Very interesting interview about Bluepoint's work on the Uncharted remasters.
I'm just picking a small sample of the interview here, much more in the link.
Preface:
Samples:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...king-of-uncharted-the-nathan-drake-collection
I'm just picking a small sample of the interview here, much more in the link.
Preface:
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.
Samples:
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...king-of-uncharted-the-nathan-drake-collection