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Future Tech: How Digital Molecular Matter Could Change Gaming
Article was Written by: Chris Roper(IGN)
March 10, 2009 - Last year's release of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was big for a number of reasons. It officially expanded the Star Wars fiction, bridging the gap between the two trilogies, it marked LucasArts' biggest release ever, and perhaps most importantly for things outside of Star Wars, it introduced the world to DMM, or Digital Molecular Matter.
Pixelux's DDM technology is used to simulate real-world materials in realtime 3D applications, like games. If you mark something as being made of wood, it'll bend, splinter and snap like real wood. Tag it as glass and it'll shatter into tiny bits with the broken pieces created on the fly, meaning that you'll never see exactly the same thing twice.
Pixelux didn't hang up its collective hats when work on its technology was done for the game. The studio has been improving its technology day after day since then, and soon we'll start to see more games that take advantage of the tech.
To find out where it's at, where it's been and where it's headed, we talked with Pixelux's chief operating officer, Vik Sohal. Here's what he had to tell us about the already impressive technology and its future.
IGN: To start things off, why don't you give our readers a brief overview of what Digital Molecular Matter is and a bit of history behind its development?
Vik Sohal: DMM is a new kind of physics system that allows in-game objects to bend and break by simulating their physical properties. For example, a tree made of DMM in a game could be made to act like it was made of stone, jelly or steel by changing a few parameters. In the case of being made of stone, the tree would shatter and crack if you were to try and bend it. In the case of jelly, the tree would flop around like it had no support and in the case of steel, the tree would bend and tear if you applied forces to it.
[And here's the long version!]
DMM objects can also have their density change, resulting in objects that can buckle under their own weight. Many other interesting variations are possible, all by adjusting material properties. It is also possible to create materials which cannot exist in nature or are very rare (like super strong metals that weigh almost nothing, or objects that have negative volume preservation).
We started major development on what you see today in 2005. Prior to that we had spent 2 years doing a lot of research and prototyping. The catalyzing moment came when we got a call in July of 2005 from Nick Pavis, who was the Director of Technology at LucasArts, inquiring about what we had after hearing about it from a friend. At the time, LucasArts was "rebooting" their studio and beginning a focus on simulation-based gameplay. It was the perfect time for us to talk with them as they were shopping around for technology to make their vision real. At our first meeting with LucasArts, we talked with Nick, Peter Hirschmann, the VP of Development, as well as Chris Williams and Haden Blackman (their producers). There was also other senior staff present that had been tasked with building games around their new simulation-based vision.
After this meeting, we put together a demo of an early version of DMM that allowed a tower to be demolished with a boulder. It was a lot of fun playing with DMM even this early version. You could, for example, cause the walls of the tower to blow out if you threw the boulder from the top, or you could hit it from the side and cause the tower to collapse. The cool thing about this demo was how much variety of gameplay we got from a very simple scene. This demo convinced LucasArts to move to the next stage, a fully interactive demo level built out of DMM.
For the next demo, the vision came from a concept art piece drawn by LucasArts artist, Greg Knight. The image was of a stormtrooper being force-pushed through a stone column. LucasArts also showed us some other movies of Jedi Knights force-pushing hapless stormtroopers through marketplaces as well as into steel plates and other objects. They wanted to see that DMM technology was viable in a real game environment and so we began work on a something very ambitious - to create an interactive, playable demo level showing a stormtrooper being thrown via the Force through various pillars. The pillars were to be made of different materials (ceramic, metal and cement). The demo was also to show how compound and anisotropic materials could be used (bricks with mortar, cement with rebar and wood).
We began work on the "Interactive Fracture Demo" in early November and completed it in early January. The results were impressive. Rather than build a simple environment with columns made of different materials, we had constructed an entire house with 3 rooms that had stone columns, glass skylights, a glass and steel shelf, cross-fitted wooden beams with mitre joints, a giant glass picture window, wooden cabinet doors in slots, a giant plant, rebar-enforced stone columns, and a brick wall with individual bricks that would come apart and spring-steel bars. Into this environment the player could move freely around and "shoot" stormtroopers at anything. The stormtroopers themselves were also made of DMM and flopped around in interesting ways as they were thrown. The sound for the demo was also synthesized by using the stress information within the objects. This allowed the wooden beams to make cracking and splintering noises as they broke as well as having the brick wall make "brick breaking" noises as it broke.
The response to the Interactive Fracture Demo was very positive. It convinced LucasArts that DMM was a viable technology and they signed an exclusive agreement with us to integrate DMM into their upcoming games. The exclusivity was to last until October of 2008. After the signing of this agreement, we began work with them on an E3 demo for a new game they were working on called "The Force Unleashed". The idea behind this game was to allow the player to "kick someone's *** with the Force". Blasting stormtroopers, shattering glass windows, bending and breaking wooden and metal beams were all facets of the destructive "unleashed" abilities of this character. The story behind the character as it was told to me by Haden was also equally impressive. It looked like LucasArts had everything down, technology, gameplay and story and of course, spectacular art.
At the 2006 E3 Expo in LA, DMM technology was introduced to the world in the form of a level from the upcoming "Force Unleashed". The level consisted of a Star Wars Museum with artifacts made of different materials. You could throw an R2D2 at all these artifacts as well as stormtroopers animated with Euphoria (another simulation tech LucasArts was using). Wooden beams with stormtroopers clinging to them would bend and break, falling onto a Rancor skeleton below (which would then break apart in different ways depending on where you hit it). There was even a jungle with vivid plants from the planet Felucia. The plants were made of DMM and would gently sway when you interacted with them. The lighting augmented the visual fidelity of the scene and the DMM augmented the kinetic fidelity. LucasArts showed the demo to a lot of people in a private theatre.
After that demo, we worked very hard on refining and integrating DMM into The Force Unleashed. It took 2 years to get the game completed and I think the final result was amazing. The Force Unleashed looked and played like nothing before it and was a huge hit for LucasArts. DMM allowed players to tear up the environment as well as feel truly immersed in the Star Wars universe.
IGN: How has the technology improved since what we saw in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed?
Vik Sohal: We have continued refining performance and accuracy. Contact works better now and the overall speed of the system has been improved. The result of all this is that you can have a lot more DMM in a game level than you could before. The authoring environment has also matured. LucasArts used a set of tools we built for them within their own level editor. Since the game shipped, we have taken those tools and created a Maya Plug-In that anyone can use to create DMM objects as well as DMM movies (which can be considerably more complex than what can be done in real-time).
I can tell you that from what I have seen some of our licensees achieve with DMM, there is a lot of potential with the current generation of the tech.
IGN: With the Force Unleashed, it looks like the tech was used sparingly in scenes to keep the framerate up. Do you think we'll get to a point in this generation where an entire game world can be built using DMM?
Vik Sohal: Actually, there is a lot more DMM in The Force Unleashed than is immediately visible. LucasArts used it in a number of areas in ways that are not immediately obvious. For example, in the corridors of the Empirical, the smooth metal panels are made of dent-able DMM. There are also overhead glass light fixtures that can become unhinged and smash. The first level on Kashyyyk shows a lot of DMM in the form of plants and trees as well as destructible bridges.
In terms of making entire worlds out of DMM, we are working towards that. We have learned a lot building the current DMM and expect upcoming versions to offer game developers the opportunity to use even more DMM in their games.
IGN: Do you think The Force Unleashed used DMM to its full potential at the time?
Vik Sohal: Yes, I do. It did take the designers a bit of time to warm up to it because of the newness of it all, but once we got the performance up and the level designers got used to manipulating material properties (making objects act like they were made of steel, wood, or whatever their design called for) they started using it a lot more. I am very impressed with what LucasArts achieved in the final game. I couldn't imagine a better debut of DMM than "The Force Unleashed"
IGN: Why is The Force Unleashed the only game we've heard of thus far using DMM?
Vik Sohal: When we began back in 2005, we signed a deal with LucasArts giving them exclusive use of DMM technology until October 2008. Now that the exclusivity period is over, we are free to license DMM to anyone and already have licensees in development. We are also porting DMM to popular game engines to make it easier for game companies to adopt.
IGN: Can you give us a rough count of how many games are in development that are utilizing DMM at the moment?
Vik Sohal: There are about 8 titles in development right now with more starting up soon.
IGN: How system-specific has the technology been built? In other words, can developers do more with it on the PlayStation 3 than the Xbox 360 or the other way around, or is it designed to be identical on both consoles?
Vik Sohal: We took advantage of the benefits of each platform. On the PS3 for example, you can scale the amount of processing power DMM gets by adjusting how many SPUs are dedicated to it. The Xbox 360 is similar in that you can adjust how much time each of the three cores spends on DMM. Our customers generally like to have DMM work identically for a game running on both the PS3 and Xbox360. Normalization that way keeps testing and level design simpler.
IGN: The uses for DMM are obviously aplenty, but what new directions do you think games could take when utilizing DMM?
Vik Sohal: I would love to see more gameplay mechanics built around DMM. One could imagine building a catapult that really works or a game where tactical destructibility plays a role in gameplay. Think about a Quake Arena-style game where when you finish playing with your friends, the arena is totally trashed. A magic-based game where you could change material properties of objects to solve puzzles could be very interesting. I also see that an RTS could be built with DMM providing a mechanism for the effectiveness of barriers. A simulation-based approach to game design can get some very interesting emergent situations that I think players really like.
IGN: How detailed and realistic do you think DMM or a future variant of said tech could be on the next generation of hardware (PS4, Xbox 720, etc.)?
Vik Sohal: That's a difficult question to answer. I have no idea what form the next PlayStation or the next Xbox will take. I can say that given the current curves for processing power/dollar that future hardware will undoubtedly rely on large-scale multiprocessing. This kind of processing is something we are ready to take advantage of. DMM is exactly the kind of technology that makes multicore CPUs and high end GPUs relevant because its capabilities scale with improvements in hardware performance.
IGN: Outside of DMM, does Pixelux have anything else in development, be it other in-progress technology or perhaps even an in-house title?
Vik Sohal: DMM and the DMM Plug-In are our main focus right now. We have some other very interesting projects, but I can't comment on them just yet. You will definitely hear more about them when we are ready to show something.
IGN: When can we expect to see the next use of DMM?
Vik Sohal: There are 4 places to see it:
1) Downloadable Content Levels for Force Unleashed. The first of these came out in December of 2008.
2) The Maya DMM Plug-In
3) Games released by our licensees sometime in the next 6-8 months.
4) Simulation products built by our "serious games" licensees involved in disaster planning and recovery scenarios.
IGN: Thank you for your time.
Want to leave a comment for Chris Roper? Click Here
Article was Written by: Chris Roper(IGN)
March 10, 2009 - Last year's release of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was big for a number of reasons. It officially expanded the Star Wars fiction, bridging the gap between the two trilogies, it marked LucasArts' biggest release ever, and perhaps most importantly for things outside of Star Wars, it introduced the world to DMM, or Digital Molecular Matter.
Pixelux's DDM technology is used to simulate real-world materials in realtime 3D applications, like games. If you mark something as being made of wood, it'll bend, splinter and snap like real wood. Tag it as glass and it'll shatter into tiny bits with the broken pieces created on the fly, meaning that you'll never see exactly the same thing twice.
Pixelux didn't hang up its collective hats when work on its technology was done for the game. The studio has been improving its technology day after day since then, and soon we'll start to see more games that take advantage of the tech.
To find out where it's at, where it's been and where it's headed, we talked with Pixelux's chief operating officer, Vik Sohal. Here's what he had to tell us about the already impressive technology and its future.
IGN: To start things off, why don't you give our readers a brief overview of what Digital Molecular Matter is and a bit of history behind its development?
Vik Sohal: DMM is a new kind of physics system that allows in-game objects to bend and break by simulating their physical properties. For example, a tree made of DMM in a game could be made to act like it was made of stone, jelly or steel by changing a few parameters. In the case of being made of stone, the tree would shatter and crack if you were to try and bend it. In the case of jelly, the tree would flop around like it had no support and in the case of steel, the tree would bend and tear if you applied forces to it.
[And here's the long version!]
DMM objects can also have their density change, resulting in objects that can buckle under their own weight. Many other interesting variations are possible, all by adjusting material properties. It is also possible to create materials which cannot exist in nature or are very rare (like super strong metals that weigh almost nothing, or objects that have negative volume preservation).
We started major development on what you see today in 2005. Prior to that we had spent 2 years doing a lot of research and prototyping. The catalyzing moment came when we got a call in July of 2005 from Nick Pavis, who was the Director of Technology at LucasArts, inquiring about what we had after hearing about it from a friend. At the time, LucasArts was "rebooting" their studio and beginning a focus on simulation-based gameplay. It was the perfect time for us to talk with them as they were shopping around for technology to make their vision real. At our first meeting with LucasArts, we talked with Nick, Peter Hirschmann, the VP of Development, as well as Chris Williams and Haden Blackman (their producers). There was also other senior staff present that had been tasked with building games around their new simulation-based vision.
After this meeting, we put together a demo of an early version of DMM that allowed a tower to be demolished with a boulder. It was a lot of fun playing with DMM even this early version. You could, for example, cause the walls of the tower to blow out if you threw the boulder from the top, or you could hit it from the side and cause the tower to collapse. The cool thing about this demo was how much variety of gameplay we got from a very simple scene. This demo convinced LucasArts to move to the next stage, a fully interactive demo level built out of DMM.
For the next demo, the vision came from a concept art piece drawn by LucasArts artist, Greg Knight. The image was of a stormtrooper being force-pushed through a stone column. LucasArts also showed us some other movies of Jedi Knights force-pushing hapless stormtroopers through marketplaces as well as into steel plates and other objects. They wanted to see that DMM technology was viable in a real game environment and so we began work on a something very ambitious - to create an interactive, playable demo level showing a stormtrooper being thrown via the Force through various pillars. The pillars were to be made of different materials (ceramic, metal and cement). The demo was also to show how compound and anisotropic materials could be used (bricks with mortar, cement with rebar and wood).
We began work on the "Interactive Fracture Demo" in early November and completed it in early January. The results were impressive. Rather than build a simple environment with columns made of different materials, we had constructed an entire house with 3 rooms that had stone columns, glass skylights, a glass and steel shelf, cross-fitted wooden beams with mitre joints, a giant glass picture window, wooden cabinet doors in slots, a giant plant, rebar-enforced stone columns, and a brick wall with individual bricks that would come apart and spring-steel bars. Into this environment the player could move freely around and "shoot" stormtroopers at anything. The stormtroopers themselves were also made of DMM and flopped around in interesting ways as they were thrown. The sound for the demo was also synthesized by using the stress information within the objects. This allowed the wooden beams to make cracking and splintering noises as they broke as well as having the brick wall make "brick breaking" noises as it broke.
The response to the Interactive Fracture Demo was very positive. It convinced LucasArts that DMM was a viable technology and they signed an exclusive agreement with us to integrate DMM into their upcoming games. The exclusivity was to last until October of 2008. After the signing of this agreement, we began work with them on an E3 demo for a new game they were working on called "The Force Unleashed". The idea behind this game was to allow the player to "kick someone's *** with the Force". Blasting stormtroopers, shattering glass windows, bending and breaking wooden and metal beams were all facets of the destructive "unleashed" abilities of this character. The story behind the character as it was told to me by Haden was also equally impressive. It looked like LucasArts had everything down, technology, gameplay and story and of course, spectacular art.
At the 2006 E3 Expo in LA, DMM technology was introduced to the world in the form of a level from the upcoming "Force Unleashed". The level consisted of a Star Wars Museum with artifacts made of different materials. You could throw an R2D2 at all these artifacts as well as stormtroopers animated with Euphoria (another simulation tech LucasArts was using). Wooden beams with stormtroopers clinging to them would bend and break, falling onto a Rancor skeleton below (which would then break apart in different ways depending on where you hit it). There was even a jungle with vivid plants from the planet Felucia. The plants were made of DMM and would gently sway when you interacted with them. The lighting augmented the visual fidelity of the scene and the DMM augmented the kinetic fidelity. LucasArts showed the demo to a lot of people in a private theatre.
After that demo, we worked very hard on refining and integrating DMM into The Force Unleashed. It took 2 years to get the game completed and I think the final result was amazing. The Force Unleashed looked and played like nothing before it and was a huge hit for LucasArts. DMM allowed players to tear up the environment as well as feel truly immersed in the Star Wars universe.
IGN: How has the technology improved since what we saw in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed?
Vik Sohal: We have continued refining performance and accuracy. Contact works better now and the overall speed of the system has been improved. The result of all this is that you can have a lot more DMM in a game level than you could before. The authoring environment has also matured. LucasArts used a set of tools we built for them within their own level editor. Since the game shipped, we have taken those tools and created a Maya Plug-In that anyone can use to create DMM objects as well as DMM movies (which can be considerably more complex than what can be done in real-time).
I can tell you that from what I have seen some of our licensees achieve with DMM, there is a lot of potential with the current generation of the tech.
IGN: With the Force Unleashed, it looks like the tech was used sparingly in scenes to keep the framerate up. Do you think we'll get to a point in this generation where an entire game world can be built using DMM?
Vik Sohal: Actually, there is a lot more DMM in The Force Unleashed than is immediately visible. LucasArts used it in a number of areas in ways that are not immediately obvious. For example, in the corridors of the Empirical, the smooth metal panels are made of dent-able DMM. There are also overhead glass light fixtures that can become unhinged and smash. The first level on Kashyyyk shows a lot of DMM in the form of plants and trees as well as destructible bridges.
In terms of making entire worlds out of DMM, we are working towards that. We have learned a lot building the current DMM and expect upcoming versions to offer game developers the opportunity to use even more DMM in their games.
IGN: Do you think The Force Unleashed used DMM to its full potential at the time?
Vik Sohal: Yes, I do. It did take the designers a bit of time to warm up to it because of the newness of it all, but once we got the performance up and the level designers got used to manipulating material properties (making objects act like they were made of steel, wood, or whatever their design called for) they started using it a lot more. I am very impressed with what LucasArts achieved in the final game. I couldn't imagine a better debut of DMM than "The Force Unleashed"
IGN: Why is The Force Unleashed the only game we've heard of thus far using DMM?
Vik Sohal: When we began back in 2005, we signed a deal with LucasArts giving them exclusive use of DMM technology until October 2008. Now that the exclusivity period is over, we are free to license DMM to anyone and already have licensees in development. We are also porting DMM to popular game engines to make it easier for game companies to adopt.
IGN: Can you give us a rough count of how many games are in development that are utilizing DMM at the moment?
Vik Sohal: There are about 8 titles in development right now with more starting up soon.
IGN: How system-specific has the technology been built? In other words, can developers do more with it on the PlayStation 3 than the Xbox 360 or the other way around, or is it designed to be identical on both consoles?
Vik Sohal: We took advantage of the benefits of each platform. On the PS3 for example, you can scale the amount of processing power DMM gets by adjusting how many SPUs are dedicated to it. The Xbox 360 is similar in that you can adjust how much time each of the three cores spends on DMM. Our customers generally like to have DMM work identically for a game running on both the PS3 and Xbox360. Normalization that way keeps testing and level design simpler.
IGN: The uses for DMM are obviously aplenty, but what new directions do you think games could take when utilizing DMM?
Vik Sohal: I would love to see more gameplay mechanics built around DMM. One could imagine building a catapult that really works or a game where tactical destructibility plays a role in gameplay. Think about a Quake Arena-style game where when you finish playing with your friends, the arena is totally trashed. A magic-based game where you could change material properties of objects to solve puzzles could be very interesting. I also see that an RTS could be built with DMM providing a mechanism for the effectiveness of barriers. A simulation-based approach to game design can get some very interesting emergent situations that I think players really like.
IGN: How detailed and realistic do you think DMM or a future variant of said tech could be on the next generation of hardware (PS4, Xbox 720, etc.)?
Vik Sohal: That's a difficult question to answer. I have no idea what form the next PlayStation or the next Xbox will take. I can say that given the current curves for processing power/dollar that future hardware will undoubtedly rely on large-scale multiprocessing. This kind of processing is something we are ready to take advantage of. DMM is exactly the kind of technology that makes multicore CPUs and high end GPUs relevant because its capabilities scale with improvements in hardware performance.
IGN: Outside of DMM, does Pixelux have anything else in development, be it other in-progress technology or perhaps even an in-house title?
Vik Sohal: DMM and the DMM Plug-In are our main focus right now. We have some other very interesting projects, but I can't comment on them just yet. You will definitely hear more about them when we are ready to show something.
IGN: When can we expect to see the next use of DMM?
Vik Sohal: There are 4 places to see it:
1) Downloadable Content Levels for Force Unleashed. The first of these came out in December of 2008.
2) The Maya DMM Plug-In
3) Games released by our licensees sometime in the next 6-8 months.
4) Simulation products built by our "serious games" licensees involved in disaster planning and recovery scenarios.
IGN: Thank you for your time.
Want to leave a comment for Chris Roper? Click Here