An Uncharted Tech Retrospective

yay

YeeHaw!

What?

Unchatted

Amazing to see the journey from 1 to 4, so much has changed.

Just got finished with A theif's end last night, and during my time I could not stop looking at the scenery especially later on in the game, you can really see what things from The last of us they have improved, with the art and lightning, which made me stop up multiply times just to take it all in, "No Sam I won't give you a boost I'm busy looking at the texture here" :)

Even when I found out that some scenes showing was prerender video, Naugthy Dog hides it so well that the only way to discover it was to activate photomode DigitalFoundry show's this.

But it was not something I thought about for one second during my playthrough.

Oh and yes his pant's still get's wet, but also muddy, and dusty :)

Can't wait to se what this amazing team come up with next!

Cowboy with the Dark Souls shirt? Even more respect for the man!

Cool feature.

Well this is exciting. Can't wait to watch this when I get back - thanks duders!

Oh man, 90 minutes of a programmer chatting about coding the Uncharted series? Sign me up.

Also, why is it just Brad at the couch? Was everyone else on vacation? Or was it his passion project so you guys decided to let him have the spotlight?

Cowboy is rad as all get out.

@mikelemmer: Brad is probably the one who's most interested in tech on staff, since it's an interview style thing one person is probably enough.

YEEEEE-HAAAAWWWWW!!!

I wonder if he talks about the horrendous input lag in Uncharted 2, 3 and The Last of Us.
I like technical stuff so i'm gonna watch this, but i hate the way Naughty Dog games have felt for the longest time now, and i feel that's partially due to their tech.

Ahh yes, that there SPU and shader and thread...stuff.

More like this!

Oh yeah, great idea! I'm just about finishing up my platinum on A Thief's End and I can't wait for ND's next.

Edit: Yeah that was a fantastic piece of content. I wouldn't mind a spoilercast with Druckmann either!

15 minutes in and I can say this is some excellent content :) can't wait to sit down and watch the rest of it :D and I hope this could become a new series :D now if only you could do something like this with SWERY and Deadly Premonition :)

This is AMAZING. More stuff like this, like how Jonathan Blow came in to talk about The Witness.

Great content. Thanks Brad, Jason, and John.

Oh, this is fantastic, I would love to see more of these tech discussions.

Awesome content! Nice! Love the tech talk!

@solidocelot: Very much agreed, this is whats missing from a lot of video game website content.

I love it when you talk tech to me.

I watched a Let's Play of Uncharted 1 recently (my first time seeing that game) and I was blown away by how well it held up. Like, obviously it has aged an incredible amount and doesn't look anywhere near as good at recent games, but damn, Naughty Dog really have their shit together on a technical level.

Love this stuff!!!

This was a great feature and great content. Fingers crossed for next time: some Jeff action (Gerstmann and Minter) with Llamas and tempest clones through the ages.

I had to rewind the video to make sure Brad was actually playing on a PS3 for the Uncharted 1 part. Naughty Dog got so much power out of that system.

For anyone who has watched this already, how spoiler heavy is it? I haven't finished U4 yet.

That pool on the ship in Uncharted 3... Wow.

This was great! Out of everything that Cowboy talked about, the most fascinating part was when Brad was talking about the boat flipping in Uncharted 3 and said (paraphrasing) "so you just made another map where the floor was the wall or ceiling?" Then Cowboy chuckled and said, "no." I thought the same thing Brad said.

Hearing about all this technical stuff and how difficult it is to do simple things in video games was eye-opening. I hope to see something like this in the future!

To those interested in engine programming and Naughty Dog, Jason Gregory (the lead programmer at Naughty Dog) and referred to in this video has written a book on game engine architecture cleverly titled "Game Engine Architecture"

You can find it here, http://www.gameenginebook.com/

Loved this feature. Actually would love to get more tech-based interviews on GB. Very cool breakdown of different tech and approaches used.

The only thing I kinda missed was a discussion on the PSone Crash Bandicoot simulation in Uncharted 4... That was amazing and I would've loved to hear how they managed that aspect of the game.

@dwigtk: I would like to know this as well.

I never did think developing games was easy, but I did sort of get frustrated with certain bugs never being solved. 'Like, seriously... are the devs lazy or something?'

But more and more I find myself less frustrated the more I (try to) understand it and think about it. For example, today I've been told by someone that in Destiny, if you select 'Special Weapon Ammo' on your chest piece and 'Sniper Ammo' on your leg armor, you can spawn in the Crucible with double the amount of Sniper shots you should be allowed to. You can select Sniper on the chest piece and leg armor and you'll spawn with 6 rounds. But Special and Sniper and you'll spawn with 12. And only if you're playing a Titan. If you're doing it with a Warlock it apparently doesn't seem to glitch and still give you 6.

Why on earth the game glitches out on certain classes using the exact same specs is super weird. Can you even imagine what someone must start looking for to solve it? All that stuff can get so weirdly complicated. I made an extremely simple mod for XCOM 2 and even that was giving me a headache.

Game developers are crazy. It seems like crazy work to me.

Do more like this, ALOT more like this please.

I bet even the simplest things can be the most infuriating bugs sometimes. I took one game progamming class in high school mainly so I could use stuff like 3ds Max and making a brick breaker game was pretty frustrating. Granted I had a very rudimentary knowledge of programming and the class was a lot of trial by fire, but finding the bugs in the code was annoying. It was always one thing after another. If I changed one line, I'd have to change another eventually sometimes leading me to rewrite whole swaths of code because it simply didn't work the way I wanted.

Imagine being told this like a thousand times and having to do it a thousand times.

You're right, developers are crazy.

Fantastic!

That was amazing.

I'm very happy about this video.

Thanks duders.

Yay Cowboy! As a software developer myself, he always blow mind with all the technical / programming details that goes into Uncharted games. Amazed whenever I am reminded Uncharted was programmed in Lisp (functional programming language).

"you know"

@dwigtk: They play a bit of chapter 10. No story stuff. Just skip the last 10 minutes if you don't want to see anything.

@zevvion: We'd like to believe that modern games are all cleanly programmed and developed, but the dark secret is that under the hood they're all stapled together monstrosities.

Such amazing tech wasted on such boring games. I really hope the next thing Naughty Dog does is more video gamey because I'm just not interested in story focused games that use setpieces solely for the spectacle rather than to create interesting and challenging gameplay.

I'll be honest, 90% of what Cowboy said went right over my head, but it was interesting to listen to nonetheless, and if nothing else really hammered home the point that making good videogames is difficult and takes a lot of talented people to accomplish.

Fantastic stuff. More like this, please.

Perfect, Thank You @teoball@magpie4life and @onemanarmyy

Very excited to see what ever this thing is. I'm a huge Uncharted fan so what ever behind the scenes look I can get at these games I gladly take.

Edit: Holy moly! Seeing Uncharted 1 after having just played and currently replaying Uncharted 4 is like day and night. It's crazy how much have happened since then graphically. You don't really notice how big the jump actually is when you constantly play new games as they come out. Of course you see gradual improvements over time, Uncharted 2 was a crazy big improvement though, but just seeing it this clearly contrasted in kind of crazy.

Also seeing this makes me want to play Uncharted 2 yet again. That would only be the seventh or eight time I beat it then. I think it's safe to say now that Uncharted 2 is one of the most important games of last generation. Just talking about how much it moved ahead of anything in else on the consoles at that time. Not only was it a graphical powerhouse but it just pushed the boundaries of what I thought was possible in gaming at that time.The collapsing hotel, the train sequence... man, Uncharted 2 was and is still a damn awesome game.

Oh boy I'm going to buy that Uncharted collection after all aren't I? I guess it is going to happen at some point and seeing this certainly makes me want to replay them again.

What an awesome series of games!

Edit edit: Also do more of this in the future GB. Do a lot more of these. I would love to hear more of this behind the scenes stuff. It's cool to hear from people like the programmers what they do? Also I think it would be great if you could get a video game composer on in this series. I would love to hear the process of composing music for a video game.

Last edit: But for the future it would probably be a good idea to get a third person to play the game, so the person asking the questions wouldn't have to concentrate on playing the game.

Fantastic feature, love hearing about all the technical details. More of this please.