Thursday January 8, 2009 2:04 PM AEST
PC Authority > Features > Finishing touches go on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
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Finishing touches go on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Krome developed its own engine – Merkury – some years ago. What led to this point?
We had the Merkury engine from the very start of Krome. In some ways it pre-dates Krome; it was something that we had in place but it just had a different name. The idea was just so we had a simple language that would help the program work with the hardware better. Once we started Krome up and began doing multi-platform stuff, Merkury gave us the ability to work completely cross-platform. The engine side would handle all the platform-specific stuff and then we could just, say, put a model on screen and worry about the game side of things. We always just kept along that path from Merkury 1 to Merkury 2 - which was used on Ty and was the standard-def last-gen engine - and now we’ve got the next-gen version, which we call Merkury 3. It’s specifically for PS3 and Xbox 360. The other plus-side is that it works for PC so we can develop on PC, for console. We do our work on PCs for console, which gives us a flexibility that you don’t always get with other engines.
We came to a point where we had to make a decision when it came to next-gen – about whether we stick with Merkury or look at things like Unreal or some of the other engines out there. We decided it would make more sense to have more control over our destiny, as it were. So we stuck with our own engine.
How has the engine evolved over time?
It’s always getting new features based on what we need to work with best at that time. We might say, we need to use a certain kind of animation system or need to change the rendering pipeline a bit... With next-gen stuff a lot of work needs to be around shaders and flexibility is just so important. That helps us decide how we develop it because it really is about giving us more options. It’s not just about the programmers; it’s about the tools the artists also have now.
What we originally had was some basic tools for the artists - and they always worked - but now we’re pretty much doing most of our cut-scene work with Merkury tools. From the first Ty game to Star Wars Force Unleashed - which had 90% of the cut-scene work done – the engine has changed a lot.
How significant an investment is it for the company, in terms of resources that needed to be dedicated to it?
Our engine team is probably as big as some studios. There are around 30 people, split between Brisbane and Melbourne and Adelaide working on it. These are some real smart guys working on the engine across the board. It’s a huge investment on our part but it pays off when it comes to develop games.
You mentioned the possibility of Krome looking at other engines. Has there been any interest in other companies using the Merkury engine?
We have been approached on occasion and it’s something we may look at more in the future but we want to get it to the stage where we’re really happy with it internally first. We also want to get all our tools really polished first as well. Engines can fall down depending on where its tools are. It’s about letting the artists and programmers have all the access to the technical stuff, so they can make games as good as they can possibly be. How the tool set interfaces with the code is important, and we’re focussing on that.
When it comes to laymen, how do you describe what a game engine is?
It’s basically the film, if you will, the medium that you make the game on. If you’re making a movie you’d say you’re working with film or video, and that’s what you’re putting your story on so that it can be transported around. Actually, film may not be the best example. It’s more like the building blocks of putting a game together. A Lego set... that’s probably a better metaphor. There are all these pieces you can use and the program is about working out which piece you might need to do a certain thing. The base level engine lets the game coder talk with the hardware.
Can you share some of the more specific performance aspects of the engine? Does it handle particular things well?
Merkury’s biggest strong point is that it’s a jack of all trades. It can do a lot of everything pretty decently. I wouldn’t say it does it super-better over anything else but the sheer amount of possibilities that you have with Merkury and what it can handle is huge. We’ve used it on every single game we’ve done so you’ve got games going through Ty and surfing, through Hellboy and Star Wars. It’s a pretty powerful engine; it’s not tied down to anything in particular. It lets us do what we want to do, so that flexibility is its biggest strength.
You said all the work is done on PC first...
Everyone (here) has a PC platform they can run and that helps us get the feel right when we’re playing the game. Everything from that point, where we want to check it out on a console, gives us a faster turnaround. If you’re making it for console, you want to move it across as fast as you can because obviously the controller and frame rate and those things are all very different to PC. But doing it that way gives us quick feedback and turnaround on stuff.
What do you think about AMD working with Havoc to optimise their CPUs for Havoc’s physics engine?
Yeah, that’s pretty cool. It sounds sort of like the PhysX stuff that nVidia is doing. I’m a real physics convert. A couple of years ago I’d be going, why? But after spending the past two years working on Unleashed, which is a lot about physics and stuff, it’s given me a lot of new whole new in terms of what you can do with physics within games. The more PC stuff out there that supports it, the better.
So you see these sorts of co-operative things happening more within game development?
I hope so. I mean, it’s good for the industry in that as a games designer, it gives you more tools to play with. PCs being able to handle physics better is obviously a good thing, and I think consoles will follow soon after because there’s always a better way to do things that’s also faster. The more these companies talk to one another the better because we’re all trying to make games.
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