Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart's Rifts Could Have 'Easily' Been Done on PS3, Says TT Games Founder - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 November 2021 / 4,018 Views
Jon Burton, who founded TT Games in 1989, which was known as Traveller’s Tales at the time, in a video on his Coding Secrets YouTube channel claimed the Rift mechanics in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart didn't need the PS5 SSD and it could have "easily" been done on the PlayStation 3.
Burton says Insomniac Games was being "misleading" when the developer claimed the Rift mechanic "would not have been possible without the Solid State Drive of PlayStation 5."
"The way the Rift gameplay was represented before launch was pretty misleading," said Burton via VideoGamesChronicle.
He said what was shown was an "amazing sequences of Ratchet zipping between many other worlds all chained together into awesome action sequences" and in reality it was "mostly just cutscenes or very short sections of very limited gameplay."
He did add that he isn't saying Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart didn't use the PS5's SSD to do achieve the Rift mechanic, but he says it could have been pulled off on older hardware. He says it could have been done on the PS4 or PS3.
"Now, they could be using all kinds of Solid State Drive trickery to pull these off," said Burton. "But because it’s just one Rift and it always goes to the same area this can easily be achieved on older hardware."
"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."
"The important thing to note here is that none of this is optional, it's forced," Burton added. "This is important because it means you can pre-load the grind rail section while you are playing the speeder section. In fact, every section of this sequence is both forced and small.
"You only move across a very small part of the world and have very little ability to even move during this section. This means the game has the whole time you’re playing the section to load in the next section.
"So imagine the game has two memory buffers. The first buffer holds the section you're currently playing in. While you’re playing, it can load the next section into the second buffer. To transition between the buffers you can just have a very simple intermediate Void location permanently in memory to hide any swap-over glitches that might happen."
"I'm just explaining how other pretty simple techniques can be used to achieve exactly the same thing on older hardware," he said.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is available now for the PlayStation 5.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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That's a pretty damning claim. Doesn't make the technology used to make the rifts possible in R&C: RA any less impressive though. The PS5 SSD is still an exciting piece of hardware and I can't wait to see other ways it can be utilized.
If you can keep everything in DRAM, you don't need the SSD to load anything at all.
It's a pretty simple premise...
Even PS1 games like Final Fantasy 8 during the last fight with ultimecia had levels loading in during the last fight sequence.
This was all debated to death a year+ ago when the hardware got revealed anyway, it's not a new discussion by any means.
Wasn`t ultimecia battles sequential? So it had to at most keep the main data of the next level saved? Plus being turn based RPG (with lot os animation in between) and small enviroment arts? So everything was very controlled, when you go for the open world section of the FF games it had considerably long loadings for each battle you enter. On R&C there is more than one portal on each phase so you would have to compromise a lot on quality to have several levels loaded at once on the RAM.
Absolutely quality is the key thing here.
But if the Playstation 5 had 32GB of Ram and a mechanical hard drive (Or just optical disk only) it could do the exact same thing with the exact same degree of quality as it has enough DRAM to buffer the data set.
If we were talking on only having 2 or perhaps 3 worlds linked there quite possibly yes twice the ram would have same or even more effect than SSD (but would likely be more expensive).
2 or 3 worlds is a pretty arbitrary number to come to considering it's not based on anything real-world and thus factual.
The RAM acts like a buffer, the more RAM you have, the more time you have to stream the same amount of data from disk.
Sure it is arbitrary number. I was just thinking that the more worlds you will have residing on the RAM at once to do the mechanics the more RAM would be necessary (to keep the same setting on everything else), so without knowing the necessary data that would be on the RAM I guessed 2 or 3 worlds would fit if doubling the RAM (and likely since it is a lot faster and with less latency than the SSD it would be likely instantaneous travel instead of that small loading animation of couple seconds or more). Haven't played the game yet so I don't know how many worlds are linked into a single one for you to warp around.
Sure thing, will wait for release a game with these mechanics on PS3 or older HW, because the game he made certainly is enough proof of he being able to do what wasn`t done until now on R&C.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GXe0wKGjXg&t=39s that was designed to run on last gen hardware. Psychonauts 2 also has "pocket dimensions" that change instantly. And that is without even mentioning the PORTAL games, the original Prey, Quake III arena and Unreal Tournament, which already used teleporting back in the day, which meant what you saw on screen would change instantly.
Here is the thing: what he is saying isn't completely wrong, but he is forgetting about the new-gen factor to this. Could you do that opening sequence on an old hard drive in the PS3? Probably - but it would of course be with PS3 graphics. I always thought THAT was the point Insomniac was trying to get at with the SSD speeds: that only now could you stream in 16GB worth of data in 1-2 seconds needed for the graphics quality of R&C Rift Apart. Could you stream in 256MB of graphics (what PS3 had) on PS3 in a couple seconds? Nope - but as he was saying with the memory buffers, you would have the player in a scene with only ~100MB of graphics quality, while streaming in another set of ~100MB of data for the next sequence. So, again, that is SORTA saying this is possible, but with severe compromises along the way. But at the end of the day: he still sounds pretty salty about all of this lol
I disagree that he is sounding salty about anything. His point has nothing to do with graphical quality itself. As a developer, I'm sure he understands that the PS5's hardware is significantly more powerful than the PS3 and PS4 in every conceivable way, which allows for better image quality overall (textures, polygonal models, rendering resolution, framerate, etc). His only argument is that the rift mechanic, as it is used in Rift Apart, could have been done on older hardware. Of course that comes with graphical compromises because those machines aren't as capable, but that doesn't seem to be part of his argument at all.
Like Don's comment demonstrates the truth is it couldn't be replicated in the form that Rift Apart used with multiple instances , it's more involved than what he's talking about.the basic rift concept may have been able to be done in theory but it being practicable is another story .
Ps the deleted post was me hitting the delete button instead of edit.
I am not sure why people are referring to the visusls either. This is about the Rifts and many claimed was impossible to do on older tech.
It isnt only about having 2 memmory pools, because on R&C you arent limited to a single next destination, so you would need multiple divisions of that memmory all residing at once so several compromises would be necessary.
The Playstation 3 Mechanical Hard Drive was around 50MB/s in transfer speeds. Sometimes higher when doing a burst read. (115MB/s burst)
It can do 250MB/s in about 2-5 seconds.
Transfer rates however are only part of the story, it's latency, seek times and more where an SSD can truly show it's advantage.
The initial statement from Insomniac (taken literally) was that it couldn't be done at any level of fidelity without an SSD. Insomniac later clarified that to indicate that the SSD and next-gen hardware was required to do it at that level of fidelity. Both statements are referenced in his video. So he's rightly challenging their initial statement, even though they backpedalled (and in fairness to him, he acknowledged their back-pedal) as he himself had done a PS3 game with a similar mechanic. I don't begrudge him pointing that out.
I remember mentioning this in one of the many threads goopy spammed, that the traversal sequences seemed very on rails and limited in scope or movement. Nice to see an actual dev confirm. That being said, who cares? Of course Sony tried to sell their product. That’s what companies do.
He completely ignores the Blizar Prime section of the game which is two entire levels that you can switch between randomly. In fact it seems he did mention that section before but deleted and reuploaded the video because he was wrong about it. While yes the opening section of the game could be accomplished with smoke in mirrors because its a linear set piece, that's not how the whole game works. In fact you can travel between planets with the ship and skip the animation to see that the entire planet loads in an instant.
But the point remains that you could have done that on a Sega Genesis (or whatever). The SSD simply helps them do it at a higher level of fidelity. But Insomniac's initial claim was that it couldn't be done at all, which is false. It's just a question of what level of fidelity it would drop to on weaker hardware and/or without an SSD.
Interesting, in a way he's right, something similar could be done on Ps3-Ps4, but... the issue here is graphic fidelity.
sure, you can replicate Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart's Rifts Could "Easily" on Ps3 ... but with graphics of closer to "Star Fox on Snes" rather than the amazing display that PS5 delivers.
Insomniac's initial claim wasn't that the SSD let them do it at a higher level of fidelity, their initial claim was that the SSD let them do it at all. They did later backtrack from that claim. Both Insomniac statements are covered in the video.
Sure Jan
there would of been loading screens before loading up a level its instant on PS5
That's not correct, any more than it was correct that Blinx The Time Sweeper on the Xbox required a hard drive for its time-rewinding technique. The SSD helps do this trick at a higher level of fidelity. To do it without a loading screen without an SSD you just need to keep the next zone(s) in memory which would mean a lower level of fidelity.
Sour F**ker. Back to lego games for you!
dude has absolutely no idea what hes talkiin about
ps3 really? what a tool!
I mean he's been in the industry for over 30 years. I think he may know a thing or 2 about how games work. ;-) I don't think he's wrong though. Just that he should clarify that albeit some caveats like graphical fidelity, frames, etc it could achieve the similar results on an older machine.
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