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

Yup. There was a Gamefest talk about how they rendered that amount of
zombies. 

They used Precompiled Command Buffers using Vertex Shader Contant buffers
instead of CPU Fixups. Addtionally, they advised against vfetch because it
impacts texture cache performance.

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gregory
Junker
Sent: 24 April 2010 06:09
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Sweng-Gamedev] Dead Rising on Xbox 360: think you could domore
zombies?


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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