I'm going bed now... so I will use GAF highlights...
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-titanfall-tech-interview
What made the situation somewhat unique is that it was the first time that Microsoft's Azure cloud platform had really been stress-tested for gameplay. Respawn isn't making any grand claims about the cloud as a gateway to a next-gen nirvana ("In the end it's just a bunch of computer capacity. You can do anything with the cloud that you can do with a bunch of computers," says Baker) but it is a highly innovative approach to tackling the issue of multiplayer infrastructure which could open the door to a wider array of developers.
Titanfall may well be one of the most hyped and well-funded launches of 2014, but the implications here are intriguing - smaller developers can tap into the Azure infrastructure and don't have to take on the enormous financial burden of buying a server network with worldwide coverage. Bespoke server code created by the developer runs on Azure, and it could be tasked to do anything. In Respawn's case, it's a dedicated server, with trimmings - for example, running the AI cannon fodder drones that populate the levels. There is potential here for something more, and a mature network to make it happen.Perhaps the biggest revolution of Microsoft's cloud isn't game-changing graphics, but instead accessibility. The only question really is how much CPU resource is given to game creators - and did Respawn need to push Microsoft for functionality that simply wasn't present?
Client-side, Respawn has based Titanfall on the Source engine, but it has effectively been re-built from the ground up. In our last Respawn interview, producer Drew McCoy said that "I hate to say that it's the Source Engine" because so much had changed. From our experience with the beta, we saw a piece of technology significantly transformed. Source was never particularly well-threaded, and there was no DirectX 11 support. More than that, the tech simply wasn't built for the kind of ultra-low latency feedback that the erstwhile Infinity Ward team members demand from a satisfying shooter.
Respawn is also talking about what sounds rather like extensive Xbox One optimisations, including a revision for the 1408x792 native rendering resolution of the game on the Microsoft console.
"We've been experimenting with making it higher and lower. One of the big tricks is how much ESRAM we're going to use, so we're thinking of not using hardware MSAA and instead using FXAA to make it so we don't have to have this larger render target," Baker tells us. "We're going to experiment. The target is either 1080p non-anti-aliased or 900p with FXAA. We're trying to optimise... we don't want to give up anything for higher res. So far we're not 100 per cent happy with any of the options. We're still working on it. For day one it's not going to change. We're still looking at it for post-day one. We're likely to increase resolution after we ship."
"A lot of the performance is on the GPU side. There's still room for optimisation and we're still working on it," Baker says. "Ideally it would have been a rock-solid 60 all the time when we shipped but obviously when there's big fights going on, lots of particle effects, lots of physics objects... we're still working to condense the systems, make them more parallel so we can hit 60 all the time, ideally."
Titanfall's '792p' resolution and frame-rate dips call into question - once again - the power of the Xbox One's hardware architecture. The GPU - based on AMD's Bonaire part - seems to be falling well short of the sort of performance we would expect from the architecture, making us wonder if the custom ESRAM is proving to be more of a problem than it should be.
As our session with Baker comes to an end, it's time to address the great unknown. Just what is going on with the Xbox 360 version of the game? We wanted to know about resolution, frame-rate and feature parity. Two weeks from release and still nobody has seen the game.
"Yeah, we've actually been playing it almost every day here. Bluepoint's developing it and we've mostly been hands-off, letting them make their own technical decisions," he says. "It seems pretty close [in terms of] feature parity and they're still working on getting the frame-rate up. I'm not sure about the resolution..."
