Finally released this week, Evolution Studios' MotorStorm Apocalypse marks the arrival of another high-quality, high-profile first-party release for the PlayStation 3. Sporting state-of-the-art environment deformation, 1080p and 3D support, superb dynamic lighting and an even more refined version of the franchise's remarkable physics engine, this is still clearly a MotorStorm game, albeit one quite unlike of its predecessors.' As kids I think a lot of us were happy for video game sequels to offer minor iteration and polish, but as the medium has grown more significant differences are rightly expected,' MotorStorm Apocalypse game director Matt Southern suggests.' We felt that interest in MotorStorm would wane if we didn't treat the franchise with a 'healthy disrespect', whilst still respecting the original audience and staying faithful to our DNA. We also spotted a decline in interest in the entire genre of racing after Pacific Rift, which sold really well. We looked to the genres that were really gaining momentum for our inspiration: shooters, action adventures.'
Lead technical artist Andy Seymour concurs: 'It's all too easy to find yourselves treading water,' he observes. 'We needed to push ourselves beyond our comfort levels in order to keep the franchise invigorated.'
From an engine perspective however, the studio prefers to build upon its existing work as opposed to developing a completely brand new slab of tech for each major release. 'Evolution by name, evolution by nature,' says lead graphics programmer Oli Wright.' Apocalypse has lots in common technologically with our previous games. Unlike our approach to the franchise, we try and make incremental improvements to our technology rather than reinventing the wheel,' Andy Seymour confirms.' For example, on the first MotorStorm our VFX pipeline was very hard-coded.
On Pacific Rift we developed an in-house editor for the artists to define VFX, and this was taken through to near-breaking-point on Apocalypse. Our animation pipeline, however, had to be completely overhauled to deal with the massive events in Apocalypse and the engine was reworked to deal with new challenges such as multiple dynamic lights.' 'We were partly ready for large-scale dynamic environments already. Our object-culling approach, for example, has always used occlusion objects rather than pre-computed visibility,' Wright explains. 'This system just needed iterating to handle moving occlusion objects, and we also added a dynamic portal system to make our indoor sections more efficient.'
Combat is turn-based. You give each of your characters their battle order and then let them go off on fisticuffs. Atk determines the amount of damage you deal with basic attacks and with most special moves, as well. Atk is the main damage stat for most characters, with a few exceptions.
Evolution's staunch support for stereoscopic 3D yields benefits for owners of conventional HDTVs too - the game features support for 1080p. Click through for full resolution shots.Another of these evolutions was the inclusion of the SCEE-created MLAA (morphological anti-aliasing), which shifts AA processing from the RSX - a piece of hardware not ideally suited for the task - onto the Cell CPU, used by many developers also like a graphics co-processor that works in tandem with the NVIDIA GPU. Evolution adopts a different approach that is fundamental in creating its very specific gameplay experience.' The only major pixel-pushing task that we run on SPU is the MLAA. The SPUs are mostly occupied with physics, vehicle simulation (which runs at 600Hz), animation processing, particles, scene processing and rendering preparation,' reveals Wright.' They're certainly not sat idle. If the SPUs were tied up doing lots of work offloaded from the GPU, then we'd need to have much simpler worlds with far fewer dynamic objects.
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That wouldn't be MotorStorm. As it stands, we have worlds with over 2000 dynamic objects in them.' Across the years - and the games - Evolution has worked closely with middleware vendor Havok in adapting its physics libraries to be more SPU-friendly.' On Pacific Rift there were significant performance gains over previous versions thanks mainly to increased SPU usage, so by the time we were working on Apocalypse the big performance gains had already been made,' confirms physics programmer Dave Kirk.' However, the lessons we learned from the early products enabled us to really streamline our code.
This meant we could squeeze even more tech in, such as our groups of NPCs, as well as significantly ramping up the amount of dynamic objects and destruction.' It's a shame we can't really highlight how cool MotorStorm Apocalypse's 3D mode is on a 2D website, but at least here you can get some small idea - grab hold of your red/blue paper glasses and enjoy an anaglyph shot of 3D gameplay, with the conventional 2D view also included.A core element of the new MotorStorm are the 'Events' - episodes of seismic destruction that change the circuits as you play, realised in the form of some spectacular graphical set-pieces.' From a production standpoint the key challenge was to define and create an entirely new team - the Events Team - who could deliver the quality animation and VFX solutions we needed in high volumes,' explains Matt Southern. 'Nick Sadler joined us from Studio Liverpool (who were invaluable throughout the project), to help run things.' 'Continual refinement of gameplay and visuals was invaluable in achieving final results, so it was key to have a process which allowed frequent reviews and frequent iteration,' Sadler elaborates.' The biggest issues faced in preparing the events were pretty fundamental design challenges: how would the event affect gameplay before, during and after it had triggered? The events were designed with fairness in mind from the beginning: they should be triggered far enough away so that the fastest vehicle with a clear run at full boost would experience as much of the event as possible and not be disadvantaged.
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No dynamic object could have sufficient mass to radically affect the gameplay negatively, or take out the player unfairly.' We knew that the player could learn the motion of events, and how intrusive they would be onto the racing line, but wouldn't know if events would trigger.
There's definitely a need for twitchy reaction and skill in adapting to the order of events.' Sadler goes on to discuss the challenges of conceptualising the event design process, using blockout assets - basic building blocks used in the prototype game engine to test whether a particular set-piece would work or not. 'We also had to make significant alterations to the modelling/animation pipeline for interactive events,' he adds.' There was a good amount of 'chicken vs. Egg', when moving between interactive pre-vis-quality events and interactive production-quality artwork and collisions: approving gameplay if the interactive blockout might be different to the production version vs.
Having artists commit to investing in a production-quality asset, without a blockout to prove its worth.' Another issue came about because of the sheer number of contributions necessary in preparing the artwork; from modelling, to animation, to VFX/particles, back to modelling, then to audio, etc. Getting the right person working on the right aspect of the event at the right time was initially a pain, but we were well-managed, and the team was amazing in producing 280+ events on a tight schedule.'
3529d agoI'm getting a bit worried again.Only footage I see is straight driving, not a lot of curves, no sharp curves and intensive steering at all like in Motorstorm 2. Its just straight, with events happening left and right of you like collapsing buildings, roads and thus its not even always choosing new paths, its new roads that 'happen' to you most of the times.I am not getting fooled by the amount of stuff happening around the car and how cool it looks, that 'Split/Second' kind of feel, I want the real racing aspect, the curves where you could crash like in MS2! 3529d ago (Edited 3529d ago )The graphics look good but really don't seem to have anything to do with the racing. It's the green screen UC2-itis of driving games. They need to explain where the racing comes in.
It's point A to B in a strait line.UC2 has ruined gaming, more so on the PS3 with all that pre-rendering crap that they blend into the gameplay at the expense of the game play. This looks like the end of UC2 when Indiana drake was trying to outrun the collapsing bridge only backwards.lol Infamous 2 trailer was the same.chasing destruction.how embarrassing, PS3 exclusives looking all the same.At the moment, splitsecond has the graphics, pacing and gameplay down. Take a look.this looks familiar.lol. Look at the f'ing car.exactly the same.lolHere's some Splitsecond multi-player action. Does Motorstorm have multi-player??? 3529d agoI've been playing Pacific Rift lately, which I bought with bonus $$$ I had left over from Amazon (only $13 out of my pocket as a result). It's brilliant.
I'd actually love to see another game like Pacific Rift with the elemental themes rather than an apocalyptic setting, as it had the island arcade racing thing pinned down perfectly. I was stunned with how gorgeous Rift looked on my TV and am surprised that it isn't mentioned more often when people bicker about console wars and graphics. I guess I'll wait and see with MotorStorm: Apocalypse, but I'm not as keen on racing through crumbling cities as I am through the gorgeous elemental-themed settings in Pacific Rift. I'll be interested to see how much variety they will be able to provide in Apocalypse; that could be the key factor for me regarding purchase.