[Q&A] Gun: Showdown
We sit down with Rebellion Entertainment and get their take on taking Neversoft's brutal portrayal of the Old West and making it portable.
Published: September 12, 2006
What kind of relationship did you have with Neversoft? This is kind their baby, the first non-Tony Hawk game in years, and a completely original IP. Did you have to walk on eggshells anywhere or were they open to letting you go nuts?
I found the relationship with Neversoft and Activision rather refreshing; we were given a simple directive to embrace the raw grittiness and savagery of the old west; which we did, with gusto!
Was there a lot of re-use of libraries and assets from the console versions of Gun employed with Showdown? We're just trying to feel out how easy it is to repurpose parts of PS2 games for use on the PSP.
We had a complete dump of all the code, environments, characters, sound, music, FMV from the console versions. Naturally, as we used our own engine, we only delved into the original code on a couple of occasions. The art assets needed plenty of treatment to firstly be made suitable for rendering within our engine, and then to fit into the memory allocation and other constraints to be streamed. This was one of the hardest parts of the game and required a Herculean effort by our team of environment artists.
The animations from the console were also used within the game. Good judgment and brutal pruning was required to allow the myriad of animations from the original to be shoe-horned into the PSP.
How much thought has gone into overcoming some of the more... difficult aspects of the PSP's controls? Stuff like the massive dead zone on the analog stick and a complete lack of a second stick have caused more than minor problems in the past.
Tuning, testing, tuning, testing… that’s the only way.
How has working with the UMD format been? It's certainly got a decent amount of storage space -- more than on any other handheld -- but there have been complaints of seek times. Given the size of Gun's world, were there any tricks employed to keep things as seamless as possible, and were there any issues that really drove you bonkers?
The small memory footprint on the PSP forces us to be economical with the size of our assets, and that in turn makes the UMD seem larger! We’ve managed to keep the game to a single sided disc despite the vast streaming landscape that the game takes place in. Sure, seek times are a pain but some careful load scheduling in our streaming system is able to give the game plenty of time to pull in the data. Actually, the streaming system was what gave us the most sleepless nights – it’s an incredibly tough task to get the PSP to stream the Gun world, even more when the player is galloping at breakneck speed through it on a horse!
I’m incredibly proud of our coding team for transforming our engine (Asura) from a static data engine to a fully streaming system – it’s not just the landscape that needs to stream, environmental sounds, enemies, mission elements, collision data, waypoints, effects all need to be taken care of; much worse enemies, animals and even projectiles need to move between streamed areas that may or may not be always in memory! Lots of fun (aieeee!!!).
I found the relationship with Neversoft and Activision rather refreshing; we were given a simple directive to embrace the raw grittiness and savagery of the old west; which we did, with gusto!
Was there a lot of re-use of libraries and assets from the console versions of Gun employed with Showdown? We're just trying to feel out how easy it is to repurpose parts of PS2 games for use on the PSP.
We had a complete dump of all the code, environments, characters, sound, music, FMV from the console versions. Naturally, as we used our own engine, we only delved into the original code on a couple of occasions. The art assets needed plenty of treatment to firstly be made suitable for rendering within our engine, and then to fit into the memory allocation and other constraints to be streamed. This was one of the hardest parts of the game and required a Herculean effort by our team of environment artists.
The animations from the console were also used within the game. Good judgment and brutal pruning was required to allow the myriad of animations from the original to be shoe-horned into the PSP.
How much thought has gone into overcoming some of the more... difficult aspects of the PSP's controls? Stuff like the massive dead zone on the analog stick and a complete lack of a second stick have caused more than minor problems in the past.
Tuning, testing, tuning, testing… that’s the only way.
How has working with the UMD format been? It's certainly got a decent amount of storage space -- more than on any other handheld -- but there have been complaints of seek times. Given the size of Gun's world, were there any tricks employed to keep things as seamless as possible, and were there any issues that really drove you bonkers?
The small memory footprint on the PSP forces us to be economical with the size of our assets, and that in turn makes the UMD seem larger! We’ve managed to keep the game to a single sided disc despite the vast streaming landscape that the game takes place in. Sure, seek times are a pain but some careful load scheduling in our streaming system is able to give the game plenty of time to pull in the data. Actually, the streaming system was what gave us the most sleepless nights – it’s an incredibly tough task to get the PSP to stream the Gun world, even more when the player is galloping at breakneck speed through it on a horse!
I’m incredibly proud of our coding team for transforming our engine (Asura) from a static data engine to a fully streaming system – it’s not just the landscape that needs to stream, environmental sounds, enemies, mission elements, collision data, waypoints, effects all need to be taken care of; much worse enemies, animals and even projectiles need to move between streamed areas that may or may not be always in memory! Lots of fun (aieeee!!!).