Epic and PSX2

Sneaking in

With the GDC show on Sunday winding down, we decided to run back in and grab ourselves a Nintendo Dolphin (yes, Nintendo was handing out Dolphins for free at the show - squeezy foam dolphin toys that is). On the way out of Nintendo, we walked past the Epic Games meeting room. We poked our heads in there on a whim actually. It was only after introducing ourselves that we remembered why Epic was at GDC - to show off their latest terrain and skeletal animation technology. We were quite fortunate to get in on their last demonstration of the show.

Epic's signs

UT on a PS2

Brandon "Greenmarine" Reinhart conducted the demo, and started off by showing us Unreal Tournament running on a PlayStation 2. From what we could see, the game looked great! Visually, you wouldn't notice much of a difference between the PC version and the PSX2 version. Perhaps the 4MB of video memory isn't such a constraint. However, the game was running at a rather sluggish pace, probably around 15 frames per second. No optimizations were made to the code yet. In fact, the entire game was only using the PSX2's CPU.

Reinhart explained that it didn't take very long to get to where they were (the project only started in the second week of January), but it would take some time for them to fully utilize the PSX2's vector chips, which would greatly improve performance. The low level programming involved there that takes the most time when it comes to PSX2 development.

Overall, it was a convincing demonstration of Epic's engine on a Playstation 2. We asked Brandon if the game would have multiplayer support, and they replied that multiplayer is a definite must, pending Sony's release of the network protocols. They also cautioned that they're still looking for a publisher and once they find one, that publisher must submit UT for approval as an official PlayStation 2 game.

New Technologies

Despite their excitement over X-Box and Playstation 2, the Epic guys stressed that they were going to continue to innovate and develop for PC. Citing the same reasons we noted in our X-Box Analysis, they talked about how PC performance evolves continuously, so it would always be cutting edge, and therefore attractive to game developers.