I have just purchased the latest EDGE Magazine and within it is an amazing 5 page article on WarDevil, an upcoming game for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 which has been in development since 2004 and is boasting some amazing technological feats. I have typed up the 5 page article below. (It gets interesting during paragraph three, a demo comparible to id Software's Rage running on a original Xbox? No way!)
I have highlighted the parts I found to be most important in Red.
Prepare for a long read...
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MEGA PIXELS
When it comes to making games that look like movies, the CG Veterans at DIGI-GUYS believe the devil is in the details.
Title: WARDEVIL
Format: 360/PS3
Publisher: IGNITION
Developer: DIGI-GUYS
Origin: UK
Release: TBA
The trouble with 'myth-busting' studio visits is that they all too often become myth-affirming. Wheter out of need, defiance or simple denial, sometimes a developer actually believes that the way to silence critics is to show them more of what they doubted in the first place. So it's with some trepidation that we walk through the gates of Ealing Studios, currently home to the next St Trinian's movie, to find out if WarDevil, a game that most people still associate with a 2004 technical teaser clip, is anything more than CGI fluff.
Another worry is that this visit, which for creator Digi-Guys is the first of its kind, has been arranged as a 'technical reveal'. And as we stand in a kitchen currently full of packing material for a Euphonix audio workstation, not to mention the discarded fruit machine from Shaun Of The Dead (no one knows what to do with it), it's a reveal that's coming five years after the game's announcement. Andy Whitehurst, the studio's founder and the game's project lead, has a lot of explaining to do.
"Every now and again something needs to shake the industry up," he says. "I hope that either WarDevil or its pipeline can do something like that. The analogy would be Star Wars. Think of the movie industry in '76. George Lucas was given $6 million at a time when the average was around $15 million. He had nothing and made this thing that turned the industry on its head. It revolutionised visual effects; if it wasn't for Star Wars, we wouldn't even be using the tech we're using now. People keep talking about movies and games but, in my opinion, they're thinking about it in the wrong way. You can't use coventional thought" We know what you're thinking. And had we not just seen something comparable to id Software's Rage running on a original Xbox, we'd be thinking it too. Our mistake, the demo suggests, was expecting the myth to be simply that WarDevil, a thirdperson action game set thousands of years in the future, was vapourware. It's not, but that quickly becomes irrelevant. The myth is that the way industry works today is the way it'll work tomorrow.
Some more about that Xbox demo, first, as it casts Whitehurst's rhetoric in a substantially different light. It was developed in 2005, when you'd expect all eyes to be on Xbox 360. Such is the nature of Digi-Guys' new pipeline, though - designed as it is to render Hollywood-grade visuals at true 1080p, at an unbroken 60frames per second, using just one core of a modern Console CPU - that the demo would have to do much more with much less to be valid proof of concept. "Hold me to it and hang me, because the reality is that if we don't do it this way, it's not a project," says Whitehurst. "If we reduce the textures, there'd be no point in doing it." So on come the black block of a chipped retail Xbox, and his words are put into action.
Using creatures and environments familiar to both the teaser video and now the game itself, it's a smooth stroll through and arid, sun-drenched scene: the cloister of a temple carved into a moutain, apparently, opening out into an arena full of richly detailed pillars. Biomeks, which at a glance resemble fleshier versions of Doom 3's Revenants, adopt various positions before a Virtua Cop-style shooting system takes them down. This, importantly, is not how WarDevil will actually play.
It's a persuasive piece of work, to say the least, and tells you as much about the last five years as it does about Whitehurst's concept of 'Hollywood grade'. The crux of it is the use of such high-resolution textures that it avoids the traditional break in fidelity from feature film standard to in-game. So what you'd expect to see even in modern games - textures that turn to porridge if you look too close - doesn't happen here. Then there's the motion blur, of the kind seen in Jurassic Park rather than the harsh, sometimes nauseating vector blur used in modern games. Add to that many of the light and particle effects you'd expect to see today, and a healthy layer of anti-aliasing. All on a original Xbox which then has the pleasure of rendering it twice, a debug menu bringing two separate cameras to the scene.
How is this possible? Whitehurst is cagey, probably to protect his work rather than hide some inconvenient truth, which given the evidence would seem unnecessary. In principle, it stems from a conclusion that's currently sweeping the game industry, and which Whitehurst, a veteran CG artist, live-action director and apparent technical guru, came to several years ago: that brute force rendering methods that put all their weight on graphics hardware aren't the way to go; they won't reach that goal of true parity between HD cinematics and in-game action. Instead, Digi-Guys' pipeline uses a pre-caculated texture system that "gives us the ability to have an enormous amount of textures onscreen, at a fidelity we can use in 35mm or even 65mm formats without altering them.
"It's not dissimilar from many normal industry practices, but we've pushed it in another direction by holding colour, grading, lighting, diffuse, specular and even bump maps in a single PCTS (pre-caculated texture system) data structure. This information lets us seperate it into channels for complex effects and do cool stuff like intergrating the image map itself, and finding individual pixel light values for condition-based rendering."
Head spinning? Let's return to what this means for WarDevil itself, and another demo that brings things bang up to date. The background for this one is a visit by Sony reps in October 2005, by which time Whitehurst had built the kind of HD studio that was still having to be described to most developers. They saw the Xbox demo - and remember, this is the same year that Doom 3 struggled it's on to the same console - and were suitably impressed. "They said: 'Here's some devkits. Let's see what you can do'. So we got a very quick build running, then there was this whole shebang for the E3 2006 [PS3] launch, with everyone having to sbmit what they were doing." WarDevil was lucky enough to be picked, and together with Heavy Rain was one of few non-aligned projects on show. "It was good for us and it wasn't, because we were just 16 people at the time, with all the pressure of doing it."
That's not the only reason for PS3 becoming WarDevil's lead platform. "Sony's hype was right," says Whitehurst, echoing those old, oft-forgotten claims that the architecture of Cell and it's satellite SPU's is ideal for the future of HD gaming, as opposed to the present, which is ruled by DirectX. "It's advantageous fo our thought process. There's better filtering on 360 but the whole thing comes together better on PS3." With modern deadlines and product cycles, though, few have the luxury of challenging today's wisdom and putting that to the test.
Currently pencilled in for behind-closed-doors display at September's Tokyo Game Show, the PS3 demo of WarDevil is frustratingly small. The texture streaming system is stull under development, though it's expected to boost the current texture bandwith to support 1K (1024x1024) textures for every four square metres of gameworld. Characters meanwhile, already boast seperate 2K (2048x2048) textures for their faces, torsos and limbs. Compare that to something like Fallout 3, where everything from the neck down uses just one 1K texture, the faces using one half that size.
The demo is essentially a short section of gameplay and introductory cutscene in which the WarDevil, an 'ultime killing machine that can make 10,000 men lay down their arms', shows his stuff against the troops of his nemesis, The General, using a God Of War-style mix of blade attacks, martial arts and supernatural powers. Given his name, the WarDevil himself is a suprisingly lithe and humanoid figure, decked in a ornately festooned armour resembling that of Lieutenant Colonel Kroenen, the clockwork Nazi in Hellboy. The enviroment, meanwhile, is a weathered canyon splashed with vibrant ancient motifs, juxtaposed with a central pillar full of perfect angles and bronzed metal.
Much like Hideo Kojima when demoing early footage of MGS4, Whitehurst's trick when presenting this brief section is to stop the action and detach the camera, bringing it to within touching distance of various characters. As promised, thhere's no discernible point at which the edges start to soften. Chainmail retains its crispness as the links fill the screen, skin reveals its pores and subcutaneous layers, and the standard of decoration in the various crests and engravings is never compromised.
This almost exact reproduction of the team's concept art - there are now 75 staff on site, a third of them from the CG animation industry - is what Whitehurst calls "living, breathing concept art". It sounds like some buzzwordy rephrasing of common industry practice, but there;s more to it than just ensuring that what goes down on paper (or indeed in Photoshop) comes out on the screen.
"CG movies now are all pretty much the same style: everybody's trying to be photoreal," explains Whitehurst. "Even if they're stylised, they're still rendered with RenderMan and they still have that look. That rule doesn't apply for 2D movies or 2D animations. So if I say Ren & Stimpy, 1950's Tom & Jerry, Pink Panther, Willo The Wisp, Cinderella, The Rescuers, all those images that just popped into your head are all 2D, but they're all very different. Now if I sai any Pixar movie, with all due respect to Pixar, they all have the same look. Any anything from Avatar to Beowulf to The Polar Express, the're all doing CG the same way. Why can't we have CG projects - which is what WarDevil is - which are styleistic?"
WarDevil, you see, isn't just a game. The selling point of Digi-Guys' pipeline is its speed when rendering everything from high-quality movie material to in-game action, and Whitehurst has no doubt that it can deliver WarDevil as both a game and Blu-ray movie, albeit one with a forecast duration of just 40 minutes. "Rather than taking hours and hours per frame, the movie side renders in about 45 seconds per frame, maybe a minute and a half maximum. So by the end of one day we can all have movie footage and game footage rendered side-by-side using the same assets."
You're probably wondering two things now: whether somewhere between the videos and demos is enough to make a full-bodied game, and whether the rigours of adding dynamic elements like AI and physics will leave any of today's promises intact. You might also ask whether a studio of which three quaters is CG talent could make anything other than a Don Bluth-style vanity project (not that it did Dragon's Lair any harm). New staff will presumably bulk up the game side, though the best indicator we have remains the project's one absolute certainty: the uniqueness of its creator.
A self-professed "working-class boy from the north" - and, yes, that is the classic line about Ridley Scott - Whitehurst's career alternates from an early stage between live-action TV and pop promo direction, before working with symbolics workstations (precursors to the ubiquitous SGI workstations) in the early days of CG. Something of a Renaissance man, he was soon asked to mastermind a Phillips CD-i project ("it tanked") after which came the SNES and Mega Drive. "The film industry back then wasn't like it is now - you couldn't really get budgets to do anything crazy," Whitehurst recalls. "Anything that had a werewolf or a creature or a spaceship: forget it. So all my really creative stuff was going into games, and I got involved with doing a Spy Vs Spy game."
That project, built around the idea of adding a Mata Hari figure to make it Spy Vs Spy Vs Spy, became a victim of its publishr, a British company sub-contracting to First Star in the US, going bankrupt. "I kept it going for a little while with my own cash, but soon became aware that the money from my directing was feeding the project and I might not get anything back, so I stopped." Vowing to never again get involved in gaming, he returned to live action before a chance to salvage his Spy Vs Spy ambitions pulled him back, the result being a SNES platformer called Frantic Flea. As creative director of its developer, Haus Teknikka, he would then, in 1998, be commissioned by Grant Naylor Productions to create some ondly remembered idents for the Red Dwarf Tenth Anniversary. Out of that company would come Digi-Guys.
It's a CV that adds credence to claims that Whitehurst could, were he to clone himself a few times, fill every role at Digi-guys himself. His own character designed for WarDevil are scattered everywhere - including, of course, on the walls - and the mo-cap studio he built downstairs acts out his storyboards, the pipeline digesting the data apace. "Say we shoot in the morning," he explains, "we can start at 9am and actually finished the shoot at 10.30am having got alot of moves through, and have them processed through the new pipeline by about lunchtime."
Importantly, though, this background check sheds light on the hybrid process behind WarDevil's construction. A glance at the company's tools, a key component of which is the Game Creation Tool (GCT) and lets its artists interface cleanly with the engine, shows how almost everything at Digi-Guys starts at the top and trickles down. The characters, for instance, are born from pen and paper in Whitehurst's office (a hive of competing technologies that would suit Jeff Bridges' character in Tron) before they're passed to the art team (with dazzling results). While playing the demo, Whitehurst casually grabs screenshots that land on his workstation's desktop at print resolution. The movie-style 'screenplays' for the game, the movie and even its trailers are all there.
It's enough to convince us that WarDevil will happen, and in fascinating form regardless of whether it actually works. Whitehurst brings to mind the likes of David Twohy, the enigmatic, somewhat eccentric filmmaker who, in his various adventures, wrote Waterworld and The Fugitive, created Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick, and in the meantime penned StarBreeze adaptation The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. He and Whitehurst share a telling fondness for David Lunch's Dune, and WarDevil, with its rival factions of FreeState Brotherhood and Chun caste - "Masters of the Sky, Overlords of the Earh and keepers of the Beast" - seems no less idiosyncratic.
Whatever happens, be it the blueprint of gaming's future, a convoluted spectacle in the epic tradition of a curio that revives the most unwelcome excesses of 'multimedia', something positive must surely emerge from this marathon project. "It's the grand experiment, I guess," says Whitehurst. "Companies that have far more funds than we do throw money away and bring in loads of film people who say: 'Do this. Do that'. And the games people say 'You can't do that because of this, this, this and this'. I'm just sitting here quietly working on this stuff with a very small group of people, and I can say that this, this and this will work. We are a hybrid studio and this hybrid technology - that's where I want us to be positioned."
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End of Article. JEEZ that was a long type...
Well looking at the pictures the game really does look amazing and this game has shot from nothing to highly anticipated for me. I hadn't heard about it at all untill today. What are everyone elses thoughts if you managed to read through all of that?
NOTE TO SELF: I'm never fucking doing this again.
^^
