The Criterion Tech Interview: Part Two

You can if you want to!

No.

We're busy drawing pixels. There are issues again potentially with latency in terms of stopping your GPU to do some physics and get it back to doing graphics without introducing a huge stall into your graphics pipeline or have the CPU waiting around forever to have the results come back. There's enough CPU horsepower for the moment.

Paradise really did not stress the CPUs of these consoles. There's an awful lot of room left. I think that's why the PC version kind of just worked. Had we really gone to town, it would've been much harder to get it running. We tried as much as possible to run the gameplay on CPU and keep the GPU as scalable as possible. Depending on your graphics card you could have different quality options, but CPU would have been minimally affected, whereas with some games you play, the graphical options will have a massive CPU load without telling you why. We tried to stay away from that.

It was an awesome piece of machinery!

Sony would tell you that it hasn't passed yet.

I cut my teeth on Dreamcast and unfortunately missed out on a lot of PS1 coding but the PS2 was a very cool machine.

Black came when our tech was pretty mature and a new thing for us to do was an FPS...

A lot of the tech in the core game, the rendering tech at least, was the same as Burnout 3. But again when you write something you've got to be sensible. We didn't write a Burnout engine as such.

That's exactly the right phrase to use. We did that in Black because it was fun. It wasn't to show off or anything like that, it was just fun.

Ultimately, Burnout was about how much fun we can have in a car. With Black we literally thought how much fun can you have with a gun? It's not exactly politically correct but it's an interesting question in the context of a video game. Shooting stuff and having lots of smoke flying around, it's a hugely visceral experience, and that's what we focused a lot of Black about. We gave you some good reasons to blow some stuff up.

That was a bit of a PS2-driven decision really. You talk about the embedded eDRAM on 360, it's the same on PS2, you can just draw lots of pixels. What are we going to do with that? We'll cover the screen with lots of smoke.

Well you say that but the Xbox kept up as well. It rendered the world and the characters so much faster, because we went quite heavily with multi-textures at that point and the Xbox could do that better than the PS2, but it was slower at rendering particles. So whereas it might have only used a quarter of a frame rendering its characters and 75 per cent to the particles, the PS2 would've been more along the lines of 50-50... slower at drawing the world but faster at drawing the particles. It's another example of where the two trade-offs meet bang in the middle and it looks great on both.

Without a shadow of a doubt, there always is.

Well, there always is, isn't there... it's nothing new. You hear it all the time... we've maxed out, we're the best.

That's proof there that you're not the best. It means you're out of ideas.

You always find new ways to do things, the constraints lift. Not just with a new console generation but with every game you do. Whether it's a sequel or whether it's a new game, you learn to do things differently... better. The constraints go away because you learn. While it's nice to say you've maxed something out, there's not really any point.

We started Black with tech that we'd used with Burnout 3 and were starting to use with Revenge and when we got to the end of it, it's not like we hadn't learned anything. We could've carried on learning about those consoles, we could still be learning today. We just went off and learned different stuff on PS3 and 360 instead.