Q&A: Criterion talks Xbox, PlayStation 2, and GameCube

With development costs for next-generation software going through the roof, it's high time for middleware developers like Criterion to step to the fore. The RenderWare set of tools for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube provide a backbone that developers may build upon while providing enough headroom for them to be creative. The result is more free time to polish games and less time wrangling with hardware, hoping to achieve desired results. With well more than 200 developers already using Criterion's RenderWare to develop next-generation console games, many will never realize that the company has had such a big part in bringing next-generation content into homes around the globe.

Companies such as Konami (Winning Eleven 5) and Ubi Soft (Rayman Revolution) have already released games developed with RenderWare, and there are plenty more coming down the pipe. Criterion recently attended the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, where it showed a demo running on the Xbox rendition of its RenderWare program. Steve Smith, director of business development at Criterion, and Adam Billyard, CTO of Criterion, took the time to speak with us about the growing importance of middleware in next-generation game development and the features that make its RenderWare tools the middleware of choice among game developers both large and small.

GameSpot: Has the process of merging RenderWare and Maya [Alias Wavefront's Modeling Program] been completed yet?

Steve Smith: We actually have had a Maya plug-in for some time. Basically, we work with whomever our customers are interested in working with. What we're talking about is a closer relationship with the Maya team to make sure that we get all the features that game developers are using in Maya into RenderWare.

GS: Will the two systems continue to function independently of each other?

Adam Billyard: It's not taking two products and putting them into a melting pot and melting them down into one sort of blob. It's not that. The issue with developers is that they want to see in the modeler what they're going to get in their game. They don't want to start doing crazy things in the modeler and then find that they don't run properly. Using RenderWare, they're sure that the stuff they generate is going to look exactly as they see in the modeler as in the real-time engine.

RenderWare gives you the ability to upload custom vertex shaders and pixel shaders that were created outside RenderWare. The reason we've had so much success with the developers is that we haven't made middleware some sort of [cap] over top of the hardware. It just doesn't work for anyone. On one hand, you have to leverage all the high-level value adds that we can do with tool chains to make them very fast to develop games but also [have to] allow people, if they want to, to get down to the metal. It's quite a balancing act to make sure we're not making it something that runs your game, and you can't change it. This is what distinguishes Criterion's RenderWare from other high-level offerings.

GS: A common fear with middleware is that all games created using it end up looking the same. But what you're saying is that RenderWare has some room for experimentation so that crafty developers can get more out of it. Is that correct?

AB: Oh yeah. Very much so. For example, if you take a straight engine and essentially do a mod and you steal or borrow textures that came with the original game, then I think there's a strong argument that those additional mods end up looking the same as the original game. Whereas, with RenderWare, you're only limited by what you can expect within the modelers. With the huge amount of experience that the Maya guys bring, they've got all sorts of animation tools, texture placement tools, and multipassing tools that we can bring straight into RenderWare.

SS: And no one particular genre, either. We were shown sports titles, extreme sports titles, platformers, everything.

GS: How much time can a developer save using RenderWare to develop a game?

AB: The interesting thing is that people thought they could license our technology and it would significantly reduce their time to market. While we certainly have extraordinary examples of people getting things out very quickly using RenderWare, in general, our experience has been that it won't actually save you a great deal of time. What it does do is that after a month of starting a game, you've got something up and running on the platform you're going to deliver on. You spend the entire time focused on making the game good. Once you have 250 to 300 development teams around the world feeding information back into a software base, it gets good extremely fast. The huge difference is that people really get to focus on the game rather than getting the technology to go.

SS: Most of our developers feel like they do save a lot of time in getting their original prototypes up and running. Instead of working on the technology, they can prototype their game and have something to show to the publisher to get a feel for the response in a matter of months. Instead of trying to ship in 12 months, they try to keep to the 18-month schedule and spend that time working on content and making the game look and play really great. You can really see that in the games we showed at the Game Developers Conference, and we're going to show some more at E3 as well.

AB: At GDC, we were talking about technology, and at E3, you're going to see a lot of games. I know from our support department that there are a lot of people gearing up to show some pretty groovy games.

SS: Our original licensees are just now getting to the point where they're going alpha. Over time, we're going to have a lot of stuff to show. We just wish we could show you some of the things that are going on with RenderWare.

GS: I wish you could too!

[laughter]

GS: How many developers are currently using RenderWare to develop next-generation console games?

SS: We have 250-plus studios that have licensed RenderWare. And that's a moving target. There are 100-plus titles in development. There's somewhere around 70 PlayStation 2 titles in development, so we have a huge installed base.

GS: I know you've announced RenderWare support for the Xbox and PlayStation 2. How would you characterize your work with GameCube? Have you had a chance to even start on it yet?

AB: One thing I'm going to say is have you ever met any of the lawyers from Nintendo?

[laughter]

GS: No, but I've heard a lot of stories.

AB: They have a special thing called personal liability. They don't come after the company, they come after me. Which is lovely.

[laughter]

GS: So what you're saying is you can't talk about anything GameCube related.

AB: Wait for E3, I think.

GS: Between the Xbox and PlayStation 2, how has your experience been working with each development kit?

AB: I think very good. Our philosophy is that you play to the strengths of the platform. We have individual teams that basically work on just one platform. We have Xbox guys, we have PS2 guys, and we have other platform guys, and that's all they do. Each of these platforms has their strengths and weaknesses. The key thing is that what RenderWare provides is a common platform to make it easy to move games across to different platforms. We provide functionality on Xbox that you can't get on PS2, and on PS2, we supply functionality you can't get on Xbox. There are some very cool tricks you can pull on these platforms, and the important thing for our customers is that you do the kind of cool tricks that they would have done themselves.

GS: Was the Xbox demo Criterion shown at GDC an actual game in development?

AB: What we really wanted to show was just proof of RenderWare running on Xbox. It's not a game, it's basically artwork that we knocked up here. The Xbox XDK is very much ongoing work. We just wanted to show a couple of key things from an engineering point of view. It demonstrates RenderWare's ability to upload vertex and pixel shaders on Xbox. One of the tricky things is that Microsoft and Criterion are well aware that what we're using are development kits, which are significantly lower performance than they know the final hardware will be.

GS: Does Microsoft know when it's going to ship out the final Xbox development kits?

AB: I'm sure they know.

GS: But they haven't told you?

AB: We're basically using the time to iron out the bugs and the issues using the development kits. It's important to emphasize that this is just a piece of hardware that's clocked at a lower rate. These are the development platforms all developers are using for Xbox. On the one hand, it could be misleading getting into numbers and stuff. But just the central character [in the Criterion Xbox demo] had 20,000 skinned, boned, lit polygons. If you consider that current generation games will have three to 4,000 polygons per character, Xbox really does push an awful lot of polygons. There's no doubt about it.

GS: What are the specs for your Xbox demo?

AB: From Microsoft's point of view, they are much keener on giving figures out for final hardware than for what is essentially a dev kit that will be superceded once they come out of the gate.

GS: Will development houses working on the Xbox XDKs have to repeat a lot of work once the final development kits are released?

AB: To the degree that once the final hardware comes out, it will be able to push a lot more pixels and vertices--I think the developers do have to be aware of that. The RenderWare XDK can help here because we have such great export paths. Yes, it can draw a lot of polygons, but the real key is being able to bring technology that allows you to do smart scene management. For example, we recently hooked up with the guys from Hybrid, who do some interesting acclusion culling. If you're standing in front of a door, [the game engine] will draw pretty much nothing on the other side of the door, and if you open the door just a little crack, it will just draw the polygons you can see through that crack. If you're not doing intelligent culling, it means that you can still bring hardware like this to its knees. In our view, it's very much the wave of the future. You want to use those millions of polygons to do incredible detail of the things you can see, not of the things you can't see.

SS: That brings up a larger point about the RenderWare architecture. It is something that third parties can plug technology into. It's not a closed development system. We're open to working with third parties, so some of this great technology you see developed by third parties is going to end up as RenderWare plug-ins.

GS: What do you expect to show at E3?

SS: We're going to be primarily showing PlayStation 2 games because it's been on the market longer, and the guys have had the hardware longer. But that's not to say that we are PlayStation 2-centric. We are platform agnostic. It's just that those games are a little farther along, so they make for better demos.

AB: Another key thing is for us, Microsoft, and the developers--until we get final hardware, it's a bit tricky. You know the deal. You put your game on display, and people look at it and criticize it. So people are concerned because they want their game to be seen in the best light. And that clearly means final hardware, really.

GS: Thank you for taking the time out of your day to speak with us.