Sony's big first party game for the holiday season is a remaster - but not just any remaster. Uncharted: the Nathan Drake Collection is a beautiful recreation of three of PlayStation 3's finest games, upgraded not just with higher resolutions and smoother frame-rates, but with top-to-bottom improvements of the original artwork, with enhancements made across the board. This works in combination with new gameplay modes along with a comprehensive re-evaluation core gameplay systems. We've previously dissected Drake's Fortune, Among Thieves and Drake's Deception in depth, but we still wanted to learn more about how this exceptional project was put together.

Happily, the developers at Bluepoint Games were more than happy to talk about the efforts they put into the game, and as expected, there's a remarkable story to tell here. Marco Thrush - Bluepoint owner and CTO - talks us through the development, from the firm's efforts to improve the original games so that they're as good as you remember them, through to the techniques employed in improving the original titles.

There are some surprises here. For example, Naughty Dog's work on The Last of Us Remastered could only go so far, as the original game was based on the Uncharted 2 engine, making it unsuitable for the Uncharted 3 port. There are also details on the lighting enhancements that improved the classic Uncharted 2. And we get answers on just how Bluepoint managed to cram three Blu-ray-based PS3 games onto one PS4 disc. It's a unique insight into the creation of a remarkable project and we're happy to share it with you.

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Digital Foundry: How did the timelines work out? Bearing in mind how vast the scope of this project is, we must be talking about a development timeline akin to a full AAA project.

Marco Thrush: We started the day The Last of Us Remastered shipped in June 2014, so that would make it 15 months from start to release. It was definitely our longest project so far, but it was also three full games.

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Digital Foundry: Can you give us some idea of the size of the team that handled the Nathan Drake Collection and how that number is divided amongst the various departments?

Marco Thrush: At the peak we had 48 people: 13 engineers, 17 artists, four production/design, nine internal QA and lots of other helping hands.

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Digital Foundry: Is the dramatic improvement in Drake's Fortune a result of a concerted push to do more on that title, or a product of a consistent remastering process applied to all three titles?

Marco Thrush: U1 definitely needed the most love to get it to the state of "how you remember it" from the PS3 days. Our goal was to spend time to make the earliest game feel at home in the collection with the other two games. Some additions such as SSAO, ambient specular, and object motion blur got us a tiny bit closer. The lighting improvements we made to U1 are essentially the same changes we made to U2. Art had to put a lot more effort into U1, updating world and character textures, adding normal maps, adding more geo detail and replacing particle effects.

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Digital Foundry: One of the biggest questions we had pre-launch concerned the pre-rendered cut-scenes and how you would fit all three games onto one Blu-ray. Obviously you could lose the 3D encodes from Uncharted 3, but beyond that, just how did everything fit onto one disc?

Marco Thrush: Better compression for both audio and video. Removing video content: S3D movies for U3, bonus content for all games, credits movies (we rendered the credits at runtime to save disk space). Removing multiplayer assets helped as well. Lastly, a lot of streaming games improve load time by reducing seek-time overhead and by duplicating assets to place data physically close on the Blu-ray. With all data being installed onto the hard drive (with much faster seek times), we're able to get away with just storing a single copy of each texture and still have everything load in time (or even faster than the PS3). One question we've seen come up is: Why don't you just render the cinematics in real time? The reality is that all the geometry and texture data required to render the cut-scenes takes up way more room than the movies.

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Digital Foundry: Naughty Dog's GDC 2015 presentation on bringing TLOUR to PS4 talked about a massive effort in reorganizing CPU tasks - parallel fibres run off single threads attached to each core, splitting CPU work between frames in order to get maximum parallelisation. To what extent was TLOUR useful in getting the Uncharted titles to run at 60fps?

Marco Thrush: The TLOU code base itself was actually an evolved version of U2 (not U3), meaning it didn't have some of the functionality required to make U3 work. Still, having access to the TLOU engine for reference helped a lot. Once the PS4 versions were initially running (using all the knowledge the TLOU engine could provide) we were hovering at ~30 fps. At the end of the day each of the games are running in their own engines that have been individually optimised to get to 60fps.

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arne said:

stryke said:

I'd be more interested if DF could interview Bluepoint if SCE would allow it.

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dark10x said:

That would be so excellent but I doubt that would happen. :-(

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I've been going around Europe the past couple of weeks talking about this a bit, it's difficult between the short time talking about the Collection in general or journalist questions to delve too much into some stuff.

Apart from DF directly talking to Bluepoint, what kinds of things do you want to know? Maybe we can find someone we can work with to write about it or find a way to delve deeper into it. There were some crazy things Bluepoint had to deal with to even get the remastered project underway.

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One question we've seen come up is: Why don't you just render the cinematics in real time? The reality is that all the geometry and texture data required to render the cut-scenes takes up way more room than the movies.

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nib95 said:

Fantastic article and a very interested and quite detailed read. Bluepoint really knocked it out of the park. Their goal in limiting the jump between UC1 and the others from a graphical standpoint was absolutely successful.

Marco mentions their next project is a bit different, I'm quite interested to learn what it could be. Whatever it is, I'm sure they will do it justice.

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stryke said:

I'm going to inflate my ego a bit and say it was me who made this happen, you shouldn't doubt me John

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Zero Spooks said:

All of their remasters have been on point but I hope that they don't just get cornered into only doing remasters. I would like to see a Bluepoint original game sometime in the future.

Then again you figure that doing remasters must be solid contract work. All of the ones they have worked on have been successful as far as I know and there's no shortage of demand for more remasters. But an original Bluepoint game would be nice

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stryke said:

I'm going to inflate my ego a bit and say it was me who made this happen, you shouldn't doubt me John

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zsynqx said:

Interesting that TLOU was based on an updated version of the uncharted 2 engine, not uncharted 3.

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Zero Spooks said:

All of their remasters have been on point but I hope that they don't just get cornered into only doing remasters. I would like to see a Bluepoint original game sometime in the future.

Then again you figure that doing remasters must be solid contract work. All of the ones they have worked on have been successful as far as I know and there's no shortage of demand for more remasters. But an original Bluepoint game would be nice

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Jonnax said:

Wasn't Bluepoint founded by people that helped make Medtroid Prime?

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arne said:

Not that surprising, given TLOU work started after U2 and before U3, so the code that got branched off was whatever we had around then. I'm trying to recall exactly, but it may have been the engine that already had work for U3 started on it before it got branched, but that's testing my memory quite a bit about basically one e-mail that went out.

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nib95 said:

Fantastic article and a very interested and quite detailed read. Bluepoint really knocked it out of the park. Their goal in limiting the jump between UC1 and the others from a graphical standpoint was absolutely successful.

Marco mentions their next project is a bit different, I'm quite interested to learn what it could be. Whatever it is, I'm sure they will do it justice.

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BeeDog said:

Good article, but not as good as it could've been due to the short and quite blunt answers. The questions posed by DF were great, I just wish the answers delved into more specifics.

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the_batman said:

i'm surprised they only have about 48 people.

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stryke said:

I'm going to inflate my ego a bit and say it was me who made this happen, you shouldn't doubt me John

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the_batman said:

and why is their next project Gravity Rush of all games?

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Digital Foundry: Few remasters even attempt to improve geometry - the improvements in the Nathan Drake Collection occur across the board. Was it literally a case of taking the original assets and improving them all by hand, or was there another process involved?

Marco Thrush: Yes, all assets were improved by hand by our artists.

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the_batman said:

i just noticed something weird, Bluepoint's website doesn't work, it says the domain expired..

and why is their next project Gravity Rush of all games?

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arne said:

*thumbs up emoji*

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dark10x said:

Ah, so you're the one that set everything up then? ;-)

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dh4niel said:

Me too. 48 people and 15 months seems crazy.

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Rap2thaMoon said:

Haven't read it yet, thought the interview with A4 games was very interesting, to bad i didn't understand the more technical stuff.

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the_batman said:

i'm surprised they only have about 48 people.

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DieH@rd said:

Team size is also a reason why they did not tackle MP portions of Uncharted games.

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Henrar said:

Oh crap, now I know they removed the bonus content from the games

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henhowc said:

they were quoted as saying this? thought nd said it was something about splitting the playerbase for existing ps3 games so they decided early on not to do MP

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Zero Spooks said:

All of their remasters have been on point but I hope that they don't just get cornered into only doing remasters. I would like to see a Bluepoint original game sometime in the future.

Then again you figure that doing remasters must be solid contract work. All of the ones they have worked on have been successful as far as I know and there's no shortage of demand for more remasters. But an original Bluepoint game would be nice

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Marco Thrush: We use a fairly simple FXAA solution. The best way to avoid aliasing is to make sure the content doesn't create it in the first place!

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Marco Thrush: We used temporal re-projected SSAO. It gives a smoother effect without being crazy expensive. Improvements were made in the 1.01 patch to some ghosting artefacts on moving objects that apparently nobody outside of Bluepoint seems to have noticed yet!

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leng jai said:

People keep saying this but why? What's the point when there's a likelihood their own game will be mediocre? If they do their own game then we lose the best studio for remasters and have someone else produce inferior ports. Might as well let them stick to what they know, it's not like we're short of original games.

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