Use the Force, Luke (and four GPUs running in parallel) Virtual reality is the star of the show at GDC 2016, but Star Wars also gets top billing.
Everybody is talking about VR in San Francisco this week, and everybody who’s talking about VR is also talking about Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine, a demo that brings the galaxy far, far away to VR goggles.
It comes to GDC courtesy of ILMxLAB, a division of LucasFilm’s special effects juggernaut focused on creating experiences that transcend modern moviegoing. And the future of cinema, according to ILMxLAB, is an experience.
Star Wars isn’t something that you watch, in other words. It’s something you participate in.
THE PRICE OF PARTICIPATION
Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine is what happens when the bright and creative minds at LucasFilm create a state-of-the-art sandbox using their iconic property. It exists to show possibilities. It exists to foreshadow the future. Unlike most of the VR at GDC this year, though, it has a very high barrier to entry.
As thrilling as may be to see the Millennium Falcon land in front of you, to interact with R2-D2 and help Han Solo repair his ship, or to wield a lightsaber, Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine is not something for your home VR experience — at least not now. Behind what you can see are massive amounts of technology, computing power and technical wizardry that fit better in an amusement park than your living room.
This became clear Tuesday evening, when two employees at ILMxLAB and one from Skywalker Sound told the story of Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine’s creation.
It was a fascinating, often technical talk. And though it spoke of the future of cinema, it felt right at home at the Game Developers Conference. According to ILM, creating Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine, where players strap on a VR headset and live inside a scene ion the planet where Luke Skywalker grew up, was closer to developing a video game than a movie. They wrote a script and they animated the virtual world, but unlike a movie, players get to interact with it. Interaction is the domain of games, not films, and ILM treated Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine as much like a game as a movie.
But if Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine was a video game, it’d be tough to imagine a consumer PC capable of playing it.
For example, the original version of the Tatooine set piece included 400 GB of textures created at 8K resolution. That level of artistic detail makes sense if you’re trying to create a photorealistic virtual experience that effectively transports viewers onto a movie set. But even the beefiest modern hardware had trouble rendering the VR world at 90 fps.
The upshot: Even ILM’s might couldn’t make it work as well as it needed to, so its creators significantly down-sampled many of the assets. Artoo’s model, for example, contains a mixture of textures at original and degraded resolutions in Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine.
Of course, hardware-based compromises are nothing new. They’re as old as the gaming medium. But the processing power to render the VR world became undeniable when ILM got into the technical details about what, ideally, Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine could run on.
Though Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine can run on lesser configurations, a presenter showed a more ideal setup, which involves four state of the art GPUs coded to run in parallel. Each frame is so complex that they use three of the GPUs to render it. Then they pass that to the fourth GPU, which does a bit of final processing and passes the final product to the VR display. This process — render with the power of three, pass off, pass off — repeats in parallel 90 times a second to make it run in real time.
When running on lesser hardware, ILM cut some more digital corners, rendering some things at half resolution to determine the chrominance and luminance for the dual-sunned planet. There’s even a way to run it with two GPUs in parallel, which each rendering a frame for your left and right eyes, respectively. Again, not exactly a consumer-friendly solution.
Those weren’t the only technical hurdles that ILM had to crest, either. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit of information had to do with the lightsaber that Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine players eventually pick up. The VR experience runs at 90fps, much higher than the 30 or 60fps of non-VR games — and significantly higher than the 24fps standard of movies like Star Wars. Wielding a lightsaber at 90fps doesn’t look the same as watching a lightsaber at 24fps. It’s not a one-to-one comparison, and the developers spent a lot of time figuring out how to recreate just the right amount of motion blur in 90fps to recreate the look of 24fps as players swing their laser swords through the air.
AN EXPENSIVE PRESENT FOR AN INEXPENSIVE FUTURE
A few years ago, 3D TVs took the annual Consumer Electronics Show by storm, as manufacturers pushed what they believed would be the next big thing in home entertainment. Something similar is happening this year at GDC. Virtual reality, which was a theory for decades, is on the verge of becoming a consumer reality.
Many of the biggest stories at GDC 2016 are about virtual reality. And almost all of them are about the VR that could be in your home by the end of 2016.
Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine is not one of these things. It is a leap beyond, generations beyond what you might experience in the comfort of your own home. It is a deeply impressive technological achievement, but its practical implications in 2016 are, based on what I’ve seen, years away from consumer grade practicality.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. ILM is pushing the technological envelope. I’d be shocked if the technology they’re inventing didn’t wind up in your home one day — but not today or tomorrow or this year or next.
It also fits into the narrative that virtual reality proponents have espoused during the last few years. VR may begin with video games and its early adopter crowd, but few believe it will end there. Facebook didn’t buy Oculus because it wanted to get into gaming, after all. It bought it because it believes that VR has applications well beyond that ecosystem.
As deeply impressive as Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine is, it’s more of a harbinger of things to come than an practical experience. In 2016, it’s not the stuff of home entertainment. LucasFilm isn’t pretending it is. Instead, it’s the kind of experience you’ll need to spend 90 minutes in line to see at an amusement park.

The ability to edit and create virtual reality games while inside VR comes to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine today for anyone to use, technical director Mike Fricker announced during a press conference at GDC this morning.
The source code is available now on GitHub, and binary code will hit this June.
Editing in Unreal Editor is a one-to-one experience. Editors can move around the world by grabbing the world and pulling it, sort of like Spider-Man walking up a wall. You can also pinch and zoom objects or the whole world.
Pointing to one controller with another controller brings up menus in the VR world, which then let you select objects or functions and use them in real time. You can also go straight into much more robust tools like the material editor or blueprint visual printing in VR.
“This is really just the beginning, and we want to take you along for the ride," Fricker said.
The tech, which allows game makers to strap on a headset and be inside the game they’re working on, was first shown off in February during a livestream. The livestream showed how Unreal Engine developers can use the game’s editor in VR to develop content, moving and editing 3D objects with a "virtual iPad" interface.
"You’re editing VR in VR," Sweeney said at the time. "It’s a completely what-you-see-is-what-you-get experience. There’s no question about what your game looks like."
"To see all of Unreal Editor in VR … it’s something I never thought possible when we started," Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe said.
You can watch the February presentation in the video below.

High Voltage’s Conduit series landed on Wii and mobile. Now the team is attempting a shooter in VR Like a benchmark, any time a new platform comes along, people try to make first-person shooters for it. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. It happened on Wii and mobile, and now it’s happening in VR.
Developer High Voltage Software has been through each of those phases, developing the Conduit series on Wii and later overseeing a mobile port. Now it’s developing Damaged Core, a first-person shooter for the Oculus Rift.
While in many ways shooters seem like a natural fit for VR, with the player looking through the eyes of the main character, they don’t always work as well as they seem because the amount of movement often makes players feel uncomfortable. High Voltage’s solution was to take out the movement.
In Damaged Core, you can’t walk or run. Instead, you teleport between stationary enemies (or orbs floating in the sky if you need a bird’s eye view). You play an AI and the enemies are robots, so you jump into a robot body, shoot the enemies in your view, then hop out before all the nearby robots turn on you. You can teleport into most enemies you can see, though in some cases they might not be immediately available and have a shield you have to shoot off first, for instance.

In practice, movement feels great. It’s easy to target an enemy and “inhabit" them, and the strategy seems to be more about choosing where to teleport than having perfect aim. When I played it at a recent press event, the most exciting moments came not from killing enemies, but from abandoning bodies at the last possible second. It’s like a game of hot potato, using up what you can from one robot then finding another to keep the streak going.
In the level I tried, it seemed like many of the enemies stood still to accommodate this design, giving off a bit of a shooting gallery feel. High Voltage chief creative officer Eric Nofsinger says the team showed the level I played to show how the mechanics work, and that other levels will have more enemies that rush you like you might expect from a traditional shooter.
"On that level, I’d say because of the space it is — the open, almost arena-style play space of that level, which is one of our smallest levels — they tend to give you a little bit more room and not get up on you," says Nofsinger.
Because of that open space, where enemies spawn all over and sometimes behind you, I also turned around a lot while playing. The developers seemingly anticipated this, since at the press event one booth attendee’s job was to stand next to the player and hold the cord that sticks out of the headset, moving it as players turned so no one got tangled in the cord.

Producer Doug Seebach says he hasn’t seen many issues with players getting tangled in the cord, and that players who get to understand the game’s flow often look 90 degrees to their right or left, and then return their view to the center where they began, and repeat that sequence. Nofsinger adds that in the development team’s office, many choose to play sitting down in a swivel chair rather than standing up like at the press event.
As a base concept, though, Damaged Core is already a lot of fun. The rhythm of hopping between characters came because of VR limitations, but feels like something that would be fun in any format.
And as the game plays out, Nofsinger says the team has plenty of other twists on the formula in the works — like a Valkyrie enemy that you inhabit then aim its missiles by tilting your head, and different generations of enemies that you can’t inhabit until you upgrade to a certain level. The game will also have bosses, many of which you can’t inhabit, and a story worked on by BioShock Infinite and Saints Row writer Drew Holmes.
High Voltage doesn’t have any multiplayer plans, and is currently preparing for a spring 2016 launch.

Here’s a rundown of what the small box does and doesn’t do Sony has kept mum on the capabilities of PlayStation VR’s processing unit to this point, but the company finally provided some details on the box during a presentation today at the 2016 Game Developers Conference.
“It is not extra GPU power CPU power," said Chris Norden, senior staff engineer at Sony. "It is certainly not a PlayStation 4 expansion unit or upgrade."
Norden added, "Actually, it’s not really accessible to the developer in any way," noting that "the PlayStation 4 is perfectly capable of 120 Hz."

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The making of PlayStation VR

Sony’s been so secretive about the box, which is officially called the "processor unit," that we weren’t even allowed to take photos of it as recently as December. The company provided the dimensions of the box yesterday, following the announcement of the PlayStation VR price and release window: The processor unit is about the size of four CD jewel cases stacked together.
So what does the processor unit do? A slide in Norden’s presentation explained that the box handles processing of object-based 3D audio, and displays the "social screen," which is Sony’s term for the second screen that you may use with PlayStation VR. (The box allows the PS4 to simultaneously output an image to the headset and, say, a television.) The processor unit unwarps the headset image so it can be displayed on a normal screen, and that process drops the resolution somewhat for the social screen.
The processor unit can use the social screen in both mirroring mode and in a separate mode, according to Norden. And the box also handles the display of the PS4 interface when the PlayStation VR headset is being used in cinematic mode.
We’ll have more from Norden’s talk soon.
Developing …

Tournaments as easy as matchmaking The Xbox Live Tournaments Platform will allow developers to create their own game tournaments powered by Xbox Live, Jason Roland, head of Xbox Advanced Technology Group said in unveiling the new program at a GDC 2016 panel today.
Like Xbox Live’s built-in matchmaking capabilities on console and Windows PC, the Xbox Live Tournaments Platform is designed to make tournaments easy for developers to integrate into games. Microsoft’s ambitions go beyond developers, though: Ronald announced partnerships with esports networks ESL and Face It, who will stage their tournaments using the platform.
Roland said the Xbox Live Tournaments Platform was built with more than just esports players and leagues in mind. Chad Gibson, group program manager at Xbox Live, used Rocket League as the backdrop to explain how he wants to use the Xbox Live Tournaments Platform.
“I’m a huge Rocket League player, but I’m not amazing," Gibson told Polygon. "I would love to play a tournament with my friends. I would love to be able to say, ‘Hey, guys. This Friday, why don’t the eight of us play a single elimination, one-on-one tournament and see who wins?’"
Gibson also said that tournaments could work cooperatively. In Tom Clancy’s The Division, he imagined a scenario where entering with a friend could allow them to be more competitive and climb leaderboards they couldn’t climb on their own.
On the developers’ end, Gibson said, Xbox Live Tournaments Platform will allow games to integrate with the service in much the same way that games already integrate with multiplayer though Xbox Live. Microsoft will handle things like arbitration, registration, queuing and notifications. The aim is to make it easy to add tournaments to a game. Then, Gibson said, developers can choose how tournaments work in their games.
A preview software development kit is available today, and Roland said that Microsoft plans to release the final version later this year.

We just wanted to talk to camels. Moon Hunters is one of those games that feels incredibly vast, while also very small.
It’s a point-and-click RPG from Kitfox Games, where you play a legendary hero trying to figure out what happened to the moon. You see, the moon was supposed to rise for your village’s First Moon Feast but instead she was a no-show. As a respected hero, you’re sent out to find her.
That basic premise is the same with every playthrough, as is the villain: sun cult leader Mardokh. But in between, any number of things can happen. The procedurally generated encounters and locations of Moon Hunters hint at a huge world full of opportunities.
In practice, it can be a little frustrating. The gameplay is limited to three in-game days, which are marked by your camping after clearing an area. So while I often discovered really interesting opportunities (cave full of blood!) I wasn’t always able to pursue them. In every playthrough I was told that I could find someone who could teach me to talk to animals. I only broached that possibility in my fifth playthrough, but wasn’t able to pursue it fully before my three days were up and I had to fight Mardokh.
It reminded Griffin and me a little bit of The Yawhg, and a little bit of Road Not Taken. One thing you definitely can’t miss: the gorgeous art and music. I’m not the kind of person who goes wild for pixel art, but this game is an exception for me. Watch the video to see what I mean! It also showcases the game’s environments, fast-paced combat, and the camel that I still can’t talk to.
Moon Hunters is available on Steam for PC. You can play with up to four players, locally and online.

Part puzzle game, part reflex challenge. Like many VR games, Headmaster starts with a simple concept. The game throws soccer balls at you, and you move your head to hit them back. It’s wrapped in a story where you visit a center for soccer players who need help, but it’s really all about the feeling of a soccer ball hitting you in the head.
There’s a nice sense of timing when the ball flies in, a satisfying suction cup sound effect when it hits you and a quick bounce when it flies away. And you don’t have to move your head to the point of discomfort — you can slowly lean in and still get a pretty accurate shot, as long as you approach it from the correct angle.
Similar to something like Portal, the game is primarily a series of challenges, with bits of story and humor snuck in around the edges. Your main goal is to aim the soccer balls at specific targets. The more difficult the targets are to hit, the more points you get for them. Then as you progress, the game throws in obstacles and twists on the concept, with an excitable employee named Carl mixed in.
“It’s not wacky,” says Frame Interactive CEO Ben Throop. “It’s more like dark humor. The guy that runs it, you never see him. … Let’s just call him the headmaster. … He’s kind of only half paying attention, because he’s got a lot of other stuff going on. He hired Carl to do stuff, and Carl gets a little bit excited to make the challenges for you.”

Carl is the center’s only employee, and isn’t allowed to talk to you, so he leaves notes behind to tell you what’s going on and add some flavor. The bulk of the game, though, lies in the challenges he creates.
In the demo version on display at GDC, this plays out initially in a realistic sense, but soon ramps up. In one challenge, you get a giant beach ball that knocks over multiple targets at once, making aiming easier. In another, you get soccer ball-shaped bombs, which you use to blow up wooden crates and clear a path. One stage puts a forklift carrying an outhouse in your way, making you aim around it to hit your targets. And in the final stage before the GDC demo fades to black, you see the outlines of a rock concert stage, hinting at something more elaborate.
The developers are also planning a multiplayer mode called the “group session” where players take turns wearing the headset and pass it around, competing for score. “It’s kind of like you’re all visiting a football improvement center together,” says Throop. “You’ve all been bad players and got sent there by your club to improve.”
Frame is planning Headmaster as a PlayStation VR launch title to ship in October, exclusive to Sony’s headset because Sony funded the game.

Will be released as a book first Director Michael Mann is bringing a group of writers together to write a prequel novel and film adaptation to his 1995 movie, Heat.
According to Deadline, Mann is launching a book publishing company with the goal to adapt each title that comes through for either film or television. The director will reportedly scour his own archive of films to look for potential ideas, but his highest priority remains bringing the Heat prequel to fruition.
Starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, Heat followed a gang of bank robbers trying to evade police upon realizing they accidentally left a clue at the location of their most recent heist. The prequel will reportedly focus on the “formative" years of each major character.
Mann is currently working on securing writers for both fiction and non-fiction projects. Once his writers are onboard, work can start on the prequel but there’s no estimated release date at this time.

Step onto the desert planet yourself If you ever get a chance to check it out, your visit to a virtual reality Star Wars in its current form will be all too brief.
The Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine demo runs for maybe seven minutes in its entirety, and only a brief moment within that time is actual gameplay.
The demo opens with the familiar burst of music so familiar to anyone who has seen a Star Wars movie, and then comes the text crawl, marching off into the star-filled distance until it finally disappears.
Next you see Tatooine and then, finally, you’re there, standing by a landing pad next to a clutter of boxes and storage bins in an alien desert.
The Millennium Falcon swoops down, and after a bit of banter and a quick repair or two, R2-D2 hands over your lightsaber. The controls are precise, but smoothed out to prevent the jitter some might deliver with an unsteady hand. I was able to perform tight figure eights in the air with the tip of the lightsaber and tiny, nearly invisible circles with controlled wrist movement.
While the virtual weapon obviously lacks the heft of a physical object, I was surprised at how real it felt in the experience. It’s been a while, but I spent my high school and college years learning and teaching fencing. This weapon behaved like it should when it came to tip control.
It did feel ever so slightly behind the faster of my real-world wrist movements, but not enough to throw me out of the experience.
After a few seconds of adjusting, my place sort of under the Millennium Falcon was attacked by a swarm of stormtroopers, and Han Solo asked me, over an intercom, to protect R2.
I spent the next minute or so swatting red lasers out of the air, trying my best to both protect the droid and also angle the laser blasts back at the approaching troopers.
I found using the tip of the lightsaber was easier and more efficient than trying to, essentially, parry the blasts with the edge of the weapon.
It was fantastic fun, but over way too quickly for the buildup. I was also surprised to find that a few times I bumped the wall with my controller.
Later, the person demoing the game for me said that the typical virtual wall that pops up to warn a player that they’re about to hit something was turned off for the demo because the developers thought it took away from the experience.

Check out the video above to see the entire demo, and me awkwardly swatting my way through it.

Gods of Egypt this is not The upcoming adaptation of William Wyler’s 1959 classic Ben-Hur finally has a trailer.
The movie, which stars Boardwalk Empire’s Jack Huston as the main character, Judah Ben-Hur, follows a fallen nobleman through years of slavery before the prince decides to exact revenge on the man who betrayed him. The film will be directed by Timur Bekmambetov, best known for his work on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Wanted.
Also starring Morgan Freeman and Toby Kebbell, Ben-Hur will be released on Aug. 12.