Last year’s Spider-Man on PS4 offers one of the most sprawling recreations of Manhattan ever realised in a video game. Not only is the city huge, but so are some of the interiors of the buildings that you get to explore. The studio recently shared one of the camera tricks that helped the team to cleverly transition between the two.
Yesterday evening Elan Ruskin, senior engine programmer at Insomniac, shared a clip of what’s happening in the game at the start of the very first mission. When Spider-Man gets to a checkpoint outside Fisk Tower, a short scene starts up in which NYPD Captain Yuri Watanabe fills Spidey in on what’s going on.
Normally, players can only see what’s immediately going on in front of Fisk Tower, but Ruskin captured footage of what’s happening in the rest of the game’s world during those moments. Turns out that, in the unseen background, the rest of Manhattan depopulates while the interior of Fisk Tower begins loading.
During the approximately 30 seconds between when players finish web-slinging to the mission point and when they actually get inside Fisk Tower, the game’s resources go from supporting a big open world to detailing the elaborate halls and air duct paths of the Fisk building.
In order to hide what’s going on from players, though, Insomniac keeps the in-game camera focused firmly on the front of the building, with backgrounds behind characters pushed out of focus.
“The interior space is much larger than the exterior envelope, and too big to hold in memory at the same time as Manhattan,” Ruskin wrote. “So we use some careful camerawork to hide the swap!”
Also from our #GDC19 tech postmortem: the transition into Fisk Tower in #SpiderManPS4‘s intro mission. The interior space is much larger than the exterior envelope, and too big to hold in memory at the same time as Manhattan. So we use some careful camerawork to hide the swap! pic.twitter.com/Ur53ZSVGr8
— Elan Ruskin (@despair) April 22, 2019
Lots graphically intensive games, including Spider-Man, sometimes deploy bespoke but drawn-out animations to slow things down and help mask the load times that are going on in the background. This Fisk tower example shows how gracefully that job can be done, so much so that you probably won’t even notice what the developers have done.
Instead, the scene just feels extra cinematic and impactful as the camera tracks Spider-Man webbing his way into one of the upper floors to take down the bad guys.
If recent remarks by PlayStation’s Mark Cerny are to be believed, tricks like this might not even be necessary in the next hardware generation. In a behind-closed-doors demo for Wired, Cerny showed Spider-Man running on an ostensible PS5 with solid state drive technology that appeared to reduce load times to the point where it was possible to fast travel in less than a second and speed across the map at roughly the speed of a fighter jet.
Comments
3 responses to “Insomniac Reveals One Of The Camera Tricks That Makes Spider-Man’s World Feel So Big”
The outside world didn’t feel all that big, it weirded me out how small a lot of buildings were, especially land marks, real and MU.
I know it’s a tactic used in a lot of open world city games but it just stood out to me in Spidey.
I know what you mean, it felt like that to me too at the beginning. I think it felt that way because of Spidey’s web-slinging. If you run at street level it changes your perspective.
I found the web swinging kept your attention off size issues and it certainly was less obvious on the ground, so perspective and ground distractions are definitely a major factor.
It was actually the roof tops themselves that got me started on building sizes and spending too much time wandering around them trying to figure out what would actually fit in each one.
Wasn’t every building, NY is a very condensed city and there was a clear focus on detail over size but when you stumble in a filler building box it stood out a lot.
I still enjoyed the game immensely and it sat at the top of my list of best games for the year (and surprisingly my biggest disappointment too in a weird and completely personal way)