GDC09: Dead Rising 2 will have most rendered characters ever

by Griffin McElroy on Mar 28th 2009 11:15AM

During a GDC presentation about the bolstered graphics engine powering Dead Rising 2, Izmeth Siddeek, the game's character art lead, made a fairly startling proclomation: "Dead Rising 2 deals with the rendering of the greatest number of characters ever seen in a video game," he said. In other words, the massive amounts of on-screen zombies featured in the original Dead Rising will apparently increase by a huge margin in the sequel.

The enlarged zombie processing power can be attributed to developer Blue Castle's implementation of new visual technology called Mental Mill, which is capable of rendering large groups of characters without sacrificing graphical quality. Mental Mill product manager Laura Scholl claimed the new software will allow over 6,000 zombies to appear on-screen, providing undead multitudes that will be easy on the eyes, but rough on our formerly uneaten brains.

Source

Tags: blue-castle, capcom, dead-rising-2, gdc-2009, mental-mill, Microsoft, rendering, Xbox-360, zombies

Reader Comments (79)

6,000 zombies on screen? Holy sheep shit! We're going to need a bigger gun.

What about a bigger boat? /Jaws reference

But seriously, 6,000 Zombies?! That's insane! I wonder what the zombie killing achievement would be this time around.

Shambling undead zombies are completly different from highly detailed AI characters with adjusting battlefield tactics. I mean Games like Kessen and Dynasty Warriors on the PS2 have been pumping out hundreds of characters for the longest but they're simple mob intelligence. Follow, react, die, that's about the extent of their AI. The most impressive thing about this is simply now many they claim to be capable of rendering, because they're nothing more than dumb zombies.

"Follow, react, die, that's about the extent of their AI."

Isn't that the intelligence of a regular zombie no matter what you feed them?

That's also the formula for most large groups of protesters. However instead of "follow, react, die" it's more like "follow, react and then be ignored by those they are protesting against followed by tear gas".

Poor attempt at humor, but for some reason I saw zombies in both scenarios.

@PN04

Actually what I'm imagining is more impressive. I feel like they figured out a system that renders them in less detail when they are far, and more detail when they are close.

This sounds obvious, but normally they render every polygon on a model all the time, as far as I know. If the distant ones could be rendered with less detail, you could have lots of character models on screen, but when you walked up to them they would still be very detailed.

If it's not something like that, then i don't see why they would put out a press release or whatever they did.
-Taylor

@Taylor

It's called LoD. Level of Detail. Been done for a long time now.

So Capcom can get 6000 on screen, Sony Santa Monica are pushing at 50 for GOW3...

What gives...?

Different games. Me thinks you wouldn't want 6000 enemies in the small, tightly controlled areas God of war games put you in compared to the wide open go anywhere areas of dead rising.

you also have to remember that the a.i. required by a braindead zombie is significantly less than might be required by gow3s enemies. plus we dont know how detailed the character models are. as we can see gow3 enemies are pretty detailed as are the environments. there are loads of factors to take into account, such as draw distances and graphical/lighting effects

my guess is you'll have 6000 zombies, but probably 40 distinct models that are cloned a ton. still would require quite a bit of processing and tech, so im looking forward to seeing the results.

i wouldn't compare this to GoW3 - rendering 6000 zombies doesn't mean the character has to interact with all of them - they could just be somewhere in the background adding to the scenery.

my question is... how the hell do you even fit 6000 zombies on the screen and make them look good? @ 1080p, you've got each zombie getting an average area of 345 pixels, which is less than a common image thumbnail. Of course, this doesn't take into account overlap and such, but yea.

Remember children, this is not the comment you are looking for, move along.

The Total War series can have more than 6000 characters on screen at once.

I was about to say, I bet Creative Assembly got a good laugh if they read this.

yeah, because the total war series is anything like dead rising...

"yeah, because the total war series is anything like dead rising..."

It's not, but Total War's still friggin' awesome.

They're both video games. Now if they claimed most zombies ever rendered, they'd have something, but the Total War series puts out something like 30,000 in a battle.

processing power must be rated by the oszc (on screen zombie count) from here on out.

You need to be in charge of these things.
I would vote for you

6000 zombies on screen at once? I'll believe it when I see it....not that I'd bother counting. The zombies in the tunnel area of 1 seemed like a lot to me, but that was probably only in the hundreds.

Show me 6000 sprites and then I might be impressed.

6,000! That's a descent number ... I hope there's multiplayer right? And wasn't this a Xbox 360 exclusive? and now it got ported over to the PS3 also? :)

They're developing it as a multiplatform, so unlike a port, we'll probably get a simultaneous release :)

wasnt there a ps2 game that had up to 60,000?

Thanks for improving the zombie count, now maybe if the graphics can be that mighty you can get rid of that annoying hit delay that was on the larger weapons.

And no matter how many zombies can be on screen, if the save system isn't better and there are still regenerating "crazy guys with a machine gun on a jeep" thrown in for a false sense of difficulty, I'll pass after a couple hours of gameplay like the first one.

6,000 is quite easy when the AI is completely retarded and the majority of them look the same. I know people are going to get pissy over this, but this is nothing but bs to push the game because practically any engine can achieve numbers like that if they lower the system requirements in every way, nothing more than boxes when the AI is "zombified".

You probably don't even understand the hilarity behind the "Half the zombies look the same." bit that Dead Rising 1 used.

How so?

Question is:
If there were 100,000 zombies on the screen, can you really see that far to count them all?
Can't you not only fight 100 zombies at once before you get out of the friggin' room?

Doesn't matter how many zombies you can see, it's about how many you can kill.

Even though it came from the lead artist, this is just marketing. This MentalMill deal is just middleware to handle the crowd processing in the first place. They themselves don't even know how performance will be until its integrated into their engine and they're in much later stages of development. 6,000 characters will probably not be rendered in 3D. Background characters will most likely be broken down to sprites, and probably only a handful of zombies will be interactive at any one time. The first title had an impressive number of characters to begin with so as long as they can keep that up it will be nice.

For funtimes start up a L4D game, open the console and do some jiggerypokery to set the limit of zombies from 30 (!) to 300.

Then set the director to panic forever.

Have yourself an early xmas.

The number of creatures on screen, no matter how generic they may be, is still impressive. But my concern from the photo up there lies mainly with the main character. I think he looks like Jim Gaffigan. Would anyone agree?

Holy crap you're right. A bit thinner than Gaffigan, but that head is exactly the same.

Only if he starts talking about Hot Pockets.

Diarrhea Pocket! But the zombies will most likely be vomiting blood.

whoa, is that a zombie showgirl in the bottom left? Win

Who the hell notices something like that?

Batman

God damn you SoulBlade, you just made me spill my drink.

Well played good sir.

It's not epic until its over 9000.

its over 6000!!?
still, thats a lot of zombies at once. screw that, i hate fighting 20 zombies at once.

well if its 6000 characters, wouldnt that mean that either there will be a really long loading time or the AI would literally suck then

"literally" suck?

oh god no... necrophilia!!

I am sad to see so many people saying negative things about the sequel of one of my favorite 360 games to date. 3000 zombies on screen on a console is crazy! If you played the first one, you would know that having about 100 in your path would be a tricky proposition at best.

Speaking of dates, there isn't even a release date yet. Can't we all just relax a little bit until we see some gameplay at least? Geesh! All we have so far is a few screen shots and a frantic teaser trailer.

It is a sequel to an original IP so of course there will be improvements. The follow A.I., the save system, Otis... these things are not secrets to the developers. I know someone working on this game, and they will not let me down.

A fall/winter release would be nice, but I am betting on early 2010. They didn't release Dead Rising 1 in the middle of a sh*t storm of games and did very well so I imagine part 2 will follow suit.

6000 enemies on screen, that's great ...

But it can't beat Demon Chaos on PS2 : 65000 enemies at once ...

Stop the intox Capcom ! ;-)

What about Heavenly Sword? There were thousands of of enemies in that game.

I remember that, the final level which was also the introduction has tons of soldiers. It was so awesome when you were fighting the final boss and he'd send an energy blast at you, and if you dodged the blast it would hit the soldiers in the background sending them flying in all directions.

God that game was great... We need a sequel.

Anyways, am I the only one who doesn't really care about the game due to the first not being released on ps3. Plus to me it feels that the AI in many capcom games is always lacking...

but remember, u couldnt actually SEE 1000 enemies. Plus this is 6000. 6000>1000

Are you honestly comparing Heavenly Sword with a Dead Rising sequel??

Yeah, dude, Heavenly Sword isn't even in the same league as Dead Rising.

| 1 | 2 | Most Recent | Next 50 Comments

Sorry, you must be logged in to leave a comment.

Breaking News

The most popular posts
in the last 7 days

Vita 'UMD Passport' won't be offered in US 220 comments
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning review: A tempting fate 153 comments
David Jaffe leaves Eat Sleep Play, layoffs hit developer [Update] 108 comments
Don't call it a remake: Final Fantasy X is a 'remaster,' to be clear 95 comments
Battleship movie adapted into FPS by Double Helix 93 comments

GDC09: Dead Rising 2 will have most rendered characters ever

Reader Comments (79)

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:22AM iFester said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 12:18PM Nomgoos3 said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 12:54PM PN04 said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 1:22PM blahblah55 said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 4:52PM iFester said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 10:06PM Taylor Yes Taylor said

Posted: Mar 29th 2009 3:33AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:26AM skyzbig said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:28AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:43AM MaliceMajorE15 said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 12:49PM SoulBlade said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:27AM Mr B said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:30AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:41AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 12:11PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 1:24PM blahblah55 said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 7:28PM LaughingTarget said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:31AM Mr B said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 12:49PM original fred said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:31AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:32AM Bowser Rogozhin said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:34AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:40AM Levi said

Posted: Mar 29th 2009 12:19PM MastrofExistence said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:41AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:42AM Blkant said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 12:29PM Demon G Sides said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 1:02PM Blkant said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 1:27PM blahblah55 said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:50AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:50AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 3:29PM RENEgadeRSO said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 3:38PM Mr Khan said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 3:38PM BPMOmega XBL PSN Steam said

Posted: Mar 29th 2009 10:55PM RENEgadeRSO said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 11:56AM TheDarkWayne said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 1:00PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 1:06PM SoulBlade said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 3:41PM Chris Smack said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 12:04PM thed0ctah said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 12:06PM Rhamsey said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 12:08PM shadowhowl1900 said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 1:35PM original fred said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 12:15PM DigStyle said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 12:17PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 12:18PM wiips36 said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 1:03PM doreo said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 2:17PM shadowhowl1900 said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 2:31PM ch3burashka said

Posted: Mar 28th 2009 4:23PM The Monarch said

Info

Description

MSRP

Release Date

Genre

Developer

Publisher

Rating

Breaking News

Double Fine Kickstarter passes $1 million in under 24 hours, breaking yet another record

Featured Stories

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier brings information warfare to the front

Rhythm Heaven Fever review: Crazy into you

Remedy not done with Alan Wake

The most popular postsin the last 7 days

Engadget

TUAW

Massively

WoW

The most popular posts
in the last 7 days