Re: Dead Rising on Xbox 360: think you could do more zombies?

The Xbox is in some ways better than a regular graphics card, because you
can do instancing using vfetch, and you can send animation keyframes using
vfetch. (You could put the entire animation pipeline into vertex textures if
you wanted, but you may end up with latency stalls at that point)
I think 100 zombies in one group, each with some variation on how it
animates, is totally possible using a single draw call. Times 100 draw calls
and you get 10,000 zombies :-)
Especially when they are that many, and that far away, you can totally get
away with a few hundred verts per zombie.

Sincerely,

jw



--
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whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption
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On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 10:09 PM, Gregory Junker <[email protected]> wrote:

> Every session I went to at GameFest or GDC where someone was talking about
> 360 performance, the mantra was "render more". From what I could tell from
> listening to the MS engineers who had analyzed actual 360 app performance,
> a
> lot of rendering power was left on the table for most titles. So given that
> the 360 is essentially DX 9.5, I would venture to guess (and am prepared to
> be completely wrong) that DX instancing is a likely choice -- you really
> *can* render a ton of stuff at impressive framerates with that simple
> technique.
>
> $0.02
> Greg
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected]
> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
> Richard
> Sent: Friday, April 23, 2010 7:06 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [Sweng-Gamedev] Dead Rising on Xbox 360: think you could do more
> zombies?
>
> OK, I've been playing lots of Dead Rising lately since it was only $20
> downloaded from Xbox Live.
>
> Apparently this game uses its own engine called "MT Framework".
>
> Now, I hadn't thought about it from a gamedev perspective before, but
> crowds of zombies *is* something that will max out any GPU, given
> enough zombies.  (Of course this isn't specific to zombies, its just
> the situation at hand in a zombie game.)
>
> While playing the game its obvious that they're using some kind of
> instancing as there are a certain number of distinct zombie types that
> are repeated to make up a crowd.  According to [1], Dead Rising 2 will
> have up to 6,000 on-screen zombies.
>
> That's significantly more than appear on-screen in Dead Rising, so
> obviously the team has improved/reworked their engine to handle more
> zombies.
>
> Suppose we assume Direct3D 11 level hardware for the purposes of the
> conversation.  Obviously instancing is going to be important and it
> seems the crowd technique discussed in GPU Gems 3 (see the "Skinned
> Instancing" demo in the NVidia SDK 10) would be applicable here.
>
> In Dead Rising, there doesn't appear to be per-zombie LODs, just
> distance based culling of chunks of the zombie crowd.  (This becomes
> obvious when navigating the park between the mall plazas, you can see
> chunks of the crowd pop into view.)
>
> Would you use per-instance LODs?
>
> Would you use imposters/billboards for distant zombies?
>
> I'd be interested in hearing thoughts from the list.
>
> [1] http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3173505
> --
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