Insomniac reveals the secrets behind its ambitious sequel.
Where did you want to take the technology for this next title?
And then say, well, where are we?
Where are we falling short of this?
Now, you know, ‘photo-real’ is not exactly the goal.
And so everyone has their own little pet thing to do.
And we had our hypothesis, but I’d like to hear directly from you.
What are you guys doing to pull it off?
How did you solve this problem?
Mike Fitzgerald:Yeah, so great job [on the video].
I think noticing that checkerboarding was a great tell.
And you could get these sort of 3D shapes, especially along the back wall.
Why not render an interior by using that same system and tossing rays elsewhere?
And then as you trace into a room, we use an ID for that window.
We have some pre-calculated lighting in there.
And it worked [laughs].
It comes together really nicely.
You get that sense of movement back there, that adds a lot.
And that’s how we did the interiors for this game.
I think shadow maps would be expensive and probably not look very good.
Mike Fitzgerald:Yeah, not for each window.
It’s a very clever trick.
And that is seriously a very difficult problem to solve.
But another aspect of this depth that really caught my interest is the way you handled secondary reflections.
And I’m wondering what the source is for the secondary reflections?
How did you actually solve this problem?
Mike Fitzgerald:Mostly, we use just a plain probe of that area.
Because you don’t really need to see movement in the way you should probably with ray-traced reflections.
And so it’s a great fallback for a secondary bounce and a reflection as well.
Digital Foundry: I noticed the nice clear coat on those cars.
Mike Fitzgerald:We put a lot of work into that, that that was always a pet peeve.
But I don’t want to get away from ray tracing just yet, obviously.
Because another big thing, obviously, is the water reflections, which are now ray-traced.
So what kind of extra cost are we looking at?
How do you pull it off?
Mike Fitzgerald:There’s always a lot of balance with this.
And we just knew we could do better.
It was really expensive.
We tried to get around it.
But hey, rendering a whole other scene is really expensive, as well.
And then trying to translate that into the roughness of the water didn’t quite work.
So how can we mitigate that performance?
Our graphics programmers are awesome.
Everyone’s like, yeah, pretty much.
So how can you bin them?
How can you group them?
Digital Foundry: That’s interesting.
So yeah, I was wondering about hitting 60fps or higher with ray-traced water.
Did that happen early in development?
Was that always the goal?
And I always know immediately, when I see that screenshot and it always bums me out.
Or, right at the deadline, and we’re never quite confident enough.
It’s going to be something that’s really planned early on and and worked towards.
What’s the story there?
Why couldn’t how it looks now be in the trailer?
So in particular, I think it was the story trailer.
And we’re like, ‘ah, but it looks better now.’
I think there’s actually interest in understanding the way you do your pre-calculated lighting pass.
So that’s a big, iterative thing for us as we go.
But also there’s nothing in between you in Manhattan, there’s a lot of faraway stuff.
But usually there’s buildings close.
And that’s where you’re seeing.
So we needed to ensure our lighting over there was good as well.
Digital Foundry: Yeah, and there’s a good amount of times of day in this.
So each one of those has its own separate bake.
Do you think it’s actually feasible on these platforms in a game like this?
Or is it still just a little bit too much, especially if you factor in the reflection pass?
Mike Fitzgerald:Every game has its own trade-offs in environment and style of play.
And we never want to sacrifice any of that for something else.
And that’s moving through it, that’s also camera cuts and things like that.
I mean, that’s a broad generalisation.
Some people are doing some awesome stuff with it.
But all that stuff is so exciting.
Digital Foundry: There we go!
Of course, you mentioned New York and another part of New York is the density of stuff.
Could talk a little bit about all those different factors and how that’s changed for this game?
But there’s like 10 or 15 interlocking systems that all factor into how detailed something might look.
You have texture streaming in and out at different distances to the camera and blending into each other.
When do we transition to something better looking?
So those exist as these independent models that we have showing at different distances far away and close.
And the goal is to make it all invisible.
That can be a dynamic input to a material and shader when you’re close to it.
But since we bake those imposters, we can bake it right into that unique imposter.
It’s funny, the hardware in the console is extremely good.
You know, it’s a very fast SSD and we talked about this a million times.
Because that’s now your bounding factor on stuff.
And we also do a lot of ‘how can we get less data’?
How much less can you load?
Does that make sense?
There’s a lot of creativity around that.
One of our animation programmers came up with a way to stream animations, in a sense.
Spider-Man is a very complex character.
But we’re not playing them all simultaneously.
So you don’t need all that data at the same time.
And at worst, you’re looking at one frame that blends imperfectly into the next.
This stuff has existed in other games prior to Ratchet, prior to the Spider-Man games.
It’s the amount of data that’s been moved to do it.
Mike Fitzgerald:You know, I can’t speculate too much on what they’re doing.
But here’s some of what’s gotten us to where we are.
We were able to work with PlayStation 5 hardware very early.
We’ve gotten a lot of time with this hardware.
I’m wondering if you’ve got the option to talk about how some of these things work?
How does the room propagation work?
How do sound reflections work?
Mike Fitzgerald:These are techniques that have been around for a while.
I wish I could show you the debug visualisation for the rain.
It’s really cool.
But with the new updates, we can actually have the game target Atmos more specifically.
Our cinematics audio team did a ton of custom Atmos mixes for this game.
As soon as they knew it was coming, they did it immediately.
And this factors into streaming and how we utilise that bandwidth as well.
So that’s the behind the scenes thing that’s fun, actually.
You mentioned pedestrian and open world stuff.
Vehicles have suspensions and behave differently.
They have conversations with each other.
As you walk around, there’s all sorts of little touches.
And that’s part of the fun of the new game, I guess!
Digital Foundry: You get that right from the start with the Sandman fight.
Okay, this is huge.
‘, and I’m just like… there’s so much stuff to experience.
This is not ruining anything for anybody.
I hope you’re excited.
Even just that one fight has so many surprises and twists and turns.
And there’s some really awesome work that went into the bosses and cinematic moments across this game.
Digital Foundry: I also appreciate you mentioned the Kraven cutscene at the beginning.
But that’s not even in the city.
It’s a completely different, bespoke jungle map that was made just for the jungle space.
That’s so cool, you’re able to seamlessly transition to these different spaces.
Well done on the game is what I will say!
Mike Fitzgerald:Thank you very much.
I’m just again excited for players to spend some time with it and have a good time.
