An Uncharted Tech Retrospective

Awesome. I really enjoy these longer chats with developers. Great stuff!

Informative and entertaining retrospective. Videos like this and the one with Jonathan Blow are some of the best on the site.

Super good and interesting video even for some one who doesn't know a lot about coding! Hope to see more of this style of content in the future with other games!

Now I finally know what this was about!

Always love more Cowboy content.

Great stuff!

This is the stuff I come here for. Well done!

This video is aaaaamazing and also my brain hurts.

This is great I would love to see some similar stuff with other games from you guys.

With about 15 minutes left in the video, the part where Brad turns around in the ship room to find it filling up with water is incredible. I've played through the game twice and didn't realize they were simulating all the fluid dynamics. That's insane!

@TechnoSyndrome: Uncharted has plenty of interesting and challenging shooting gameplay and the tech feeds directly into that.

cowboy is awesome! always well spoken and amiable as hell.

more real talk with devs please!

I don't understand a word Cowboy says but damn I love to hear it. This was amazing. Thanks!!!!

I don't even care about Uncharted, but these kind of features are so interesting! More developer retrospectives!

@dwigtk: They show the environment of the start of chapter 10. No dialogue / cutscenes.

This was awesome. Love these kinds of videos!

Wow, great feature! Would love more stuff like this as well

Wait... Brad IS playing Uncharted 1 on the original PS3? I thought for sure it was the PS4 remaster. Holy crap these games look good - maybe I should actually, finally play them and not wait on getting the Drake Collection for PS4.

Wont pretend I understand most of what John is saying, But it's always cool to listen to smart people talk about cool things.

Would be down for more like this.

That talk about the train sequence in Uncharted 2 took a long while to sink in, but once it did it blew my mind.

@dwigtk: I finished U4, and the U4 portion has no spoilers, they showed the section that was covered in previews in the past....watch away duder!

Great video.

Please, for the love of God, do more of these! Hearing the technical details about how these super complex games work is always fascinating and I'm sad there isn't a site with a video series that invites developers on to routinely discuss what they do. Please, PLEASE do more of these.

This was utterly fantastic. Thanks Cowboy, and thanks Brad (and whoever else made it happen at Giant Bomb.)

I'm just a gameplay scripter, and this is very cool stuff to hear, thanks for making the feature!

I wish the gameplay was turned down more, and Brad's having a hard time focusing on the game and the conversation at the same time, but hey I get it.

In-depth dev talk + Cowboy?!

Thanks Duders, this is exactly my kind of video!

I second both these ideas; get some composers to talk about their work and how hard it gets when a game changes identity throughout development!

Hell yeah, I love Cowboy! This is great.

Please, PLEASE more dev interviews on making games like this. The high-profile names you guys can get compared to any youtuber would make a must-watch series!

Really enjoyed this feature hopefully similar Tech Retrospective videos become a staple on GB. Nice work!

a question I just had when watching this, they talked about the ps3s very powerful math SP units (or w/e they're called).

How did they port everything they did on those units to the ps4 since it doesn't have that hardware? Is it just by bruteforce because the ps4 is that much more powerful?

This dude sounds so much like Jason, even in like the intonation on syllables and certain speech quirks. Also, this is a super interesting feature, I don't understand any of it, but I love hearing it.

@df-1 said:

The PS4's cores are probably much smarter and faster than the PS3's. The speed of the PS3's SPUs was, I'm guessing, relative to the time they came to market (2006) and compared to the other cores in that system. Hearing Cowboy talk about the SPU's like that I was reminded of GPU programming with CUDA or OpenCL. Lots of cores that are great at crunching numbers but terrible at branching.

I found a very interesting (but very technical) talk Christian Gyrling (lead programmer at ND) gave at GDC last year that goes into some of what ND did to port Last of Us to PS4 at 60 FPS. It sounds like it was far from easy.

Link: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022186/Parallelizing-the-Naughty-Dog-Engine

The train sequence was especially fascinating. I don`t think many journalists would be able to keep up with what Cowboy was talking about like Brad did, so great job to everyone involved!

Brad this is freakin awesome. Cowboy's the best and thank you!

Cowboy is cool.

This was fantastic!!

@df-1: Most SPU code, if not written straight in C/C++, had a C/C++ reference implementation, which was a lot easier than trying to port assembly. A lot of the super math intensive stuff these days now live as compute jobs on the GPU.

This was great. Some of the more technical stuff went over my head, but it was still super interesting.

Great work from both Cowboy and Brad!

Every time Cowboy is on the E3 shows I wish he'd come just talk tech for a while in a dedicated video. My wish has finally been granted and it's fantastic!

Love every time Cowboy comes to chat about tech.

@cowbs Excellent work, sir! I really appreciate you taking the time to walk through this stuff, it's a fantastic example of an in-depth glimpse into game development in a more accessible format (as opposed to something like the GDC Vault).

That flat production structure at ND sounds fascinating, is there anywhere I can learn more about how you guys manage your day to day tasks vs. larger scope items like milestones without production overhead?

As someone who has been a producer/project manager in games and now other tech industries, your comment about how 'not-so-good' producers end up being a source of friction really struck a chord. In my mind, my role is to help engineers on our teams do what they love to do, and what they excel at: create awesome systems that solve interesting problems. Unfortunately many producers introduce complications to a project, and I'm always trying to keep myself in check to ensure I'm not getting in the way of anyone doing what they need to do on our teams.

Thanks again, John! This was great fun to watch.

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/gdc-2011-the-swery-experience/2300-3866/

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/swery-in-the-coffee/2300-6995/

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/swery-in-the-coffee-directors-cut/2300-6999/

Techtrospective.

do more of these!

Very cool feature!

Cool stuff, I like it, but I love how you guys sorta just missed Nathan disappearing for a few frames at 25:50 lol. It'd be fascinating to hear why that might have happened, especially as you were talking about animation work.

A+ quality content Brad. Really enjoyed watching this.

That was fantastic. I'd love to see more features like this!

As a computer science student who wants to make games, this was fascinating, insightful, and intimidating! I really need to play The Witness so I can watch Jonathan Blow talk about the nitty-gritty as well. Cool feature!

This was fantastic. I'd be into this being a new feature. I"d love to hear about Doom, brad. DOOM, BRAD. BRAD, DOOM!