Interview: Lightbox Interactive’s Josh Sutphin

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Interview: Lightbox Interactive’s Josh Sutphin Explains Why Starhawk Is So Awesome and Only Possible on PS3

DS: It seems like with every shooter these days the lines are being blurred when it comes to being different.  For the most part it feels like everyone has the same game types across the board whether they are assault or capture the flag or domination (like the multiplayer modes found in the Call of Duty titles).  Is it easier to just go the safe route with what everyone else is doing?  Or are you gunning for something different?

JS: The safe route is always the easiest… but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best  . What we’re really focusing on for our multiplayer modes is making sure that they fit well with Build & Battle, and vice-versa. We showed our CTF mode at E3 and certainly CTF is a bog-standard game mode. The advantage to that is that everyone’s familiar with it, so it makes a great entry point for multiplayer Build & Battle.

And as it turns out, building your own base to defend your flag and managing your presence on the battlefield in that way is really fun! We have other game modes in development and while we haven’t revealed what they all are yet, I can say that each one is very distinct, and they all make it rad as hell to drop buildings on people.


DS: Gamers are probably some of the most passionate people around when it comes to their hobby of choice, and because of this it usually leads to some intense internet fanboy flame wars.  We’d like you to fan the flames Josh.  Besides the obvious (being Blu Ray disc capacity), can you name distinct reasons why Starhawk is something only possible on the PS3?

JS: Build & Battle creates a very difficult AI challenge. You’ve got all this navigation data that describes the world, which in most games is generated by some offline process at the dev studio that might take hours to run for a single level. You process all that data and package it up and ship it on the disc, and your AI knows how to run around that level.In Starhawk, you can drop a bunker in the middle of that data, and the AI has to know how to deal with that.

It’s a simple problem if all he has to do is avoid it, but in Starhawk he needs to also be able to go inside it, or climb on top of it. If you link a bunch of walls together, he needs to be able to figure out how to get around them, or what to do if you’ve completely blocked his path. It basically means that you, dear player, can completely destroy hours worth of AI data generation with a single building!

So we had to figure out how to generate that navigation data a LOT faster. That means gathering up a bunch of world geometry around where you put that bunker, and shipping it off to the PS3′s very-fast bank of SPU processors, and crunching those numbers in a few seconds instead of a few hours. There’s really a lot more to it than that, but at the end of the day, the PS3′s unique hardware architecture is pretty much the reason Build & Battle even works at all.  

DS: It seems like every developer out there is trying to make an experience for everyone.  Warhawk had a pretty steep learning curve for some.  Without abandoning your hardcore crowd, how hard is it to balance things out for the “weekend warriors” to enjoy themselves?  As people level up and progress how can that fun be maintained?

JS: This is one motivation for adding a single-player campaign, actually. In single-player you can set the difficulty level where you like it and have a good time. There are no difficulty settings for multiplayer: everyone’s out to get you, and nobody’s holding back. So single-player gives you a way less-confrontational experience, and it also gives you an opportunity to learn a lot about the game systems without getting headshotted and teabagged. We’ve also got the co-op mode for those gamers who like to be social, but are not necessarily super competitive or just want a less-stressful experience.

When it comes to full-blown online competitive multiplayer, one of the main things we’re doing is adding in a matchmaking system. Lots of our fans really liked that Warhawk offered classic PC-style server lists, and we’re still keeping those! But the matchmaking system gives us another way to get the right kinds of players in games together, especially for those players who maybe don’t have a dedicated server in their social circle. We’re looking at how other games handle matchmaking, where they succeed and where they fail, and we’re working hard to ensure that our matchmaking experience is as fast, smooth, and accurate as it can be.

Oh, and we’re fixing it so you don’t have to play for nine thousand hours to reach max rank...

http://www.dualshockers.com/2011/07/14/starhwak-interview-josh-sutphi/