Head-to-head with Housemarque, plus exclusive PlayStation 4 60fps gameplay video.
It's day one of Gamescom 2013 and Digital Foundry is attending Sony's indie showcase, playing Housemarque's PS4 debut and talking tech with the developer - and we're hugely impressed with the game. Resogun ticks all the boxes in what we would want from a console exclusive - it's feels great to play, it's technologically groundbreaking, visually arresting and built from the ground up with the capabilities of the host hardware specifically in mind. Remember when Mark Cerny talked about GPU compute becoming more important a few years into the PS4 lifecycle? Resogun - a launch title - is already putting the Radeon graphics hardware through its paces with a range of effects that could only be done on a system built upon a surfeit of GPU power, a console like PlayStation 4.
Resogun works because it combines state-of-the-art tech and next-gen visuals with an extremely simple concept - the exact same core-gamer-pleasing formula that made Super Stardust HD one of the best shooting games of the current generation. It's a game that not only validates your next-gen console purchase with all the technological whizz-bangs you could ask for, but delivers the same style of gameplay that made you fall in love video games in the first place.
Gameplay clearly hails from the old-school "score attack" arcade tradition - a genre that has unfortunately fallen by the wayside during the current-gen era, represented by just a handful of games like Super Stardust and Geometry Wars. These are games that are conceptually at odds with the modern day triple-A experience - spectacular scripted set-pieces, infinite lives and hand-holding gameplay simply aren't part of the equation. The rollercoaster-style thrill of the modern day score attack game is defined very much by the player's skill - the better you become, the more exciting, tense and dangerous the experience feels - and as a bonus, the more insane the on-screen effects. Spectacle isn't handed to you on a plate - you earn it. You create it. We saw that in Super Stardust, but Resogun takes that to the next level.
"The entire environment - everything - is built up from these voxels," explains Kruger. "All of the cubes that you see flying around - there's no gimmick, no point sprites, it's not a particle effect, they're actual physical cubes. In gameplay, dynamic cubes with collisions, floating around, you can get up to 200,000. Our engine supports up to 500,000 but in actual gameplay scenarios, it rarely goes over 200K."
"Compute shaders are the big thing and of course the RAM," says Harry Kruger. "We're using over 500 megabytes just for the level geometry. It's all optimised in real-time. We don't have the full 3D texture in memory because as you can see, the level's pretty empty in this case so all the levels are generated into separate sub-meshes."
On top of the full HD, 60Hz experience, it's clear that Resogun's presentation is extremely clean. A deferred lighting solution would suggest that - in common with most next-gen console games - multi-sampling anti-aliasing (MSAA) is off the table, yet aside from just a tiny touch of pixel flicker around the main ship, Resogun looks really smooth.
Impressive stuff. Resogun has only been in development for 18 months, and the quality of this code - which almost maintains its 1080p60 target - is exceptionally good. For a game that emphasis GPU compute so much, for Housemarque to have come so far so quickly is testament to the skills of its development team. Development of this PS4-specific game must surely have begun on unfinished hardware, and Kruger acknowledges that this is the case. When I suggest that coding for PS4 so specifically on prototype hardware must have been exceptionally challenging, the response is a simple "indeed".
More here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-resogun
Download 720p@60fps video: https://mega.co.nz/#!9NpD2AwZ!EldCilyHgZilU5HGgWvxFS8Y7O49sClKqfuznsZYyYE (mirrors in the original article)
