Yesterday, we told you about the thoughts of Megaton Rainfall's developer Alfonso del Cerro on PlayStation VR. Today, we have more exclusive tidbits of information on the indie superhero game scheduled for PlayStation 4 and PC; more specifically, we asked him first a couple technical questions and then the obvious one about the release date.
- Did you have to tone down the graphics at all when compared to PC, and what kind of resolution/frame rate are you targeting on Sony's console?
- Megaton Rainfall is easily scalable, because the most demanding task for the GPU is rendering the city, that is made by a massive amount of relatively simple objects, so we adapt to different hardware specs by setting the density of city stuff and the render distance of those details. We are targeting 1080p 60fps at medium settings at PS4. In my (high end) PC the game can run at 4K 60 fps with high settings. But the resolution difference is not dramatic at all. I'm currently unimpressed by playing games at 4K... It means that there are 8M pixels on screen, and nowadays games don't have 8M little details on screen to take advantage of it. The explosions and the scale of the cities will be equally spectacular on PS4.
- What's your take on DirectX 12 and Vulkan? Are you interested in adding support for these APIs to your engine?
- No. DirectX 12 is all about saving CPU-time to generate render commands. And our game is super-GPU bound. We use a lot of instancing, a lot of arrays of textures in shaders to minimize the number render commands, so the render thread is several milliseconds idle every frame already. The only platform where we feel the CPU is more limited is PlayStation VR, and those APIs won't work there.
- Will the game be released within this year? Is Q3 or Q4 a good guess?
- Yes! We work hard to make your guess good.
Check back tomorrow for the full interview, including more details about Megaton Rainfall's gameplay mechanics and features.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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