More on High Moon Studios’ Cell work shop

We’ve recently reported that High Moon Studios, together with IBM held a “Cell Summit” so that Vivendi-owned studios will be able to work better with the PS3’s complicated Cell processor. The results so far? Well, Next Generation was able to get and interview with High Moon Studios technical boss Clinton Keith, and he was able to reveal several interesting things about the things they’ve learned in that summit.

When asked what to expect from the PS3 when the complications are finally “unwound”, Keith said hinted that the PS3 has enough power to create environments and artificial intelligence rules that emerge with gameplay and adjust to gamer input. He explains:

Right now, the games youÂ’re seeing come out are using engines that are more in the traditional way of creating games, which is that your engine architecture has access to all the other parts of the engine itself. With the PlayStation 3, weÂ’re going to have to figure out how to divide up these things up so that theyÂ’re much more separate.

[WeÂ’ll have to] explore things such as “procedural synthesis,” which really has exciting potential on the PS3. Rather than creating all these environments and all these behaviors by hand, now weÂ’ve got a lot of this power, [so] we can come up with ways that the processor can create environments, and create artificial intelligence rules that kind of emerge with gameplay and adjust to the gamers’ input, so we can have a lot more variety. That could interest somebody with the concerns of the rising cost of development.

When asked how far away from now will we be seeing truly mind-blowing games on the PS3, Keith takes time to brag that they already have a prototype running on the PS3 that simulates liquid “like no one’s seen before” and that they’ve already built this small minigame that takes advantage of that.

Read the rest of the article after the Jump.

We’ve recently reported that High Moon Studios, together with IBM held a “Cell Summit” so that Vivendi-owned studios will be able to work better with the PS3’s complicated Cell processor. The results so far? Well, Next Generation was able to get and interview with High Moon Studios technical boss Clinton Keith, and he was able to reveal several interesting things about the things they’ve learned in that summit.

When asked what to expect from the PS3 when the complications are finally “unwound”, Keith said hinted that the PS3 has enough power to create environments and artificial intelligence rules that emerge with gameplay and adjust to gamer input. He explains:

Right now, the games youÂ’re seeing come out are using engines that are more in the traditional way of creating games, which is that your engine architecture has access to all the other parts of the engine itself. With the PlayStation 3, weÂ’re going to have to figure out how to divide up these things up so that theyÂ’re much more separate.

[WeÂ’ll have to] explore things such as “procedural synthesis,” which really has exciting potential on the PS3. Rather than creating all these environments and all these behaviors by hand, now weÂ’ve got a lot of this power, [so] we can come up with ways that the processor can create environments, and create artificial intelligence rules that kind of emerge with gameplay and adjust to the gamers’ input, so we can have a lot more variety. That could interest somebody with the concerns of the rising cost of development.

When asked how far away from now will we be seeing truly mind-blowing games on the PS3, Keith takes time to brag that they already have a prototype running on the PS3 that simulates liquid “like no one’s seen before” and that they’ve already built this small minigame that takes advantage of that.

When asked how things will turn out after the workshop and how Vivendi, High Moon, and IBM’s relationship will be after all of this, Keith notes:

I think that weÂ’re exploring continuing this on a more one-on-one basis. Right now, theyÂ’re coming down here and theyÂ’re working with about thirty engineers across Vivendi in a workshop and giving [Vivendi] hands-on experience with some of their tools that theyÂ’ve developed. Going further, I think that the work we do could benefit both IBM and us in looking at specific problems that weÂ’re trying to solve like procedural synthesisÂ… ItÂ’d benefit IBM to see the actual application challenges of the Cell processor.

In addition to that, we want to look at utilizing some of these blade servers, which are arrays of Cell processors. WeÂ’re doing things like right now, if we had a huge environment and we wanted to pre-light it, it can take half a day for a PC to cook that lighting to the level. The promise of these blades is that we can do that in a few minutes. We always say that the quality of whatever youÂ’re working on is based on how many times you can iterate on it, so weÂ’ll certainly come up with far better looking levels if we can rapidly iterate on things like that.

Well, good luck High Moon Studios. As far as how this supposed “procedural synthesis” turns out, we’d really like to see how it’s felt in games, and how it’ll affect traditional game design staples like difficulty settings and stage design.

For example what if that adjusting AI concept from FPS games – where the AI gets smarter depending on the player’s skills – is applied to platformer-type game that could take advantage of tilt-sensing, like say Loco Roco, and have the game environment actively get  change and be more difficult depending on the character’s skill. Imagine something like that inserted into a game like Prince of Persia!

To read the whole interview, feel free to click our VIA link below.

Via Next Generation