Danger Zone – Three Fields Entertainment

Danger Zone Development Diary

Fiona — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 17:50:54 +0000

“Pumping Up The Jam in the Danger Zone”

Here are extracts from my development diary for Danger Zone on Xbox One.

It was the silence that we noticed first. The game on screen had suddenly gone quiet.

We were sat on the sofa in front of our ‘living room setup”in the Three Fields Entertainment office watching one of the Aftermath sequences in “Danger Zone.” It’s really easy to lose all sense of objectivity when you make games. So we’ve always found it important to do those final playthroughs together as a team. As a group on the sofa, passing the controller back and forth playing it trying to pose as both novice and expert player. Unlocking every Achievement. Earning every Trophy. But this wasn’t a final play through…

All we need is just a little patience

The first page of my Danger Zone Development Diary said ‘If making games was for everyone, then everyone would be doing it.’The world is full of players. Millions and millions of people love playing games. But over the past two decades I’ve learned that actually making them is a very different experience. And requires a completely different set of skills. As well as persistence and a lot of patience.

It might not be as glamourous as I’m sure you might think it is. You get to sit in front of a monitor for long periods at a time. You see every facet of the software up close. You’ll see it at the start, a blank screen on the very first day of development. You’ll see it at the finish line, right up to the moment when a button marked “UPLOAD” is clicked and it finally leaves the building, ready to be shared with the world. And you see it every single day in between.

We see farther

Making games you get to see things happening in our game that no-one else will see. There are failed experiments temporarily brought to life, shining quite brilliantly but only briefly. Some spectacular moments that be for our eyes only. We get to see our games brought to life. And we also get to see them when they are ugly – when they don’t work, when nothing ever seems to work. We get to see them when they are dull, lifeless and no fun at all. And then try and write about them in a Development Diary!

Epic Performance

In the first three months of this year, we developed Danger Zone for PC and PS4. We wanted to release the game on Xbox too but our game just wouldn’t run well at all. Massive teams are able to throw programmers at platform problems and spend weeks and months clawing back performance to keep all shipping versions roughly in line with each other. In fact, this was the exact advice that Microsoft had given to us at their last development conference.

But as a small independent team, we simply couldn’t afford to spend months optimising engine code. We had a game to make. Epic’s roadmap showed us that a huge amount of fixes and Xbox performance would be coming down the pipeline later in the year. Fiona decided to put the Xbox version of the game on hold, and wait and see what the engine improvements would be.

Optimisation and improvisation

So in early June, we got the game up and running in the latest version of Unreal Engine. Performance was better than we had expected, so we knew we’d be able to bring the game over to Xbox. This gave us an opportunity that a lot of developers don’t get to do. To not just bring the game over to a new platform but to try and improve it in almost every single area. As we got started, we gathered around the office TV and revisited the software. And that’s when we started to see the game through entirely fresh eyes. For a game all about car crashing and big explosions, it was clear that a few things were going to have to become a lot more frequent and a lot more obvious.

Balancing act

In the world of theatre it’s the job of the Director to bring the script to life “from the page to the stage.” This means ensuring that the actors performance, hair, makeup, costume all work in tandem with the stage direction, set design, sound, music and lighting to bring the script to life. I bet they don’t often get time to write a Development Diary either.

For our game, and every game I’ve worked on over the past two decades, we do things slightly differently. If anything we are trying to bring the game to life “from the Editor to the TV screen.’ (It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.) When we’re building the game using the engine Editor, we can experience the game from almost any camera angle. We can see everything working as it should do, and also things happening that the player will never see. The problem lies when we fail to realise that the player isn’t getting to see and thus understand all the things that we are able to see.

Sofa Surfers

Back to that sofa then. The game was quiet because there simply were not enough explosions happening. The first improvement we made was to overhaul the explosion system. This would immediately trigger bigger and more frequent explosions.

FROM THIS:

TO THIS:

We’d seen a lot of great moments where the player could bump or ‘check’ one car into the path of another car but as a Player you probably weren’t quite being made aware of it enough. We made all checked vehicles explode on impact, which made every level which featured traffic checking 100% more exciting. We also made cars explode when they were tumbling through the air or falling. And rather than de-materialising the cars when they fell off the edge, we let them fall to the floor….and then blow up when they did.

These changes also had a wider effect. They made the game more entertaining for others to watch. Our company motto is to make games that put a smile on your face, and for some reason knocking cars about and making them blow up does tend to do that.

Overhauling Ass

Next we looked for ways to try and further how the game could better communicate to the player what the consequences to their actions were. The great arcade game designer Eugene Jarvis once stated quite simply, “players like games they are good at.” Those words have always stayed with me over the years ever since I read them in Martin Amis book “Invasion Of The Space Invaders.” Players like games that they can understand and then master. Software has to work as hard as possible to communicate to the player what is really important. With that in mind, we felt we that our effects and damage systems could with an overhaul.

The player was hitting a lot of cars and whilst we knew it was happening, we weren’t calling attention to that fact either visually or aurally. So the traffic behaviours were revisited. We improved traffic checking, making it much more reliable and much more pronounced when you did it. We also made sure that the traffic became better at panicking and displayed more complex behaviour when starting to crash. The player car wasn’t generating any sparks either, so we made sure it did, made the sparks physically accurate, and improved the visual quality of the SmashBreaker sparks too.

Blowing the bloody doors off

We spent a fair bit of time studying the Aftermath sequences – the bit at the end of each crash where the camera pans around and shows off your score for each vehicle crashed. We had a system where the doors, boot and bonnet (that’s “trunk” or “hood” for our American readers) would detach in the middle of the action, but it wasn’t working nearly as often as we wanted it to. So we made sure it would all happen when it needed to, and we improved how tyres should bounce as well. We also thought it was a bit odd that the “TAXI” lights stayed on for the Aftermath, when it was clearly obvious that any taxi driver wouldn’t be touting for a fare after one of our pileups. So we fixed that too.

Time to look again

Finally, we made several improvements to both CPU and GPU performance which gave us more stable performance across the whole game, implemented better quality AA, and improving the visual quality of the flyby, aftermath and in-crash action cameras.

These improvements, done at the start of the Xbox development period gave us a better game, delivering much more of what we originally set out to deliver. We remixed the entire game audio, creating new engine sounds, adding extra sirens and improving the detection of the impacts which gave us a lot more sounds which we suspected were missing. We also tweaked and tuned the HUD, focusing mainly on the score and Medal sequences.

As we began working on Xbox, we also did work to support owners of the PS Pro hardware adding in 4K Temporal Checkerboard rendering and also 150% super sampling for those PS Pro owners playing our game on 1080p displays.

The thing we were really excited about, which Phil Maguire covered in his excellent blog post here, was when we discovered that we would be able to deliver native 4k on the Xbox One X. That was a GREAT day and something I personally have been very excited to see.

So when you next boot up the game on your sofa on whichever system you play on, you’ll know what we did last Summer.

Danger Zone is available on PlayStation®4, Xbox One and PC (via Steam). Enhanced for PS Pro and Xbox One X
RRP: £11.99 $15.99 €15.99

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The post Danger Zone Development Diary appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

Danger Zone on Xbox One X – Development Postmortem

Fiona — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 11:32:49 +0000

Danger Zone on Xbox One X is about to release. We thought we’d share some thoughts on what it’s like for us to develop for it.

With great power comes great responsibility

Danger Zone has been enhanced specifically to take advantage of the power of the Xbox One X. Microsoft talk about the Xbox One X by describing it as “the world’s most powerful games console”, promising to herald in the long promised era of 4K gaming. Does the hardware live up to the hype and did it allow us to deliver a true 4K game?

Developer’s Cut?

At Three Fields Entertainment we were lucky enough to receive early development hardware from our partners at Microsoft many months ago. We have been working since then on ways to use all this extra power to make the definitive version of Danger Zone.

Ignoring The Hype

So is the machine as powerful as they say it is?

In short, yes! The Xbox One X is, without doubt, the most powerful games console in the world right now.

Forged In Fire

For the first time we have been able to add two, user-selectable, performance modes to one of our games: “Best Quality” and “Best Performance”.

Quality Street

“Best Quality” not only renders the game at an incredibly crisp native 4K but also manages to add dynamic shadows while still maintaining a steady 30Hz frame rate.

Performance Management

“Best Performance” renders the game at 1080p to achieve a super fast 60Hz frame rate while still having GPU performance left over to draw our HUD and text at a sharp 4K resolution. The vastly improved hard drive also slashes our already short load times to be almost non-existent.

Optimus Prime?

In case you can’t tell I’m already a big fan of the hardware. It wasn’t all plain sailing though and getting here took a lot of hard and painstaking optimization effort to squeeze out the best possible results.

The Path to Native 4K…

Unboxing our first Xbox One X development kit all those months ago was an exciting day. I was excited by the prospect of getting Danger Zone up and running. Then we could start to see what we could expect to achieve. We received our hardware not long after we had begun development on Danger Zone on Xbox One and were already deep in the process of optimizing our physics CPU cost, rendering calls and GPU performance to target 900p at a solid 30Hz.

Chubby Checkerboard

Having heard all about the performance boosts that we could expect from the Xbox One X from Microsoft I wasn’t 100% confident that scaling up to native 4K from 900p would be achievable. I thought we would have to compromise with an upscaling solution, such as checkerboard rendering to deliver a reconstructed 4K image.

Sharp Objects

As with any new hardware we had teething problems getting Danger Zone up and running for the first time. Thanks to our friends at Epic and the amazing Unreal Engine we got over these hurdles relatively quickly and soon had an Xbox One X version of Danger Zone. Our efforts were rewarded with the first native 4K console game any of us had ever seen – the sharpness of the visual really blew us away.

Framed Out

Unfortunately the game was not rendering 4K at an acceptable frame rate. We had read about 4K gaming being around the corner for a few years. Now we had just seen what Danger Zone would look like at 4K on a games console. Thus, anything other than delivering native 4K felt like it would be a real let down. We re-doubled our efforts to find the performance so we could get there.

Full Transparency

By the point we had completed all our optimization for the Xbox One version of the game the native 4K target seemed a lot closer. Our biggest problem was transparency. Transparency is the ability to see through something to what is behind it. Glass and smoke (which we have a lot of in a game about cars crashing) need to be rendered using transparency to look right in game. Unfortunately transparent pixels are expensive for the GPU to render – not only do you have to render the transparent thing but also the thing behind it too, requiring the pixel to be drawn twice. It gets worse when you have transparent things overlapping one another which then require pixels to be drawn many times for each overlapping transparent thing.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Things get worse still when you start having complex effects like lighting transparent smoke. You see this on our Starting Line. This is adding even more GPU cost per pixel drawn. We have more than 4x as many pixels to draw as our Xbox One version. The GPU was not managing to hit native 4K. We desperately wanted to achieve this at a consistent frame rate. A lot of hard work and some clever smoke and mirrors (literally!) tuning to get the best effect for the cheapest render cost later and we were in touching distance of the target. The final GPU push for Xbox One performance got us over the edge and we had a native 4K game.

The Shadow Knows

Where the raw grunt and clever architecture of the console really did help was on the render side. Sadly we were unable to have dynamic shadows in the Xbox One version of Danger Zone. The CPU cost of dispatching the data to draw them to the GPU was simply too high. The faster memory and simpler hardware architecture of the Xbox One X meant that this cost was dramatically reduced. As a result in addition to running at native 4K we were able to turn on dynamic shadows while still hitting a constant 30Hz framerate.

Translucent smoke fills the screen overlapping a multiple other translucent effects and cracked transparent glass. A fiery nightmare vision of hell for a graphics programmer, “wow” for anyone else.

Speed Limit 60hz!

Having taken full advantage of the GPU grunt and clever hardware architecture it seemed a shame that we weren’t really making full use of the additional CPU horsepower at our disposal. Not wanting to rest on our laurels we set about seeing if we could run Danger Zone at 60Hz. We knew that we could comfortably run at 60Hz on the GPU if we rendered at 1080p, since there would be 4 times less to draw. We had also already done all the optimization work to always run the physics simulation at 60Hz, regardless of frame rate, as this gave such a significantly better game experience. Running some profiles we were still some way off a 60Hz CPU performance. The main culprit turned out to be quite counter-intuitive.

Lost Toys

From all our experience and all the advice we had received from expert help and talks at conferences the accepted way of making things run fast on modern console hardware is to go as parallel as possible. Specifically this means keeping as many of the cores on as many of the CPUs doing work for you a the same time as possible. A great visual metaphor from Danny Chen at Microsoft was his daughter’s toy box. When she put her toys away they would only just fit in – there were lots of gaps between toys but at least the lid would close, although sadly there was no space for new toys. When Danny cleaned up, being a king of efficiency, he managed to squeeze everything in with no gaps. Now not only did the lid close but there was space for even more toys.

Toy Story

In the case of a video game there is only a fixed amount of time each frame to get all our CPU work done. This is represented by the space in the toy box. If we can efficiently pack our CPU work in leaving no gaps on any CPU core then we can do more work in the same amount of time. This would deliver better frame rates . Or more features running at the same frame rate.

Packed In

We had taken this to heart in Danger Zone. We thought we had made great use of packing in our physics-based animation. This allows our car wheels to turn and the doors, trunks and hoods to flap when they are hit. We had made it hugely parallel, distributing the work for the physics animation. This was over all of the 140 cars we were simulating per level across all of the available CPU cores. Our performance profiles looked great. They showed we had packed work across all the CPUs. We felt very pleased with ourselves.

Parallel Lines

Unfortunately on closer inspection things were not so great. Firstly, the performance cost of dispatching all this parallel work vastly outweighed the calculations that actually needed to be done. Secondly, there was a bug in all this complicated code. This was preventing cars that were no longer driving or crashing being removed from the physics simulation. This was costing us even more CPU time for no obvious benefit. Thirdly, replacing all this complicated parallel code with a simple once a frame loop over all the vehicles to update their physics animation made our total physics cost much cheaper. This freed up a lot of CPU time to allow us to get to 60Hz. In conclusion then, challenge every assumption and really interrogate all performance captures. They might look great. It doesn’t mean that they are.

Doors, trunks and hoods pop open and unhinge as cars explode and crash

There’s no great power than the power of X

We are incredibly proud of what we have achieved with Danger Zone on Microsoft’s new hardware.

The Danger Zone Xbox One X Update is now live for Xbox Danger Zone . In addition to beautiful 4K visuals and super-smooth 60Hz frame rate the update also adds 6 new bonus levels. Players also get a Pickup vehicle.

Happy downloading.

Buy Danger Zone for Xbox One X here:

Psst! To be the first to hear our news sign up to our Fan and Press Mailing lists here. We guarantee we will always tell you our news first before we put it out on social media.

The post Danger Zone on Xbox One X – Development Postmortem appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

Danger Zone – First Update Now Available

Fiona — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 12:06:57 +0000

Danger Zone – the First Update is now availble to download.

Ahead of Schedule!

The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed that on our Roadmap we had planned to release new levels (on all platforms) alongside the Xbox One X launch next Tuesday November 7th 2017.

Halloween Surprise!

We find ourselves in the happy position of having all the content approved by the appropriate first parties and so the Danger Zone First Update will be going live TOMORROW, October 31st 2017. It’s tricky sometimes to be able to clearly say when our games will be available to download as we have to wait to hear from Sony and Microsoft themselves. Passing certification or “cert” is always something you aim to pass first time.

X-Cellent!

Which means if you’re lucky enough to already have access to a Xbox One X (ok so that’s probably only Press and Youtube/Twitch/Mixer streamers right now) you’ll be able to play the game in glorious native 4K(or 60 fps 1080p if you don’t have a 4K display).

It’s A Bonus!

But the real bonus for our existing customers – is that the 6 Bonus Levels will be going live at the same time.

They appear in their own Bonus Tier which is not tied to the existing progression so unlocked even if you haven’t completed the existing game.

A little Pick Me Up

And the new levels feature a new playable vehicle which is this new Pickup.

This brings the total player vehicle count to 7. Here’s the full line-up:

Not bought Danger Zone yet? Get it at these great digital stores…

To be the first to hear our news sign up to our Fan and Press Mailing lists here. We guarantee we will always tell you our news first before we put it out on social media.

And let us know what you think of this Danger Zone First Update – what else would you like to see?

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