Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/6960
Gaming n n n n e development of any successful game involves many of the same processes traditionally found in filmmaking. Games begin with pre- production, in which the game designers develop early concept art, come up with the overall design, produce early prototypes and 3D models, and generate elaborate storyboards to help chart the story arc. Once the development team moves into actual production, teams of artists not only must produce complete three-dimensional worlds, they also have to create the actors—the three-dimensional avatars representing both the characters that the game player will control throughout the life of the game, as well as every other antagonist, monster, bit player, and extra they interact with. Unlike films with physical sets and live actors, everything in a video game must be created digitally and the story and interactions programmed by teams of techni- cal and creative designers. Much of this begins by capturing the movements of real actors. Epic does all its own motion capture in-house, in a state-of-the-art mocap facility equipped with more than three dozen Vicon cameras. All the cinematic sequences in the games are recorded using real actors and physical props. Epic's animators then translate that data into highly pol- ished realistic scenes. While postproduction may not involve hours in a cutting room, it does require weeks of testing, bug fixing, and endless tweaking. Even when the development team goes home for the day, their computers continue run- ning 24/7, rendering models and scenes to be incorporated into the next day's production schedule. A group of 60 developers, artists, and program- mers were involved in the production of Gears of War 2, and they always seem to max out their hardware. Hardware Assist To live at the forefront of the highly demanding world of game devel- opment, Epic Games requires computer workstations that deliver both state-of-the-art performance and unsurpassed reliability. Epic recently began rolling out Lenovo inkStation workstations companywide for all its game and gaming engine development. e company first started using Lenovo workstations in March, co- inciding with its exhibition at last year's Game Developers Conference (GDC), the world's largest professionals-only game industry event. It was at that trade show that Epic unveiled the latest edition of its game devel- opment engine, Unreal Engine 3. One of the highlights of that release is Unreal Lightmass, a global illumination solver that produces high-quality lighting effects, including soft, highly accurate, and realistic shadows. For the engine's unveiling, Epic ran this highly demanding func- tion on a "swarm" of Lenovo workstations, utilizing a cluster of nine inkStation workstations, including a mix of D10, S20, and D20 machines, configured and managed using its Unreal Swarm technol- ogy. Yet another feature of the new release, Unreal Swarm is a massively scalable job distribution system optimized for high- speed networks of multi-core PCs. It transparently spreads applications, such as Lightmass, out over the entire network, harnessing the computational power of all the machines run- ning the Swarm Agent. "Swarm ran beautifully on the networked Lenovo inkSta- tions at GDC 2009," an Epic Games representative reported after the trade show. "Performance was smooth and consistent, and we were pleasantly surprised with how cool and quiet the server room remained throughout the show." Even on an eight-core system, rebuilding lighting for large, complex scenes is extremely time-consuming. As a result, in the past, Epic's designers were hesitant to try out different lighting schemes. But with Unreal Swarm, portions of the Lightmass computa- tion can be performed in parallel, distributed across the entire network, multiplying performance many times over and bringing extremely time- consuming operations, like global illumination, into the realm of itera- tive development—something heretofore considered to be impossible. Since returning to North Carolina, Epic Games' developers and art- ists have used the Lenovo machines to complete work on their new games and upgrades to Unreal Engine 3. For its ongoing development, Epic Games has standardized on the inkStation D20 workstation, each equipped with a pair of Intel Xeon quad-core processors. With the CPU's Hyper-reading enabled, each workstation can execute 16 simultaneous operations, providing a huge performance increase over the company's older workstations—a signifi- cant factor when rendering the complex scenes in a computer game, video production, or architectural simulation. Epic has already rolled out more than 20 of the new Lenovo inkStation D20 workstations and will eventually install them companywide. Epic employees use Lenovo inkStations to power all aspects of their work: creating 3D models and animations, programming the ac- tual game play and engine code, and releasing the latest build of Unreal Engine 3 to the company's many licensees. Development team mem- bers transfer hundreds of gigabytes of data on a daily basis. Epic's art and animation teams use Autodesk's 3ds Max and Maya, Pixologic's ZBrush, and Adobe's Photoshop; the cinematics department utilizes Apple's Final Cut Pro to create trailers, cut-scenes, and in-game cine- matics; and engineering and Q/A rely on Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008, Perforce's software configuration management system, Seapine Software's TestTrack Pro, and internal tools for gameplay balancing and stats tracking, along with programming tools such as Intel reading Building Blocks. "With Lenovo's S20 digital workbench and two powerful Intel Xeon 5500 series processors, Epic's animators are presented with a premier digi- tal canvas on which to test and refine their ideas," says Tony Neal-Graves, workstation segment general manager at Intel's Data Center Group. "It is amazing what one generation of Intel and Lenovo technology delivers. Epic can make virtual reality feel so real, it's incredible." e hardware combination is helping Epic Games and its partners to not only develop entertaining games with stunning visuals, but also enabling this technology to be leveraged in other fields, such as architectural design and more linear visual storytelling. Not bad for a technology originally developed for shooting aliens. n David Cohn, a computer consultant and technical writer based in Bellingham, Washington, is the author of more than a dozen books about computer technologies. You can visit his Web site at www.dscohn.com. LazyTown, Nickelodeon's award-winning children's show, uses Epic's Unreal Engine to combine live-action and puppetry with computer-generated content in real time. February 2010 41