Intel Graphics Performance Analyzers

NETDEVIL, BASED IN LOUISVILLE, COLORADO, IS ONE OF THOSE FAIRY TALE SOFTWARE DEVELOPER STORIES:

Guys who love games start company in basement; work hard; move upstairs to spare bedroom; attempt to save universe. Well, one universe, anyway. That would be LEGO® Universe, the online game the company recently released in collaboration with the LEGO Group of Billund, Denmark, and NetDevil’s parent company, Gazillion Entertainment. LEGO Universe is a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game that takes place in an alternate universe populated by LEGO Minifigures. Players must protect the final existing vestiges of pure imagination from extinction—clearly a worthwhile quest. Also, very probably, a useful skill in life outside the MMO gaming environment.

Saving the Universe, One Brick at a Time

What sets LEGO Universe apart from most other MMOs is its audience, a posse largely comprising eight-year-olds and older playing on hand-me-down desktop systems or inexpensive netbooks. It’s a great niche and a natural target for the LEGO Group, but the age of the fan base and the limitations of their game play hardware conjure a host of technical and functional challenges.

LEGO Universe was the LEGO Group’s first foray into the MMO space, and to address the challenges it faced it needed the right partner. Enter NetDevil. The company cut its teeth in the MMO gaming industry 13 years ago, when founders Scott Brown, Peter Grundy, and Ryan Seabury collaborated on their first title, Jumpgate®. In its time, Jumpgate broke ground in the MMO space, raising the bar in terms of online action game play. Today, NetDevil is pushing the boundaries of MMO development by pioneering technology that optimizes the user experience on legacy and low-end hardware. Working closely with Gazillion’s cutting-edge Platform Compatibility Labs, the developers are striving to extend the game’s reach to as broad an audience as possible.

Erik Urdang, NetDevil’s technical director for LEGO Universe, is in charge of devising engineering strategy that delivers a superlative user experience, while leveraging all the game play a particular player’s platform can deliver. “We’re aiming at youngsters with LEGO Universe, so we are unswervingly dedicated to having a very low minimum specification for the hardware required to play the game,” said Urdang. “Kids don’t usually get new computers; they get their parents’ old computers. So our target market may be playing on computers that were manufactured three, four, or five years ago. We are also able to run well on netbooks. We’ve made that a priority because they are starting to come to a price point that is very affordable for families.

“This focus on broad compatibility makes our development process demanding because we have a very lush, beautiful 3D world with large, open spaces. You can move wherever you want; you can control the camera. And fairly uniquely, I think, we support user-generated content by basically providing unlimited opportunity for players to build whatever they want in their own property. Their creations are persistent, so kids can build for a while, go to bed, and wake up the next morning and build some more. Supporting a game environment this visual, this complex, and this endlessly dynamic on low-end, legacy platforms turns out to be an extremely complex undertaking.”

Engineering for Small

Predictably, this kind of application architecture calls for fierce software development skills, and serious heavy-lifting tools. Urdang, who studied computer science at both Columbia and Yale and specialized in artificial intelligence and spatial reasoning, is supremely focused on both the development process and the tools. “We develop most of our game code in C++ using Visual Studio*. Each engineer has a pretty high-end Velocity Micro workstation. To get quick build speeds, we use build servers and automate the process using Cruise Control. We also use a number of third-party tools and middleware elements that allow us to concentrate on creating the game experience. For example, we are using Intel’s Havok for game physics like collision detection and for navigation mesh generation. Havok also gives us a good tool for moving non-player characters around in the game environment. You know, like monsters or vendors or Professor Bricklayer’s dog, M.U.T.T.—the little AI-controlled guys that walk around in the game that aren’t other people. One of my favorite things about Havok is that it is very easily integrated with the Lua scripting language and a lot of game developers on our team make use of that tool.”

One technique that NetDevil and Gazillion have raised to an art form is the use of the Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) to assess compatibility. Intel GPA helps the team optimize for best play across platforms and rapidly pinpoint the causes of performance degradation. “The Intel® tool that we use more than anything else is the [Intel] GPA, and we use it extensively,” said Urdang. “Here’s why: Most people, when you talk to them about rendering a universe made of LEGO bricks, say ‘Oh, that should be easy. How hard is it to draw little square bricks?’ But actually, the LEGO Group is extremely particular about their intellectual property. They don’t want the bricks to look just any old way; they have to look like real LEGO bricks. Shaders have to be precise; the bricks have to look like ABS plastic with the right kind of polish on them. Additionally, the bricks have little cylinders on top, and those have to look round. In order to get them to look right we need a fairly high-count polygon model.”

Optimizing the rendering process for LEGO Universe’s complex, multi-layered graphics turns out to be far more challenging than that of an animated movie where the exact sequence of frames is known in advance, or a single-player game where the set of influences on the visual environment is more limited. Persistent user-generated content and freedom of player movement in the game environment implicitly create an infinite number of paths through the game world. This makes it impractical to test and optimize an MMO without professional tools such as Intel GPA.

As Urdang explained: “I’m looking at an e-mail from one of my engineers who used [Intel] GPA to examine a place where processor use jumps radically. [Intel] GPA metrics showed one of the smoke effects in the game was using 14.2 percent of the scene budget. We disabled just a small amount of smoke and got back a14-percent increase in frames per second. In another case, we found 21.9 percent of drawing time was being consumed by the way we were handling terrain and rendering a couple of wall pieces. Once identified, issues like these are relatively simple to optimize. [Intel] GPA has been a huge help for us, finding things like that quickly. It reduces iteration time dramatically. If you’re just poking around, randomly testing things, it takes forever because you can’t optimize what you can’t measure.”

It Runs on What?

Lynn Taylor, head of Compatibility Testing Labs at Gazillion Entertainment, is in charge of her own kind of alternate universe. Her lab ensures LEGO Universe plays well on a diversity of the oldest, smallest, and slowest systems inhabiting the family rooms of Planet Earth. Taylor is a widely acknowledged virtuoso in the area of graphic performance analysis and a veteran, with over 15 years in game compatibility testing.

She put this frame around platform compatibility issues and her collaboration with NetDevil: “In LEGO Universe, we are aiming at a minimum system configuration of something like a 1.5-GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 processor with 512 MB of memory and a video card typical of that era—pretty primitive by most gaming standards. Additionally, LEGO Universe is an MMO, so we can’t just fix performance and compatibility problems by releasing a special version. Everybody gets to see the LEGO Universe world in real time, so everyone has to be playing the same game.”

Taylor has used the Intel GPA tool since version 1.0 and is a confirmed fan. “I can easily look in great detail at performance across a variety of GPUs; I can gather a lot of information very rapidly and define frame rates in each area of the game. This is key, and here’s why: [Intel] GPA doesn’t actually run on the lowest-end systems we target. We can’t manually test game play on all low-end targets because the paths through the game are effectively infinite. But we can rigorously analyze performance on higher-end systems. If we see drops in performance on more powerful systems, this predicts bottlenecks for low-end platforms. We target these, fix problems, and modify our development process to avoid repeating strategies that don’t work well. For example, some cards have a lot of trouble with smoke effects, snow, or scenes where there is a lot of white. [Intel] GPA allows me to work with our artists to find alternatives that are as good aesthetically, but more optimal for low-end graphics cards.”

Taylor’s job—making sure the game plays beautifully across the entire spectrum of potential user platforms—also includes accommodating high-end hardware. “Scalability is a central focus for me,” said Taylor. “One of my expectations is that on min-spec systems I’ll have to turn everything down. But what if I am running on a more powerful computer? I work on scalability and auto detection so that when you load up your new game, it will be set to look and run the best it possibly can on your specific hardware. Utilizing [Intel] GPA tools for this is ideal because I have data that can alert me when things degrade. It can say ‘Look, I turned everything up on this system and my frame rate dropped in half.’”

Is Taylor’s lab preparing to evaluate game behavior on the 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processors that will be turning up in consumer-priced hardware? “Absolutely. Those things are the future of our products” said Taylor, who participates in the early experience program for the 2nd generation Intel Core processor technology. “I make sure that I always have the latest and greatest hardware in my lab. Long ago, I worked on a game released just before the advanced [Intel] Pentium processor started shipping in consumer systems. When that hardware came out, you couldn’t play the game on it, because it moved too fast! Because of that experience, I make sure I stay ahead of hardware trends.”

That’s probably the wisest course to take where the 2nd generation Intel Core processor is concerned. With relatively low price points and features such as embedded GPU, shared cache, and improved parallelism, the 2nd generation Intel Core processor family will endow consumer-targeted systems with graphics capability that was once the exclusive province of high-dollar gaming hardware.

FOR MOST PARENTS, TEACHERS, AND MENTORS, the idea of a socially networked MMO game for children raises questions. If you aren’t there watching every click, how can you know your kids are safe? You aren’t alone in your concerns. The LEGO Group, NetDevil, and Gazillion are staking their brand reputation on child safety and have “net cops” on patrol.

Lynn Taylor, head of Compatibility Testing Labs at game publisher Gazillion Entertainment said, “I have had the pleasure of working on three previous LEGO games. The LEGO Group really cares about its customers, and it really cares about this audience. It has gone to great lengths to make sure that children are safe in this environment. We have an internal team here whose entire focus is child safety. They monitor conversations among players for tone and appropriateness. All player chat is based on white/black lists and continuously evaluated by human moderators. I personally played a role in testing the Best Friends option, a safeguard that ensures that parents are informed and have given consent before kids make online friendships. This safeguard system sends an e-mail to the parents to get approval and to make sure that it’s safe for kids to have a less limited conversation with a particular person. For us, when targeting this audience, it is a top priority to make sure that these kids will never have any negative experience.”

It makes game engineering tougher to build in these safeguards, but it’s a key value of the product, and game developer NetDevil designs child safety in from the earliest phase of feature development. “We offer kids unlimited opportunity to build whatever they want,” said Erik Urdang, NetDevil’s technical director for LEGO® Universe. “Their creations in the game world are persistent, and other players can come and look at what they build, which translates to all sorts of circumstances we have to be ready to address. We ensure we can do this through moderation. For example, models cannot be seen by other players before going through moderation, and we respond immediately if somebody makes an unacceptable model. We have human moderators on duty 24/7 that have that responsibility.”

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