Bringing SSX to Android Alex Aptekar, EA

Omar A Rodriguez, Intel

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Which AAA console title would make a

great tablet experience?

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It has to translate well to touch input

It has to be accessible, easy to play, and fun

It has to still look great with less horsepower

It has to be built on internal tech

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SSX is timeless and fun series!

SSX is a timeless, fun series that translates well into a touch experience.

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So how do we go from SSX console to

Android?

What are the technical challenges and limitations?

What are our goals?

Fidelity!

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Stay faithful to the core console experience

No compromise on gameplay – same tracks, tricks, feeling of speed

Look as good as the console version

From console to mobile - First steps

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Console to Mobile – Tech

What we had

Great in-house framework powered by

central tech and the dev community

In-house cross platform renderer

3rd party libraries (Autodesk)

Getting to mobile

Get the system and game Android

ready: compile, run the main loop,

load data.

Renderer and the shader pipeline to

run on PC with OpenGL subset.

Android code path to do the same but

with OpenGL ES.

Work with Autodesk or replace

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Optimization

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Tech Optimization – CPU Load

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Build in tools and measure

What came up on the radar

Ray casting for camera and boarder, surface analysis

Animation blending

Audio simplification, voice reduction

UI chatter (too much messaging between Scaleform and the game each frame)

You have 4 cores, use them wisely

Lua runtime, replaced with C++

Scaleform runtime: work with Autodesk

Tech Optimization – Graphics

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Tech Optimization – Graphics

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Rendering and GPU load, bandwidth

Shader optimization

Ambient occlusion, no shadows just yet

Binary shaders

Improved draw order to minimize overdraw

Terrain SubDs: bake them in

Render 500m in front

1 snow layer instead of 4

Tech Optimization – Other Considerations

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Build size, make 9GB smaller!

Compress media, textures, and cutting content

Memory, we tried but couldn’t compromise

Original Assets Before Optimization

Vast terrain size – Hundreds of kilometers of

trail

High-detail character models – Detailed meshes

and bone structure

Character animations – Complex blending trees

Integrated asset pipeline – Great tool, but

complex for mobile games

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Optimizing the Assets

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Character bone animation and mesh simplification

Reduced the bones in the character, head, and jackets from 300 to 150

Reduce the complexity of the meshes, while maintaining visual fidelity

Terrain simplification

Poly-reduce by 50% while maintaining mountain topography

Reduce tree and rock instances where they are not essential for gameplay

Sky boxes

Create a number of skyboxes instead of real time weather effects

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Redesigning for Mobile Experience

10 characters, 9 regions, two game

modes, equipment upgrades and

special gear for the regions

Extensive UI system

Gamepad controls

4 characters, 7 regions – redesign

around hardware and build size

limitations

Menu system remained, redesigned

for touch

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Redesigning for Mobile Fun

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Touch controls

Give your focus group a movie and see how

they try to control it

We loved the accelerometer, everyone else

hated it.

Offer two types of control schemes

SSX on Intel Bay Trail

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Our Hardware Target

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Bay Trail

4 core x86 CPU

Intel HD Graphics

System RAM: 2 GB

Enhancements on Bay Trail

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Intel’s CPU and GPU profiling tools

Android - x86 pipeline for our framework and 3rd party libraries

No CPU optimization was required, great level of horsepower

GPU

o Instancing

o 4 types of snow: interpolate between the types

o And more!

Bay Trail – Particles

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Particles: snow spray, falling snow, important details for a winter game

Bay Trail – Normal Maps

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Normal maps: now the light is falling properly, you can see geographic details

Bay Trail – Lights

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Lighting: we were able to have up to 4 lights per scene. Flare lights reflect on the

snow

SSX Mobile – Sorting terrain geometry

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The end result

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SSX on Bay Trail Tablet

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Ready for More? Look Inside™.

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Keep in touch with us at GDC and beyond:

• Game Developer Conference Visit our Intel® booth #1016 in Moscone South

• Intel University Games Showcase Marriott Marquis Salon 7, Thursday 5:30pm RSVP at bit.ly/intelgame

• Intel Developer Forum, San Francisco September 9-11, 2014 intel.com/idf14

• Intel Software Adrenaline @inteladrenaline

• Intel Developer Zone software.intel.com @intelsoftware

Up Next…

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11:30 – 12:30

Achieving the Best Performance with Intel Graphics: Tips,

Tricks, and Clever Bits

Presented by:

Blake Taylor - Intel

Thank you for attending!

Any questions?

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All the images are property of Electronic Arts.

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