SS2 is slated for PC and Xbox. Why not go for the XBOX 360 instead of the venerable DX8-level GPU in the XBOX?
Well, you have to keep in mind that XBOX is a well established platform, and it makes sense to make a game for it. On the other hand, its development process tends to be very painful from time to time, especially when you look at that tiny, miserable 64MB of RAM. I can tell you, making the same game for today’s PCs and XBOX is....well, damn hard!
XBOX 360 is something that we really look forward to. Looks very powerful, especially on GPU side! But I'm a bit worried about that multi-core thingy.
So what's your take on the arrival of dual-core processors in the near future and how will the CPU parallelism help/hurt the renderer?
Good question, but don't expect answer like "oh, yes, great stuff, can't wait, new horizons, bla-bla...". :(
Generally, programmers are now victims of Moore's law being... errr... how should I put it? khm... not-so-well. It's nobody's fault, nobody's "wrong design decision" - multi core is a logical step forward, since there are no more ways left to crank-up the MHz. So, pass the hot-potato to developers, and make them wrestle with all the hassles and drawbacks that multi-threading will bring to "every-day's" programming.
Finally, could you tell us the length of a typical SM 2.0 shader in SS2 and perhaps the maximum vertex count used by the game?Lemme check... lets see.... SM2.0... SM2.0... (it's hard to find it around here, since we still have a lot of 1.x shaders :)... OK, I think it's something in the range of 15-20 instructions. But, as I said before – the shader that really raped high-end GPU was the one with 8 texture fetches (and only 25 instructions!).
As for vertex shaders... well, we went overboard a bit - turns out that some shaders now have >100 instructions (water surface geometry deformation, complex reflections with fresnel and similar high-tech mumbo-jumbo :).
For that matter we tried to keep vertex count reasonable, so having ~100.000 vertices per frame proved to be just enough for our little Sam2. Well, on low-end machines it can be down-LODded to ~50.000, and for high-end we can crank it up to half a million.
Also, I have to give many thanks to our artists regarding batch-count; they did a really great job in optimizing number of surfaces and models, so we now have only ~250 batches per scene, and this came as a really pleasant surprise for IHVs. We even got a credit for doing that! (And you know how they can be picky when it comes to batch count. :)
We’d like to thank Dean Sekulic for the time he has given us from his hectic schedule to answer our questions. Serious Sam 2 is scheduled for release in the autumn of 2005.
