Resistance 2 unveiled; Set for 60 player Online Mode

esmufc07

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Ever since Insomniac finished up Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction and started on Resistance 2, we've been anxiously awaiting any and all details they wished to divulge. Well, it appears that the upcoming edition of Game Informer contains a huge unveiling of the game, and damn...the information will be enough to make you drool. Get a napkin, folks.

Much of the article is revealed in a thread over at the NeoGAF forums, and first up, we learn something we already knew- Resistance 2 will take place in the US. However, we weren't sure if Nathan Hale would be returning as the main character, and as it turns out, he will be (we knew it!). The game will also boast one story-based campaign - co-op for two players included - and a campaign for 8 players online. But speaking of online play, this is where the big news comes in. We at PSXE are big fans of the original title's online play, so we're pretty darn excited to hear about these unbelievable features.

While Resistance: Fall of Man can support up to 32 players online, Insomniac is taking things up a notch with the sequel: up to 60 players can compete on dedicated servers, with lobbies for individual squads. That's just insane. We'll also be getting a more robust online experience, as there will be classes (Heavy, Special Ops, Medic, etc.), "partial randomized geometry," and of course, the best stat-tracking anywhere courtesy of MyResistance.net. Last but certainly not least, the release is actually set for Fall 2008, so Resistance 2 just became an automatic Game of the Year candidate. No, seriously. It really, really is. We can't wait to hear more about this one!

http://www.psxextreme.com/ps3-news/2424.html

Loved the original, 60 players online though should just be downright crazy!
 
That could well be revolutionary. The first Resistance was simply Halo but not quite as good.
I think this'll be cracking game.
 
feck me! Are Insomniac simply just totally godlike developers or what? It's not that they always seem to produce high class and technically brilliant games, but they churn one out every year.

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60 player online? 8 player co-op? 60 frames per second! :eek:
 
Another FPS? Seems like 50% of the games on PS360 is FPS games.
 
Insomniac are a great developer. I love the newest Ratchet and Clank; it's easy to get into and most importantly, fun.
 
Richter said:
Hehe yes it is I just wish they made more games like DMC and God of War. Btw have you seen the Crysis rumours?

http://www.gamesradar.com/us/ps3/ga...&releaseId=20070209104752229059Gamesradar.com
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Yes, I've seen them. If it's true, I'm not sure how gimped it will be though. They will need the Cell to do some seriously heavy lifting.

God of War 3 is coming (SCE Santa Monica must be doing something). You have DMC now, and there is Heavenly Sword and Ninja Gaiden Sigma for more of that type of thing.
 
esmufc07 said:
Ever since Insomniac finished up Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction and started on Resistance 2, we've been anxiously awaiting any and all details they wished to divulge.
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Just one thing, Insomniac have two large game teams, and an engine team. Resistance 2 will have been in the works ever since Resistance FOM was completed. So, when released towards the end of the year, this will have been in production for two years. It will also be the third iteration of the "Resistance Engine" used in RFOM and R&C.

The reason why they can churn out such quantities of high quality stuff at these rates is because they have two game teams, they have their tool sets and engine locked down, with the engine team constantly improving and optimizing it. They do one hell of a lot of research on how to use the PS3 which is then shared across all SCEs 1st and 2nd party studios. Look at the credits for Uncharted for example, Insomniac is on them (amongst others). They have a web page that shows all of their research. I'm personally very interested in Mike Acton's team's work on Cell "shaders".
 
WeasteDevil said:
Just one thing, Insomniac have two large game teams, and an engine team. Resistance 2 will have been in the works ever since Resistance FOM was completed. So, when released towards the end of the year, this will have been in production for two years. It will also be the third iteration of the "Resistance Engine" used in RFOM and R&C.

The reason why they can churn out such quantities of high quality stuff at these rates is because they have two game teams, they have their tool sets and engine locked down, with the engine team constantly improving and optimizing it. They do one hell of a lot of research on how to use the PS3 which is then shared across all SCEs 1st and 2nd party studios. Look at the credits for Uncharted for example, Insomniac is on them (amongst others). They have a web page that shows all of their research. I'm personally very interested in Mike Acton's team's work on Cell "shaders".
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That is indeed the way to go. When I was working for a company in London, we only had three programmers trying to get to grips with the AGB, GCN and Xbox and it was very tough, especially since I have no personal interest in graphics programming (very much a designer/gameplay programmer), so it made it all the more hard.

With backing like they have, and if they can cover the burn rate with three teams, then that why it produces those kinds of results.
 
Redlambs said:
I really hope it maintains 60fps, otherwise I'd prefer it locked down to 30fps and be 100% constant. Looking good though!
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Well, those are 1080p shots there, we're not going to get that at 60fps, and there is too much AA in them IMO - publicity shots possibly. 720p @ 60fps seems highly possible, as they did that with Rachet & Clank. Maybe it will be possible to run it in 1080p @ 30fps as an option? I remember them saying something about they had to remove 1080p support from R&C close to the end because they ran out of memory. However, they are close to Naughty Dog, who in a recent interview said:

Therefore, every MB saved improves the quality of our game. We’ve solved most of our memory problems by relying on the SPEs to perform compression, both at load-time and at run-time, using techniques developed by ICE [Internal Naughty Dog tech team], SCEA Tools&Tech and the SCEE ATG group [I think this is Cambridge or London].
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You could see the streaming tech in Uncharted quite clearly. It never had any loading screens or pauses at all, although some pop-in at times where the texture didn't quite arrive on time.
 
WeasteDevil said:
Well, those are 1080p shots there, we're not going to get that at 60fps, and there is too much AA in them IMO - publicity shots possibly.
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Totally publicity shots. Everybody does it and gets away with it. In fact, if you've heard of a game called Wardevil (Digi-Guys), the whole thing is faked (shhh, but don't tell anyone I told you! ;)).


I've had many an argument with fools who would rather games run at 30fps and look prettier because they claim you can't tell the difference. I'd much rather 60fps with a hit on filtering/AA, but that's never a decision games companies take.


Up until recently, a guy I used to work with was working for SCEE on tools (he's now in Liverpool working on Wipeout). He's liking the system (and it's power), but it still typically has strange quirks which most developers will tell you is a trademark of Sony systems! So it'll be a while yet before the framerate tricks come to fruition.
 
WeasteDevil said:
http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/articles/0108/files/RFOM_Debriefing_public.pdf

Gets very interesting around page 31. So, they estimate that they were using 10-20% of the SPU/SPEs in Resistance FOM. I wonder where they are at now.
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Lots of big words to sound important (I've written development docs like it before, not fun I can tell ye!), but yeah 10-20% is feasible for a first effort, but I would hazard a guess that a team like theirs with experience on Sony API's (ugh) in the past would have been slightly higher than that.
 
Redlambs said:
Lots of big words to sound important (I've written development docs like it before, not fun I can tell ye!), but yeah 10-20% is feasible for a first effort, but I would hazard a guess that a team like theirs with experience on Sony API's (ugh) in the past would have been slightly higher than that.
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Mike Acton replied on a forum to questions about that...

Mike Acton said:
Don't read too much into it. It was just a very rough guess on how much SPU horsepower we could still get after RFOM (So, looking at it that way - The thought was that we could still get 8-10x as much useful processing going on to the SPUs) It's just a rough number based on utilization times- it doesn't have any accurate meaning.

...

Also, just to stomp this discussion - remember this is a description of what RFOM did for launch. Much has changed since then. Specifically, we are making use of all the available SPUs now.
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Redlambs said:
BTW Weaste, it's about $10k for a PS3 devkit for digital distribution (plus costs per download, hosting), if you ever fancy putting your wealth to good use.
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You got a very good credit line with a bank? Would love to get back into this type of thing, but a few blokes sat at home can't really do it anymore.

Maybe a PSN title.
 
WeasteDevil said:
You got a very good credit line with a bank? Would love to get back into this type of thing, but a few blokes sat at home can't really do it anymore.

Maybe a PSN title.
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:drool:

Actually, it's once again becoming easier to make games on a smaller scale and schemes like this (XBoxLive is similar priced, with the Wii version half the cost of those) help greatly.

If I decide to start prototyping a 3D game in the future, I wouldn't bother with any of those solutions at first anyway, I'd use a free 3D engine with the PC and focus on developing the game.
 
There were some guys attacking RSX to try and reverse engineer it through Linux (it's obviously not supposed to be available through Linux - Sony really don't want people attacking their hardware without a licence fee). Obviously, it's a closed shop again after a firmware update.

Shame really.
 
WeasteDevil said:
There were some guys attacking RSX to try and reverse engineer it through Linux (it's obviously not supposed to be available through Linux - Sony really don't want people attacking their hardware without a licence fee). Obviously, it's a closed shop again after a firmware update.

Shame really.
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Yeah it is. Mind you, they brought it on themselves opening up the PS2 linux thing! Gave people ideas :wenger:

I'm a huge fan of Sony and the way they try to boost the industry though, I actually came up through the Net Yaroze scheme (programmable PS1). If only they'd do something like that again.
 
I liked it when hardware companies basically did just that, made hardware, and it was open. It was the likes of Sega and Nintendo that kept it closed, whilst Commodore and Atari left their systems open (if you bought the hardware instruction manuals, you could do what the hell you liked and didn't pay them a penny). Oh the joy I've had trying to multiplex 8 hardware sprites into 128 without a single one flickering (obviously no more than 8 can be on a single scan line - well, not without going after a hardware bug).
 
WeasteDevil said:
I liked it when hardware companies basically did just that, made hardware, and it was open. It was the likes of Sega and Nintendo that kept it closed, whilst Commodore and Atari left their systems open (if you bought the hardware instruction manuals, you could do what the hell you liked and didn't pay them a penny). Oh the joy I've had trying to multiplex 8 hardware sprites into 128 without a single one flickering (obviously no more than one can be on a single scan line - well, not without going after a hardware bug).
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Hehe, lucky for me I only had brief encounters with Spectrum/Amiga work, I pretty much started on the Playstation 1 (but the bloody memory limits in that thing was a pain). Although a guy I used to work with used to like telling us how much the Gameboy Advance was like working with the good 'ol computers, he worked wonders with that Risc chip I can tell you.

Today's machines teach people to be sloppy with their programming, too much memory!
 
Did the Gameboy use an ARM? I'm just guessing?

Trying to do 3D without any 3D specific hardware was always fun, especially when the entire display was organized in bitplanes. Yes, that's right, 1 bit per pixel in 8 whole plane chunks (256 colour). Perfect for fast 2D hardware scrolling and mad parallax effects, totally useless if you needed to write to a single pixel, as you needed 8, yes 8 single bit accesses per pixel in a 256 colour display. At least VGA had byte level access (chunky pixels), thus died the Amiga.
 
Insominiac did brilliantly with the first one, multiplayer was absolutely superb and not once did I suffer from lag. How can they do 40 and 60 online multiplayer, yet the likes of Ubisoft and Konami struggle with their online elements?
 
Because Insomniac actually know what they are doing and are single platform at the moment (although I doubt that would change much). There are no game developers at the moment that can make the PS3 sing like they do, not even Polyphony Digital are close on the pure technical level.
 
esmufc07 said:
Well it just goes to show what you can do on the PS3 if you put the time and effort in. Looking forward to this game.
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It's not about time and effort, it's about the having the resources to fully focus on, what is essentially, an alien platform. I remember doing a report on the PS2 and whether or not we should work with it over the Gamecube or Xbox, and it was much the same with that.

The games will come, but much like the PS2, it may never really get to it's true potential, but will get close.
 
So how much of the PS2's potential was actually used?

As long as the games look and play as good as the likes of GTAIV, MGS4, FFXIII will do, I'll be happy:)
 
esmufc07 said:
So how much of the PS2's potential was actually used?

As long as the games look and play as good as the likes of GTAIV, MGS4, FFXIII will do, I'll be happy:)
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That's hard to tell.

Towards the end of it's life, people were still finding new filtering techniques to bring the games more in line with what the Gamecube could do, and it could have gone further. Unfortunately, the Sony consoles always have a certain knack to them.

GTA4, MGS4 will be bettered by both the 360 and PS3. I'm much more interested in what dedicated teams will do, and luckily for us the likes of Insomniac seem to have the resources to do whatever the hell they want.
 
Well, it's something to look forward to!

Imagine how games will look in 50 years from now, probably makes todays look like atari games.
 
esmufc07 said:
Well, it's something to look forward to!

Imagine how games will look in 50 years from now, probably makes todays look like atari games.
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Hehe, yeah.

Mind you, the leap will seemingly slow down as we get closer and closer to photo-realism. What's happened since the first space invaders game is absolutely immense.

As I think Weaste has pointed out before, it will slow down (or rather has done), until we hit the next revolutionary technology. At the moment we are beginning to get strained on what we can do with current theories. In which case, all programmers do what we always do: Wait till we see what Carmack comes up with next!
 
Well I don't have any knowledge of the technical side of things if I'm honest, so I can't really comment any further, but I do understand what you're saying, graphics are so brilliant these days that it is hard to see how they can get much better, despite HD being developed and getting even better than it already is.

Thought some of the facts in this article were mind-boggling.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7205338.stm

18 minutes needs 3.5 terabytes of data, ficking crazy!
 
esmufc07 said:
Well I don't have any knowledge of the technical side of things if I'm honest, so I can't really comment any further, but I do understand what you're saying, graphics are so brilliant these days that it is hard to see how they can get much better, despite HD being developed and getting even better than it already is.

Thought some of the facts in this article were mind-boggling.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7205338.stm

18 minutes needs 3.5 terabytes of data, ficking crazy!
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Certainly impressive! Imagine the resolutions the PS5 could hit with that baby ;)
 
3Sixty said:
This, Killzone 2 and Haze will all be so dope.

13th of June is alot sooner than i expected too.
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It's not being released 13th June, just an exclusive gameplay video will be being released. It is currently scheduled for November 2008 in Europe. Haze will be out 23rd May, and I'm not too sure on Killzone 2.
 
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