Turn 10 talks about the challenges of next-gen development
Forza 5 is coming later this year on the Xbox One, and if it’s even half as good as promised, it’ll probably be a treat for racing fans. Developer Turn 10 recently spoke to OXM about the development process, and mostly chose to focus on one major facet — the Xbox One’s cloud processing capabilities.
Turn 10’s studio manager Alan Hartman stated, “a massive game, a quality game, an innovative game. At launch of the console. It’s crazy hard. It’s the hardest thing we’ve ever done. But it’s exciting, we’re having fun, but it’s a huge challenge.” But the biggest challenge was apparently the “Drivatar AI” system, which boasts a vastly smarter artificial intelligence design, drawing from cloud-stored data to increase the experience.
Creative director Dan Greenawalt expands on the Drivatar tech, explaining, “When you’ve got a learning neural network, more computing power is nothing but helpful. Because what you’re able to do is process a lot more information, and you don’t have to do it in realtime on the box. And that frees up more of the box to be doing graphics or audio or other computational areas. So we can now make our AI instead of just being 20%, 10% of the box’s capability, we can make it 600% of the box’s capability.”
It all sounds great on paper, but will it pan out? I guess we’ll have to wait until later this year to see for sure.
Forza 5 [The Official Xbox Magazine]
