a level editor, a shader and material editor, an asset management system and a scripting language that can be compiled and uploaded to the PS3 on the fly. With all of the development tools that we use, the most important feature is iteration time. We want to cut down the time it takes for our artists, designers and programmers to see their work show up in the game. This means that they will get the maximum opportunity to experiment which is the only way to make a great game.

Q3: Do you find a global queue of jobs to be doled out upon request to be a good approach to paritioning work to the SPE’s, or is it better to assign each SPE it’s own task in the game?

A3: Naughty Dog uses a Job Manager developed jointly by Naughty Dog’s ICE team and SCEE’s ATG group. This means that we can send any type of job to any SPE, and all of the scheduling of jobs is done through a priority system. This works well, since the overhead is minimal and we achieve good load-balancing between SPEs, something that would be hard to do by allocating a whole SPU to a single task.

Q4: With streaming technologies and the included HDD in every PS3, how important is actual memory? I ask because the PS3’s OS takes up so much more of the available 512MB than the 360’s OS does.

A4: Main memory is a cache, but remember that a larger cache enables us to keep more data in memory at the same time, enabling more detail in textures. Therefore, every MB saved improves the quality of our game. We’ve solved most of our memory problems by relying on the SPEs to perform compression, both at load-time and at run-time, using techniques developed by ICE, SCEA Tools&Tech and the SCEE ATG group. So yes, memory footprint is very important to us.

Yesterday we kicked off the Insomniac interview with Part I and some great questions about Resistance: Fall of Man. Today we continue those questions, plus we have some questions about the PS3 in general that I think you’ll find fascinating.

5. Can you tell us what you’re currently working on? I assume Ratchet & Clank PS3 development has started, am I wrong? What about an R:FoM sequel? Any downloadable games?

TP: We’re working on more online content for Resistance: FOM and you can find the details in a recent interview we did on IGN.com. [Editor: I assume he means this interview.] And yes, we’re definitely working on Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction for the PS3 and it’s looking awesome. Amazing what happens when you move into developing the second wave of software on any hardware platform…I’m going to stay mum when it comes to the other stuff we’re doing.

6. Developers mention 1080p and splitscreen support as performance bottlenecks. For example, with R:FoM you went with splitscreen (which is great!) and 720p (instead of 1080p, which is fine IMHO). MotorStorm didn’t even do splitscreen. What kind of perfomance impact does 1080p or 4 player splitscreen support have on a game? Is it really that hard to do splitscreen? (I have a personal axe to grind on this one, because I like to invite friends over to play.)

Rob Wyatt, Senior Engine Programmer: Split screen is a difficult problem from a performance point of view and it is certainly more difficult from an engineering point of view than rendering 1920×1080. Both together, no doubt, requires a serious engineering effort but it’s not impossible. As the PS3 hardware is better understood it will become easier. Rendering 1080 is more performance intensive than 720 simply because it has two and a quarter times as many pixels, which is not only more pixels to render but also more video memory and bandwidth is used for the bigger frame buffers. The general overhead of 1080 is the same for full screen and split screen, whether you are rendering a single viewport or 4 viewports the total number of pixels on the screen doesn’t change. Independently of the resolution, split screen places a different set of demands on the graphics hardware and graphics engine. For each viewport the engine has to more or less reprocess the entire scene, this is a lot of additional work, and ultimately generates a lot of additional polygons for the graphics hardware to process. The combined overhead of the 1080 resolution with the extra polygon processing required for multiple viewports, while keeping in frame and not sacrificing AAA quality, is a very difficult problem. In the limited development time frame of a launch game there were bigger battles to fight but it’s certainly possible and you will see split screen games running at 1080. For Resistance: Fall of Man, split screen with co-op play simply brought more to the table so 1080 support had to wait.

7. There are some features we’ve seen elsewhere that we haven’t seen on the PS3, and I was wondering if it was because the PS3 was technically incapable of doing these things, or if developers or Sony just haven’t implemented the features. Could you help us clarify whether or not the PS3 can do them, and how hard they would be to do? They are: (1) bringing splitscreen players online with you (like in CoD3 for the Xbox 360), (2) linking several consoles together to play local online, and (3) global voice chat.

Eric Ellis, Multiplayer Team Lead: My first reaction to this question is that we haven’t yet seen a large number of PS3 games released yet, so it’s a bit early to be guessing the limitations of the hardware from the current lineup. And none of these features really pose any sort of a hardware challenge, so the PS3 is certainly capable of all of them. However, I’ll be happy to give you some more specifics on each of the features mentioned.

1. Splitscreen online play is certainly possible on the PS3. Resistance: Fall of Man did not implement this feature because as a launch title we had to make some compromises in the interest of time and that was a feature we didn’t get the time to complete. However, I wouldn’t rule out seeing it in future Insomniac games.
2. Local-only LAN play is also technically not difficult on the PS3, though we see the demand for this being less than some other features as most people who are doing a LAN party these days also have internet access so they can usually play together that way. Another thing about our game is that we use dedicated servers for online play, so it would be slightly more difficult for us than for a peer-to-peer game or a game using one of the consoles as the host.
3. When you say “global voice chat,” I assume you mean the ability to voice chat with anyone on your Playstation Network friends list, regardless of what game they are playing? Because we certainly have voice chat in Resistance, and not everyone realizes this, probably in part because of some of the confusion and questions about other games and the PSN as a whole. The only thing I can comment on with respect to the PSN voice chat is that there is no PS3 hardware limitation that would make this any harder than it is on any other console. We also know that Sony is deeply committed to continual improvements and upgrades to their Playstation Network and it is certainly possible that you’ll see this feature announced in some future update.

8. The PS3 has 256MB of fast video RAM and 256MB of normal RAM. But I’ve heard that all memory can be used either by the Cell or the GPU anyway. Is this split an issue? Does it hinder or help? Would a unified memory architecture have been better? Do you have any clarifying comments about that?

Al Hastings, Chief Technology Officer: In practice, the split memory architecture hasn’t caused us many problems. The GPU can access main RAM at high speed and with very few restrictions. And while there are some restrictions when you want the CPU or SPUs to access video RAM at high speed, so far they’ve been easy enough to work with.

For the PS3, I think the split memory architecture was the right way to go. It allows the Cell and the GPU to both do heavy work on their local buses without contending with each other. It should really pay dividends a few years down the road in the PS3’s lifecycle when everyone’s code has gotten more efficient and bus bandwidth emerges as a one of the most important resources.

Insomniac was kind enough to answer some questions that the writers here at PS3Blog.net have put together. It’s a long process, getting all these questions answered, and you can see that several Insomniac employees were involved in answering the questions. I originally contacted them last year, but they were so busy trying to get Resistance out the door that they suggested I contact them again after launch, which is what I did. We spent a lot of time thinking of what questions we could ask, so hopefully you’ll enjoy them as much as we did. Thanks, Insomniac! Don’t forget to check out the Insomniac Full Moon Show podcast for more about Insomniac and upcoming projects.

I’ve divided the interview into two pieces, here’s the first part. The second part comes tomorrow.

1. Generally, launch titles don’t sell a lot of copies just because there aren’t that many consoles out there yet. Why did you decide to make Resistance a launch title for the PS3 when you knew that sales wouldn’t be that great? How does Insomniac gain from that?

Ted Price, President and CEO: First, I think it’s important to note that Resistance: Fall of Man has been the #1 selling PS3 title since launch despite games like Madden and Call of Duty 3 being available on the platform. More important, as more PS3s make it into consumers’ hands, Resistance: FOM’s sales continue to increase. Finally, with the recent European launch putting Resistance: FOM atop the sales charts across all formats and more content coming soon, we’re expecting Resistance: FOM to continue to be high on gamers’ “wanted” lists.

We knew from the beginning that launching with the hardware would mean lower initial sales. But we also felt strongly that the opportunity to establish a new franchise in a very crowded genre was something we couldn’t pass up. With less competition at launch it meant that Resistance: FOM would get a fair shake as the “new kid on the block” and potentially garner more long-term sales assuming we did our job in creating a AAA game. In this business, exposure is EVERYTHING for a new franchise and had we released Resistance:FOM a year later, it would have been much harder for the game to get the attention it deserved no matter how good it was.

2. What development tools and languages do your programmers and artists use? I’m a former game developer myself (I worked on Wizardry 8 at Sir-Tech), so I’m really curious as to what compilers, IDE’s, languages, graphics programs, 3D programs, etc your software developers and artists use.

Luke Petre, Director of Tools: Our artists work with a variety of 2D and 3D applications including Photoshop (for texture painting, marketing art, etc.) and Maya (3D modeling). A lot of our 3D artists are using sculpting software more frequently as we continue to work with higher and higher poly counts to produce HD content. We export data from these 3rd party applications into internal formats in some cases, which gives us a degree of flexibility in choosing the right piece of software to produce specific types of assets. In general, we try to develop technology that allows our artists to work with whatever applications best enable them to produce high-fidelity content as quickly as possible.

Our tools are mostly PC-based and are predominately written in C++.. There’s also a fair amount of Perl that we use to automate tasks and tie various systems together. There are even some Python scripts and some batch files floating around. Our PS3 code is primarily developed using a variety of IDEs, Sony’s PS3 compiler, and SN System’s ProDG debugger. The runtime code is a mix of C++ in the higher level systems and a decent amount of C and assembly for the low level engine code.

Getting all these different environments and tools to play nicely together can sometimes be a challenge, but we try to be flexible in terms of what tools we use to attack different problems. This flexibility often pays dividends in how our games perform and the flexibility our artists have to bring their ideas to life in ever-increasing detail and depth.

3. How many developers and artists did you have working on R:FoM? Will other PS3 games get the same level of allocation?

TP: At times our team, including our quality assurance staff, was up to 100 people. The size of the team varied depending on the phase of production we were in. During Resistance: FOM’s production we developed a lot of proprietary software (our engine, physics system, animation system, level production tools, etc.) that we’ll continue to use and improve during this generation of hardware. Because of this the team was slightly larger than what we anticipate for future PS3 titles.

4. Why did you decide not to do online co-op in R:FoM? It’s something that a lot of people would have liked. I’m just looking to see what you guys were thinking in this regard.

TP: We had to pick our battles. Resistance:FOM is a very large game – most people spend 12-15 hours getting through the single-player campaign alone. And then there are the massive online multiplayer modes we implemented that offer a LOT more gameplay. While it would have been very cool to do online co-op, we opted for offline co-op partially because we simply didn’t have the time or manpower to make a game this large and hit launch at the same time. And I don’t think the game is any less great because of it.

Something I have also said in interviews is that during the design process we did discuss online co-op seriously during production. We concluded that it was just as much (or more) fun to be sitting next to someone playing offline co-op than playing online co-op with a potential stranger. Yet whenever I’ve mentioned that particular reason, people have sneered and said “yeah, whatever dude.” But that’s the way we felt at the time.

Come back tomorrow for part II of the Insomniac interview!