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VGC: Traveller’s Tales’ founder says Insomniac was misleading about Ratchet PS5 rifts and they can be easily done on PS3
- Thread starter brokenswiftie
- Start date
The level geometry did change quite a bit not just the lighting, and a lot of the mechanics of Soul Reaver required moving between both worlds to solve puzzles to progress
And it did it on the back of PS1's 2x CD drive lol
The pocket dimensions are pretty standard portal stuff, probably not too different from what Prey did on the 360. Those big shifts are the bigger question
This is the gif - an argument can be made for the other portal jumps in game, but this instant (and others throughout this world) is the technical aspect of the game design in Rift Apart that couldn't be replicated on older hardware.
Yes but unfortunately you know most here won't bother to rationalize it. They just want to spit their hot take.
Because they're super fans and can't accept any sort of negativity towards their company of choice. This attitude is as old as gaming itself.
Maybe Insomniac was given direction by Sony to design a scene to show off what they wanted to market as something revolutionary? It's not like this is the first time that would have happened.
This was all about prerelease marketing and you know it. It's not like we can't find quotes by them stating that their SSD is magical and stuff like this can only be done on it. It's just marketing.
It's amazing to me we have people who continue to buy into marketing year after year.
Yep.
Yep, exactly. Nothing wrong with pointing it out either. Read the article to understand what he is really saying. Stop reading inflammatory headlines and accepting them as truth.
That's like saying that Shadow Of Mordor's nemesis system is possible on a ps3. You're technically correct but not in the way you think.
Honing in on if it's possible on older hardware misses the point somewhat.
The bigger thing is 'Would you design a game based around rifts without the SSD speeds?'. The answer is no.
You could hone in on a set-piece and say it could be achieved on older hardware, but that means very little practically.
The bigger questions are 'How much more time would you need?', 'How much more staff?', 'How much more testing?'.
You could optmize a room in Marvel's Spider-Man to have accurate reflections. You use screen-space reflections and cubemaps. You reduce the model complexity - and have mirrored models of Spider-Man and the enemies on glass. You could spend months ironing out the bugs and performance issues.
Could you do that for every room? No. Would it be worth doing it for one room? Maybe - a boss room perhaps.
What hardware-accelerated ray tracing enables is having accurate reflections for that room, and every other room - so you would do it more.
Would Insomniac invest the months in optimizing a single set-piece to jump between areas seamlessly? Maybe. Would you design a game around that? No - it would be a practical impossibility. That's what the importance of the SSD is.
The bigger thing is 'Would you design a game based around rifts without the SSD speeds?'. The answer is no.
You could hone in on a set-piece and say it could be achieved on older hardware, but that means very little practically.
The bigger questions are 'How much more time would you need?', 'How much more staff?', 'How much more testing?'.
You could optmize a room in Marvel's Spider-Man to have accurate reflections. You use screen-space reflections and cubemaps. You reduce the model complexity - and have mirrored models of Spider-Man and the enemies on glass. You could spend months ironing out the bugs and performance issues.
Could you do that for every room? No. Would it be worth doing it for one room? Maybe - a boss room perhaps.
What hardware-accelerated ray tracing enables is having accurate reflections for that room, and every other room - so you would do it more.
Would Insomniac invest the months in optimizing a single set-piece to jump between areas seamlessly? Maybe. Would you design a game around that? No - it would be a practical impossibility. That's what the importance of the SSD is.
Yeah but Ratchet does the Titanfall 2 / Dishonored 2 thing while also just straight up loading entirely new environments just as fast.
I'm not seeing any examples of the latter on previous generations without a loading screen or walking through a tight space and to my recollection the marketing around the game's loading was almost entirely focused on that element of the game rather than hitting the crystals and the same level changing into a different version. If you want to say there was less Rift full level loads in the game than the marketing lead you to believe I'd agree since that was such a focus.
You are disputing something else entirely, watch the video. He explains himself much better than that article does.
But in this case, we have a lot of evidence.
This guy is saying it could be done provided you built in the time and left space to pre-load all the new assets while still playing in the current level's assets. That's a completely different implementation to how Insomniac is doing it. In Ratchet their asset quality in a current level is making pretty much full use of the hardware, so they can't then preload a second level at the same time. Instead, they're unloading the current level and then loading the next level at record speed thanks to the SSD. That method absolutely can't be done on previous generations.
So for him to say "it could have been done by preloading the next level while still playing in the current level on older hardware" - no shit, Sherlock. LOTS of developers already did that. Hell, Jak and Daxter blew people's minds by doing it on the PS2. No loading screens during gameplay! It was incredible. But that's not what Insomniac is doing here. They're not holding back asset quality by being able to load multiple levels into memory simultaneously. They're using the SSD speed to maximise quality while still having almost instantaneous level swaps. The closest thing we've seen to this approach until now is in the notorious loading corridors, where a character squeezes slowly through a tight space so the game has time to unload what came before and load up what comes afterwards. If Insomniac's method was possible previously, these slow-ass corridors wouldn't have been so common.
Wow. What a shithead.
It would probably be better to not give him a platform and clicks here if all of that in the comments is true.
Yes! And star citizen could probably run on a PS3!
it just would not be the same project the devs envisioned to make with every downgrade imaginable used and scaling back that just gimp the vision.
it just would not be the same project the devs envisioned to make with every downgrade imaginable used and scaling back that just gimp the vision.
I think a lot of people accept that visual fidelity would make it infeasible. However It seems a number of people do think that the data needs of non-graphical data, for 'gameplay', are universally small enough that any dev team could realise any concept they'd ever want, on any schedule, with any budget, and buffer it twice or three times over in the RAM of a PS3, alongside even PS3-era assets etc. That from a gameplay perspective you could take the data related to any conceivable gameplay situation and apply 'portal-ing' to it, on PS3-levels of memory, and anything else memory wise is just useful graphical gravy and nothing more. Adding an SSD doesn't really 'free developers to do things', gameplay-wise, and ergo statements to that effect have been misleading.
Interesting if true, but there seems to be a huge amount of assumption there.
This whole thing reminds of this video i would see people from the xbox cant run rift apart camp bring up. I timestamped where he says its not possible unless u bought an ultra fast 3rd party ssd that can brute force it lol
And not to mention the fact that it probably could be pulled off on a PS3 with massive sacrifices and concessions... imagine the years of devs pulling their hair out trying to get this kind of stuff to work on older hardware.
Sometimes it's not that something "isn't possible on older hardware" but instead it's a case of "we didn't want to spend 9 months trying to figure this out so we cut it"
I still play mine fairly regularly and played thru R&C Into the Nexus a month ago. I can't imagine how much they would have had to cut back to add rifts, and the load times are already pretty long.
Exactly.
"The Pocket Dimensions are really graphically basic, and in fact just seem to use a lot of the same generic objects like crates that would already be available in generic memory.
"So it's pretty much a sky dome, a few small platforms, generic objects and nice lighting, so on older hardware it wouldn't take much memory, especially as it also uses the generic objects, all of which make it quick to load."
But in this case, we have a lot of evidence.
This guy is saying it could be done provided you built in the time and left space to pre-load all the new assets while still playing in the current level's assets. That's a completely different implementation to how Insomniac is doing it. In Ratchet their asset quality in a current level is making pretty much full use of the hardware, so they can't then preload a second level at the same time. Instead, they're unloading the current level and then loading the next level at record speed thanks to the SSD. That method absolutely can't be done on previous generations.
So for him to say "it could have been done by preloading the next level while still playing in the current level on older hardware" - no shit, Sherlock. LOTS of developers already did that. Hell, Jak and Daxter blew people's minds by doing it on the PS2. No loading screens during gameplay! It was incredible. But that's not what Insomniac is doing here. They're not holding back asset quality by being able to load multiple levels into memory simultaneously. They're using the SSD speed to maximise quality while still having almost instantaneous level swaps. The closest thing we've seen to this approach until now is in the notorious loading corridors, where a character squeezes slowly through a tight space so the game has time to unload what came before and load up what comes afterwards. If Insomniac's method was possible previously, these slow-ass corridors wouldn't have been so common.
I also watched Mark Cerny's explanation of the PS5, but thanks for transcribing it here. It is always important that information is made available from as many sources as possible, it only enriches the debate.
There are two points here that I want to emphasize:
1- We don't know how much memory each of these rifts costs. As the video says, these are snippets on rails that may well be just pre-calculated streams and that may be small next to the grand scheme of things. Eventually, to work with a slower load, it would only need the previous segment to be a few seconds longer. Most of the elements are generic and the excerpts are short.
2- Insomniac clearly made the game to work on PS5, using PS5 features. But that doesn't necessarily mean that this game couldn't be made on another platform if that's what it wanted. Many games were made thinking that the console has a HDD, but they could have been made unintentionally. Just like this game doesn't work on Xbox either, because it wasn't intended for this console.
A Soulsborne was never made on the PS2. That's not to say it was impossible.
You should check out Soul Reaver on ps1, you would be surprised at what a ps1 could do back then.
Soul Reaver was swapping between two worlds back on the PS1, but of course, Ratchet & Clank doing the area swapping with such high level graphics is what makes it impressive.
It also at the forefront of streaming the gameworld to avoid loading times.
On a goddamn ps1 where you average game had load times for most of anything.
It's also important to note that Soul Reaver did that while not degrading the game noticeably, it even a looker in its weakest configuration (I'm not even talking about the DC port here).
Are you high..? Your goalposts for this argument are jumping around all over the place.
To be fair, that's a video from three months before the PS5 came up. They're fully basing their discvussion on the pre-release stuff that this dev is pushing back on about the rifts not being possible on anything other than the PS5 SSD.
I'm not saying they're wrong - but it's an example of what this dev is saying in terms of pre-release statements, not proof of them being wrong.
Edit: re-reading your post, I think I might have misread it and might just be agreeing with you
Game development is wizardry and magic in a way. So much of it is smoke and mirrors to trick us into thinking a virtual world is normal and acting in a way out brains would expect.
R&C was very likely heavily influenced by what those guys pulled off back in the day.
As an example of limitations and work around, Resident Evil was originally supposed to be 3D, but they went with the hybrid 3D isometric view and prerendered background after they couldn't get the feeling they were working for with complete polygons. The loading times were some of the fastest at the time, and it worked creating a classic hit.
Wait isn't this a re-upload? Did he cut something out or change something?
I mean Blizar Prime alone should end this debate. It's an insane amount of data switched in the fly by the player.
I mean Blizar Prime alone should end this debate. It's an insane amount of data switched in the fly by the player.
Just loading the game from scratch proves R&C's tech. It is so fast that it feels uncanny. Every switch to a different planet proves it to. You can pick any planet, with different characters. It's what, 1 second. That is really unusual. I can't really think of another game that feels that way.
There is no questions, if the answer has to be 1000% exact. I love the SSD and don't get me wrong here... But on a PC with a truckload of RAM (64GB perhaps?) or more RAM this would be technically possible.The pocket dimensions are pretty standard portal stuff, probably not too different from what Prey did on the 360. Those big shifts are the bigger question
RAM has lower latency and significantly more bandwidth than SSD. So if you can keep everything in RAM such transition's would be possible and the kicker is even faster. Like literally instantly instead of the half a second to a second transition.
The problem... You would have horrendous first time loading times and a console with 64GB RAM would cost to much.
Rosebud Here is the answer.
Actually there were attempts. Just smaller in scale, due to the available RAM. But technically speaking he is right, lwao and Tiago Rodrigues. If you hold both levels in RAM you can easily switch. Let's say PS5 would've had 128GB of RAM... Ratchet would have easily work. It would have even faster transition than the real PS5 version, because RAM compared to the SSD had significantly more bandwidth and lower latency.
Make no mistake, having so much RAM doesn't make sense in a consumer product and MS/Sony were absolutely smart here. But a SSD at the end of the day is nothing special in terms of speed. It's the bicycle 🚲 in a world of Bugattis (RAM). 5.5GB/s bandwidth vs 448GB/s (PS5 RAM).
What's makes it special is the amount of storage and the price. But if the only question is speed, then RAM wins every award.
It works the same on every device. You keep both levels or more in RAM. Which obviously leads to a massive disadvantage on available RAM and what you can do compared to other games on the same console that don't cut the RAM in half, 1/4 just to do these rifts on a console without a NVMe SSD.
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I know where you are coming from and tend to agree, even if he is technically correct. But the question is and that's something only you'd know... How much RAM would a PS5 need to have to keep everything in RAM? 64-128GB? And that's not possible. I like that those console manufacturer put the SSD in there and made the usage of RAM pool more efficient instead of trying to go for significantly higher numbers. Besides, do I even want to know how long a HDD or SATA SSD would need to fill 64-128GB of RAM?
Funny enough, the CELL processor would have no issue handling R&C Rift Apart, it's the rest of the PS3's limited IO that would crumble.The PS3 after pulling this off:
He has an excellent YouTube channel called Coding Secrets, where he usually covers how he managed to pull off various graphical tricks when making Mega Drive games. So I guess you could say this is relevant to the theme of the channel, though usually he sticks to retro games.
People seem not understand what is happening in the game, there is a big difference between having two areas stored in the ram at one point and a portal swapping the areas instantously by loading the second area from the ram. The way ratchet and clank world teleportation works is by reading the second world's data directly from ssd within a second or less, the i/o complex is what enables such a behaviour to happen with such highly detailed graphics. Yes it could be achieved even on an hdd but you have to compromise the graphics or have a long loading screen simple as that.
A Crack in the Slab (Dishonoured 2) and Effect and Cause (Titanfall 2) both make far more impressive, and crucially gameplay affecting, instant level transitions than anything in Rift Apart.
Rift Apart does next to nothing with the dimension hopping in terms of actual mechanics, and it mostly happens at prescribed times and in prescribed places.
A Crack in the Slab is an entire mansion with two versions that you can flip back and forth between at any time to solve puzzles or evade guards.
On top of that you have a constantly visible "window" into the other world. In fact it's almost like both worlds are running at the same time, as though they are both kept in RAM, but if that were possible... you wouldn't even need to load anything in from some magically fast storage device when switching! Wild!
Effect and Cause similarly has two versions of the level that you can swap between at any time and with actual systemic effects on gameplay.
Can't imagine how they managed all that before the PS5 came out, real wizards over at Respawn and Arkane.
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A Crack in the Slab (Dishonoured 2) and Effect and Cause (Titanfall 2) both make far more impressive, and crucially gameplay affecting, instant level transitions than anything in Rift Apart.
Effect and Cause similarly has two versions of the level that you can swap between at any time and with actual systemic effects on gameplay.
Titanfall 2's sequence was entirely indoors iirc and not loading nearly the same amount of assets. I would not call that far more impressive, nor would I call it more impressive. More fun? sure.
Both of those careers would be highly lauded for a dog so it is really two wins.
That video aged like milk, considering Ratchet runs fine on a slower SSD according to one of the insomniac devs on twitter and verge testings.
Anyhow I think the developer from the OP video is missing the point really. Yes, he is correct. If you keep everything in RAM you could do something like this. But consoles don't have enough RAM for those Ratchet rifts. So without a SSD it's not possible on a PS5 with the RAM pool the consoles has.
It's ALL smoke and mirrors.
it's just that in some cases you can see the wires while the better wizards hide them well.
I find it a bit weird to claim that this could only be done on ps5 as it kinds of imply that the bigger factor is the ps5 adnd not Insomniac engineers.
