Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart Mike Fitzgerald talks ray tracing, SSDs, and more

[Nightrider]

Do you have an example?

Spider-Man is an open-world title. We built all of this tech to stream that open world as you go through it. When you’re downtown, there’s not much Midtown in memory. You can see it from a distance, but then as you go farther north, we pull in those areas. No Ratchet game has ever been constructed that way. They’ve always been: here’s a level, load the level, now you’re in that level and you play it. But by switching over the Ratchet world to use that same streaming architecture, we can pack more and more density and content and quality in every corner of a Ratchet & Clank world, because we’re happy to ditch the west side of Nefarious City when you go to the east side, and that type of thing.

Obviously ray tracing is a big buzzword right now, but when you’re making a game knowing from the beginning that it’s going to be supported, does that change how you approach things like art or level design?

For the Spider-Man games, it was a lot of “This looks really cool, this will have a great effect on the buildings in the city.” That kind of thing. We had a lot of content that was in the first Spider-Man game that wasn’t necessarily authored to show that feature off, but we knew that it would be in Ratchet & Clank from pretty early on. One thing it does is, the artists know to put a lot of care into the material properties that they author. So this is a metal and it behaves this way, and all of those physical material properties, so when it comes together it fits nicely when ray tracing is turned on.

There are some big, obvious features we can see in terms of the benefits of the PS5, like the fast load times or the rifts that pull you into a parallel world immediately. But are there any examples of smaller, less obvious things that are cool or that you’re really proud of that wouldn’t have been possible on the PS4?

With the SSD, it’s easy to say there are no load times, and look how fast we can load this other area, but it has all sorts of knock-on effects. We don’t need to be as careful with how we package our data. All of the assets for an area don’t need to be collated on the spinning hard drive to get the right streaming speed out of it. It makes the game smaller on your hard drive; it means we can patch it more easily. That’s a nice bonus. We unload the things literally behind you from a camera perspective. If you spun the camera around, we could load them before you see that. That lets us devote all of our system memory to the stuff in front of you right now, that you need to experience in that moment.

The ray tracing is nice and shiny — well, literally shiny — and it’s very obvious when it’s working. But it does have a really subtle effect on the materials. There’s a part where you’re in the spaceship with Rivet and Clank, for example, and you’re not actually looking at a reflective surface per se, but just all of the metal things in that cabin, which are all curved in different ways, are all showing the effect of those characters shifting position in a realistic way. It takes us a long way toward getting the same feeling of an animated film. The way things are grounded in the environments, the way they’re animating with each other, helps us close that gap.

A nerdy PS5 chat with Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’s tech director

It launches on June 11th.

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