Who You Gonna Call?
The Ghostbusters are back for an all new adventure! With Manhattan newly overrun by ghosts and other supernatural creatures, it's up to you to take on the role of a new recruit joining the original film cast of the famous Ghostbusters team. Equipped with a variety of unique weapons and gadgets, you will hunt, fight, and wrangle a wide range of ghosts, phantasms and demons in an all-new battle to save New York City from its latest paranormal plague. Ready to get slimed?
Utilizing the latest in multi-threading code development, Ghostbusters not only performs exceptionally well on an Intel® Core™ 2 Duo with Intel® Express Chipset G45 internal graphics, it scales to higher frames per second and amazing physics effects with faster multi-core CPUs, like the Intel Core™ i7 processor.
The jokes and warnings about crossing streams are inevitable, the sense of expectation building steadily, the growing interest throughout the gaming world predictable as the June 2009 release date nears. The Ghostbusters* phenomenon has spanned more than two decades since the original movie release in 1984, but the iconic symbol of the ghost-fighting team, the "No Ghosts Logo," is one of the most recognized emblems in the world. With the mantle of responsibility high, the decision makers at Atari turned to the talents of an experienced, savvy, game development company—Terminal Reality—headed by Mark Randel to bring the fondly remembered spirit-fighting troop to the screens of gamers around the world.
The Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers have been priceless in helping us improve our PC graphics performance. [Intel®] VTune [Performance Analyzer] was also used to help clear away the multithreading bottlenecks we were having on the Vista* platform, but not on the XP platform.
-MARK RANDEL, CEO, TERMINAL REALITY
In the process of developing the game, the technology pros at Terminal Reality recognized the potential of releasing their proprietary game engine, dubbed the Infernal Engine*, as a product. Atari's distribution plan for Ghostbusters*: The Video Game includes a bevy of platforms, a challenge that matched well with the cross-platform capabilities of the Infernal Engine. The game also extends the storyline presented in the original Ghostbusters movie and then continued in the sequel, Ghostbusters II, essentially representing the third installment in the series and incorporating script direction from two of the original cast members from the film, Dan Akyroyd and Harold Ramis.
The Lure of Games and High Technology
Mark Randel's interest in computer video games surfaced early and eventually led to an educational path that combined electrical engineering and computer engineering. "I had always wanted to write video games ever since I got my first Atari* 2600 VCS when I was in middle school," Mark recalled. "I saw a chance to go to work with Bruce Artwick, one of the computer game pioneers while I was at the University of Illinois, so I took the time to learn all I could about making computer games."
Despite the rigors of university coursework in two demanding fields, during the span of his formal education Mark also concurrently developed the highly respected Microsoft Flight Simulator* engine, a remarkable achievement by itself.
"Although my graduate degree is in electrical engineering," Mark said, "I did my thesis work in the Quantum Electronics and Ultrahigh Speed Digital Computer Research Laboratory at University of Illinois, which was then doing pioneering work with gigahertz frequency hardware. I gained a lot of experience—and a pretty good peek at what's coming and how computer chips, memory, and busses are going to interconnect with each other in the future."
His first commercial game release in 1995, Terminal Velocity*, became a runaway hit, selling more than a million units. Developing cutting-edge game engines remained a strong interest and a focal point of the development path at the company Mark co-founded, Terminal Reality. Mark's educational and commercial accomplishments have been effective preparation for understanding and exploiting the performance capabilities of new platforms. These insights are reflected in Terminal Reality's cross-platform game engine work—ranging from the parallelization of game physics routines for the Sony PlayStation* 3 console to multi-threading work to accommodate the trend-setting, performance achievements of computers powered by Intel® Core™ i7 processors.
"I really think in-depth knowledge of how computer chips work—from microprocessors down to the memory and I/O—has given us a distinct advantage with the coding of the Infernal Engine," Mark said.
PERFORMANCE TUNING WITH INTEL GPA
The release of Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) in March 2009 opens up opportunities for game developers to precisely evaluate and optimize performance for notebook computers and mainstream desktop equipment featuring Intel® Graphics chipsets. Residing unobtrusively on a network-based architecture, the two key tools of this solution— System Analyzer and Frame Analyzer—support DirectX* 9 implementations, with DirectX 10 support available before the end of the year.
The System Analyzer presents a broad overview of system performance, while the Frame Analyzer allows developers to inspect API-level transactions, offering details down to the draw-call level for each individual frame. Aaron Davies, senior marketing manager in the Intel Visual Computing Software Development group, described it in these terms: "The tool provides a performance delta between your original frame and your experimental frame, without recompiling code."
Intel GPA is available for free to members of the Intel® Visual Adrenaline Developer Program. For more details about the capabilities of this solution, visit: www.intel.com/software/gpa.
The Power of Slime
Give a group of innovative game developers enough processing power and a few ideas from a chart topping movie from twenty years back, and you may be surprised by what develops. In the case of Ghostbusters: The Video Game, the programming team at Terminal Reality started playing around with slime, the ectoplasmic tie that binds, and ended up with an addition to the game play sure to amuse and entertain.
Playable demos of the game at Comic-Con 2008 and the New York Comic-Con 2009 offered a taste of the game play built into the upcoming title, which takes place three years after the last Ghostbusters episode, an interval that has allowed technology updates to the equipment wielded by the ghostbusting team, including the familiar paragoggles, Pk meters, and proton packs. The Dark Matter generator includes a freeze beam and a shock blast. The Slime Blower includes both the Slime Stream and the Slime Tethers.
The highly destructible environment (made possible by Terminal Reality's VELOCITY* physics) also depicts creatures that are spontaneously assembled out of fragments of nearby objects, presenting a fresh challenge to game players. In demo presentations, Mark has commented on this feature, saying, "Anything can become a monster."
While on the demo circuit, Mark also highlighted a game addition called Slime Tethers, which allows players to fire off long, sticky strands of slime and hook objects in a scene—whether a bookcase, annoying pedestrian, parking meter, or street sign.
Heavy use of artificial intelligence is necessary to handle the crowd scenes, which can include as many as a 1,000 people interacting in the field of view and another 500 or so whose activities are tracked off screen. The realism of many of the catastrophic street scenes owes a debt of gratitude to the skillful artificial intelligence directing milling crowds of individuals.
Imaginative, innovative special effects, advanced physics, extensive use of artificial intelligence to control the actions of people within the game: all of these characteristics promise a lively and entertaining game environment that will introduce new twists to the classic film storyline.
THE PINNACLE OF HIGH-END GAMING: INTEL® CORE™ i7 PROCESSOR MAGIC
The growing complexity and increasing photo-realism of modern video games call for advanced platform technologies that scale to the processing demands. The Terminal Reality development team was so impressed by the capabilities of the Intel Core i7 processor, they created a number of pre-release demos of the game to showcase special effects and new features. Currently creating a buzz across the gaming world, the Intel® Core™ i7 processor Extreme Edition, the highest performing desktop processor on the planet1, features intelligent multi-core technology that accelerates performance in response to increasing workloads.
New features enhance the overall gaming experience, such as Intel® Turbo Boost Technology (to maximize speed for demanding applications), Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (for advanced multi-tasking and support for up to eight threads), and Intel® Smart Cache (to provide a higher performance, more efficient cache subsystem). To experience Ghostbusters: The Video Game in its best light, take advantage of the processor that has become prized and sought after in the gaming world, the Intel Core i7 processor Extreme Edition.
(1) Performance based on select industry benchmarks, game titles, and multimedia creation applications. Actual performance may vary. See www.intel.com/performance/desktop/extreme/ for additional information.
Adding More Threads to the Mix
Terminal Reality has worked closely with Intel over the past year to get Ghostbusters: The Video Game running optimally on a wide range of PC platforms. Recently the development team had the opportunity to test game behavior on the Intel Core i7 processor and put together a series of demos showing just what can be accomplished when a higher plateau of performance is available.
"We've put together some demos," Mark said, "that show what you can do on an Intel Core i7 processor that you can't do on any other system right now. We have specific demos with over 2,500 objects, simultaneously colliding and making great use of eight threads. Basically, I can't wait until everybody has at least eight hardware threads on their desktop or in front of their TV because the immersion—what's possible and what's going to happen in a game—is going to dramatically increase. The number of objects, number of characters, everything on the screen . . . It's like a glimpse into the future."
With Intel's help, we both took on the challenge of getting Ghostbusters* to run well on Intel® Graphics. This enables Ghostbusters to run on the widest selection of PC platforms on the market. The graphics only mildly scale back for this platform, but then can scale up way past what the consoles can do for those with SLI-enabled graphics cards.
—MARK RANDEL, CEO, TERMINAL REALITY
The collaborative engineering work with Intel included use of both long-standing tools, such as the Intel® VTune Performance Analyzer, and more recent additions to the software development products, such as Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA). Mark noted that during development, the programming team was encountering multi-threading issues under Microsoft Windows Vista*. The game was scaling poorly under Vista, even though it was running well under Windows* XP. Using the Intel VTune Performance Analyzer, the developers quickly identified and eliminated the performance bottlenecks. The problem, it turned out, was because of an obscure threading bug in the Ghostbusters code that affected Vista but not XP. The Intel VTune Performance Analyzer made it easier to pinpoint the bug and fix it.
As is the case with many game developers these days, Terminal Reality is designing the game to run on the widest range of platforms, including notebooks equipped with Intel® Graphics chipsets. The challenge, of course, is to expand the customer base to the universe of notebook users without dramatically compromising the quality of the game graphics when running on mainstream hardware, rather than tricked- out, high-end gaming machines. "Right now we're using the Intel GPA to dramatically improve the performance on integrated graphics chipsets. It's still a work in progress but we're coming along, and we're able to get a really good idea now of what shaders are taking a lot of time and where the bottlenecks are in the game."
"The goal, of course," Mark said, "is to have the game looking as sharp graphically as possible. I want to turn off the fewest number of details and preserve all the graphics features of Ghostbusters on the integrated graphics hardware. We're really close to being able to do that now."
During the tuning process, Terminal Reality provided Intel application engineers with the executables of the game. The engineers then used Intel GPA to gain a dynamic view of the execution of the game code—down to the level of pixels, shaders, and routines. Areas in which the code is taking an unreasonable amount of execution time are identified graphically.
"Not only are we able to see where the bottlenecks are," Mark said, "but we can even see on a primitive basis—a per rendering primitive—with spikes indicating what's taking the most time."
THE INFERNAL ENGINE GOES PUBLIC
One of the side benefits of the work on Ghostbusters*: The Video Game has been the realization by the development team at Terminal Reality that they have a winner on their hands with the in-house-developed Infernal Engine*, which takes advantage of multithreading on a variety of very different platforms—from the Sony PlayStation* 3 with its special-purpose units (SPUs) to the gamer's nirvana—a PC powered by the Intel® Core™ i7 processor Extreme Edition. The Infernal Engine, created to exploit parallelism and extend cross-platform compatibility to the widest extent, can be licensed from Terminal Reality in the second quarter of 2009.
The Infernal Engine combines rendering capabilities suitable to constructing photo-realistic environments; a flexible, leading-edge physics solution; and a powerful and adaptable particle system. The emphasis is on cross-platform interoperability and streamlining the production pipeline to boost productivity.
Why create a new game engine when there are so many strong competitors already in the market? "First," Mark responded, "I want to say that there are some very good engines out there for very specific purposes. The Infernal Engine is the fi rst engine that brings rendering, physics, artificial intelligence, sound, scripting, and particles together that runs on most platforms, including PS3, 360, PC, Wii, and PSP. Infernal was designed from the ground up to run major systems in parallel with the PS3 in mind. Once we had the PS3 working well with our multithreading model, the 360 and PC came together naturally."
"We also retained our original single-threaded solution to be compatible with the Wii and PSP," Mark continued. Specifically, the Infernal Engine does three main tasks very well in parallel, which frees up the main game thread for C++ game coders. Physics and animation run completely in the background, even on the PS3 system, where they run on SPUs. The rendering for one full frame is also queued up, so the GPU is never starved, and no thread is ever waiting on the GPU FIFO."
Joe Kreiner, vice president of sales and marketing with Terminal Reality, commented in an article for IGN.com, "Terminal Reality's Infernal Engine is a breakthrough in efficiency for game development middleware. Our licensees can leverage their work across more platforms, in less time, than any other engine—giving them a competitive edge critical for success. Our licensees get stunning visuals, fast time to market, and the support of Terminal Reality—one of the most experienced independent game developers in the industry."
Targeting Slowdowns—Intel® GPA Goodness
Investigating the reasons behind performance slowdowns is an area where Intel GPA excels, as the Terminal Reality development group and a team of Intel application engineers discovered. A recent engagement initiated to tackle performance issues in running Ghostbusters: The Video Game on computers equipped with Intel Graphics found problems with a particular scene in a library containing 200,000 books—each an individual object. Smooth game play became impossible during this scene as the frame rate dropped to the point that video playback stuttered.
The VELOCITY* physics engine runs almost completely in parallel. Every collision detection can be done on five threads. Every Jacobian calculation can be done on five threads, and the solver can be run on five threads, even with huge physics islands. Running a large island in parallel was a very difficult problem to solve and being able to subdivide it evenly across multiple processors makes it automatically load balanced.
—MARK RANDEL, CEO, TERMINAL REALITY
Disabling the Z-test allowed the development team to identify objects that should have been occluded (for performance reasons). Frame analysis of the library scene—made possible with Intel GPA—showed 12,565 Draw( ) calls (other scenes typically have about 3,000 Draw ( ) calls). Digging deeper to find a technique to suppress rendering of occluded books, single-frame analysis using Intel GPA confirmed the framerate hit in rendering the books; Intel and Terminal Reality began experimenting with a software switch to dynamically control rendering of the books. Further analysis with Intel GPA showed that the frame rate increased by 3.3 times with book rendering turned off.
To minimize the unnecessary rendering of books (without designing a full-scale occlusion culling system), Terminal Reality created a pixel height test. Objects that contribute less than a full pixel to the frame (based on test code run by the processor) are not sent to the graphics subsystem for rendering. Intel GPA offered a clear picture of frame-rate increases—showing a 2X improvement in rates. The final code implementation— informed by the frame data acquired by Intel GPA— demonstrated scene-rendering improvements between 2–2.5X fps in the level containing the library scene.
Better Graphics, Enhanced Physics
The complexities and expense of producing Triple-A game titles continues to grow, forcing game developers to choose platforms and tools wisely, adapt on the fly to changes in market sectors, and leverage innovations that help streamline production and exploit performance opportunities. Mark said, "Ghostbusters will have been in development over three years by the time it is released. Gamers expect more and more out of their title. When we started Ghostbusters, multiplayer wasn't very important, but we realized later on that we needed a strong multiplayer component in the game to be successful. The graphics bar for 2009 is a very high one, and we feel we have hit the bar for graphics and raised it considerably for physics-based game play."
Despite some good-natured prodding, Mark declined to provide specific details of upcoming projects at Terminal Reality, speaking only in generalities. "We have lots of cool stuff coming up in the BlackOps room of Terminal Reality," he said, "as we are already deep into development of the next-generation version of the Infernal Engine. Unfortunately, we cannot yet talk specifically about the upcoming advances..."
In the meantime, there is plenty of action and entertainment to enjoy in Ghostbusters: The Video Game, an experience that is a bit like taking a step inside a film and becoming a character along with the other actors. With snappy dialogue, smart game play guided by the latest artificial intelligence, groundbreaking physics, and special effects, Ghostbusters: The Video Game is bound to win over a whole new generation of fans and expand the expectations of the gaming community.
Intel and Terminal Reality are also cooperatively evaluating the possibilities of future game enhancements that will be made possible by Intel's next-generation visual computing architecture, codenamed Larrabee. "Once we have access to this new graphics platform," Mark said, "we are hoping to take our code base over to it and get some really cool results."
For More Information
To learn about licensing the Infernal Engine*, visit: www.infernalengine.com
For more details about the breakthrough performance of the Intel® Core™ i7 processor Extreme Edition, visit: http://www.intel.com/products/processor/corei7ee/
To see the Gamespot* perspective on the Ghostbusters game, go to http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/ghostbusters08/
For more information about Ghostbusters*: The Video Game, visit http://www.ghostbustersgame.com/
For benchmark data on the Intel Core i7 processor Extreme Edition, go to: http://www.intel.com/performance/desktop/extreme
For an entertaining retrospective on the evolution of computers, including notable games, visit the Computer Time Line, part of the Atari Archives, at: www.atariarchives.org/deli/Time_Line.php
For more details, go to: www.intel.com/software/gpa
