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Inside GTA 6's IMPOSSIBLE Rage Engine — Transcript

by Glooby · 2,554 words · 370 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:00If you shoot someone in GTA 6, the
0:02engine works out in that moment where
0:04they got shot and how their body should
0:06react. They may stumble, lean, or fall
0:09backwards. Walk into a house in a rough
0:11part of Vice City and the carpet, the
0:13furniture, and the grime on the walls
0:15were all picked by the engine based on
0:17the neighborhood outside. Sunlight
0:19bounces through the room with hardware
0:20ray tracing. Sweat builds up on Lucia's
0:23skin until it drips off. The beer you
0:25just opened has condensation and bubbles
0:27rising to the top. Every bit of this
0:29runs on rage, the engine Rockstar has
0:32been building for 20 years. And its
0:34story starts in a strange place for the
0:36studio behind GTA 6, a ping pong game
0:39from 2006 that never let you leave one
0:41room. If you guys enjoy this video,
0:43please feel free to subscribe. And
0:45without further ado, let's get into
0:47where rage actually came from. Up until
0:492004, Rockstar didn't own the engines
0:51its games ran on. GTA 3, Vice City, and
0:55San Andreas were all built on
0:56RenderWare, an engine licensed from a
0:58British company called Criterion
1:00Software. Then, EA bought Criterion.
1:03Overnight, the technology underneath
1:04Rockstar's biggest series belonged to
1:06one of its biggest competitors. EA could
1:08change the license terms, slow down
1:10support, or stop selling it altogether,
1:13and Rockstar would have no say in any of
1:15it. The obvious fallback was Unreal
1:17Engine 3, which plenty of studios were
1:19already lining up for. Unreal 3 was
1:21designed for tighter corridor style
1:23games with single cell lighting, though.
1:25It had no way to stream a huge open
1:27world in the background while the player
1:29drove through it, and GTA couldn't exist
1:31without that. But Rockstar already had a
1:33way out. Back in 2002, it had bought
1:36Angel Studios, the San Diego developer
1:38behind Midtown Madness 2, and renamed it
1:41to Rockstar San Diego. Angel had its own
1:44engine, the Angel Game Engine, or AGE
1:47for short. Rockstar set up a new team
1:49inside the studio called the Rage
1:51Technology Group. They added an R to the
1:53front of AGE, making it the Rockstar
1:55Advanced Game Engine, and rewrote its
1:57core systems. The new version was
1:59modular, so individual parts could be
2:02swapped out and upgraded, and
2:03multi-threaded, so it could spread work
2:05across the extra processor cores in the
2:07PS3 and Xbox 360. The first game
2:10Rockstar shipped on its new engine was a
2:12strange one for the studio behind GTA,
2:15Rockstar Table Tennis. The whole game
2:18took place in one small room with a
2:20locked camera. With no open world to
2:22stream, the engineers cut that problem
2:24out entirely, and the game held a locked
2:26720p at 60 frames per second. That left
2:29them free to test three systems in
2:31isolation. Subsurface scattering came
2:34first. That's how light passes into skin
2:36and spreads underneath it, which is why
2:38a player's ears could grow red when lit
2:40from behind. Then came the physics loop.
2:43With no city simulation running on top,
2:45the team could tune the rigid body
2:46solvers on their own. In a game where
2:49everything depended on how one small
2:51ball bounced. Next were vertex
2:53deformers, which bend a character's
2:55model on the fly. Table Tennis used them
2:57for cloth movement and for sweat that
2:59built up on player shirts as the match
3:00went on. Once all three worked, the
3:02engine went to Rockstar North in
3:04Edinburgh. Their job was to take it from
3:06one small room to all of Liberty City in
3:08GTA 4. But, Rockstar isn't one fixed
3:11engine that every Rockstar game drops
3:13into. Each game gets its very own
3:15customized branch, and internally those
3:17branches run from ERB1 up to ERB5.
3:21Because every branch grows out of the
3:23one before it, the tools and assets
3:25carry forward, too. Vegetation built for
3:27GTA 5 turns up again in Red Dead
3:29Redemption 2. Vehicles and clothing from
3:31GTA Online are being ported straight
3:33into GTA 6, and you can even already
3:35spot some of them in the trailers. At
3:37any point along the way, Rockstar could
3:39have easily dropped Rage and licensed a
3:41commercial engine like everyone else,
3:43but it had two reasons to stay, and that
3:45decision came with real costs as well.
3:48The first reason Rockstar stuck with
3:49Rage is money. Epic charges a 5%royalty
3:52on games built with Unreal Engine, and
3:55GTA 5 has brought in billions. Experts
3:57estimate that owning its own engine
3:59saved Rockstar more than $400 on that
4:02one game alone, and focus matters just
4:04as much because Unreal and Unity have to
4:07serve everyone, from mobile developers
4:09to film studios, so they ship with a lot
4:11of features that a GTA game would never
4:13touch. Rage only has to do what Rockstar
4:16Games needs, to stream a massive open
4:18world in as you move through it, keep
4:21thousands of NPCs on their daily
4:22schedules, and simulate the physics of
4:24everything in between. But, owning the
4:26engine also comes with some costs.
4:28Former Rockstar developers have said
4:30that working in a proprietary engine
4:32this old comes with sparse documentation
4:34and layers of legacy code that slow
4:36everything down. Some parts of Rage just
4:38couldn't be patched. Systems like audio
4:41acoustics and the physics matrices have
4:43needed full rewrites from scratch so
4:45they could run across the many cores in
4:46modern CPUs. But, no part of the engine
4:49has been rewritten more than the
4:51renderer. GTA 4 and the first Red Dead
4:53Redemption used a custom tile-based
4:55forward-plus pipeline. Before drawing
4:58anything properly, the engine ran a
4:59depth pre-pass to work out which
5:01surfaces were visible, then threw away
5:03every light source that wasn't touching
5:05them. Cutting out all that wasted work
5:07is what made real-time dynamic
5:09headlights possible. It also pushed the
5:11PS3 and Xbox 360 as far as they could
5:13go. On the PS3, the memory bandwidth
5:16became the bottleneck, and Red Dead
5:17Redemption had to drop to 640p while the
5:20360 version ran at 720p. For GTA 5,
5:23Rockstar changed how the game builds
5:25each frame. First, it draws every object
5:28on screen one at a time, but it doesn't
5:30light anything yet. It just saves
5:32information about each object into a few
5:34full-screen images. Together, those
5:36images are called the G-buffer. The game
5:38fills five of them at once, and lighting
5:40gets added later at the very end. Each
5:42of those images saves something
5:44different. Color, which is what every
5:45surface looks like with no lighting,
5:47direction, which is which way each tiny
5:50part of a surface is facing, shine,
5:52which is how reflective each surface is,
5:54how glossy it is, and how much it
5:56reflects when you look at it from a low
5:58angle. It also had light, which is how
6:00much light is coming from the sun, how
6:02much is coming from other lights, and
6:04which things glow on their own like neon
6:06signs for example. At And then it had
6:08distance and object type. These two both
6:10share the fifth image. Distance saves
6:12how far away each pixel is and object
6:15type gives every car, person, or plant a
6:18label so the game can treat them
6:19differently later. The distance image
6:21has a clever trick. GTA 5 saves it
6:24backwards so close things are white and
6:26far things are dark. Computers store
6:29numbers most accurately near zero so
6:31flipping it gives far away objects more
6:33accuracy. That stops a glitch called
6:35Z-fighting where two distant surfaces
6:37flicker because the game can't tell
6:39which one is in front. And since
6:41lighting now happens at the very end, a
6:43GTA 5 scene could have thousands of
6:45lights instead of just dozens. And then
6:47once the G-buffer is done, the game adds
6:49everything else in layers. Car
6:51reflections come first. The game
6:53captures the world around the car in two
6:55halves which keep reflections sharp on
6:57flat parts like the roof and hood. Then
6:59water comes next. The game makes a few
7:01separate images. One for the water's
7:03color, one for how see-through it is,
7:05and one for what's under the surface.
7:07The ocean you see is a mix of
7:09reflections, what's underneath, and
7:11small bumps that make waves. The whole
7:13sky is one giant dome shape stretched
7:16over the entire map drawn all at once.
7:18Clouds sit on a separate ring around it
7:20covered in detailed cloud images. For
7:23sunbeams, the game checks each pixel
7:25against the sun's shadows to see where
7:27light can get through. Then fog goes on
7:29top. Fog also helps hide how simple the
7:32far-away buildings and hills really are.
7:34Last comes the finishing touches. The
7:36game smooths out jagged edges and then
7:38adds a slight camera lens effect so the
7:40image looks like it was filmed with a
7:41real camera. And then Red Dead
7:43Redemption 2 switched to physically
7:45based rendering. That means materials
7:47like metal, wood, and cloth react to
7:49light the way they do in real life. The
7:51way light bounces off a scene was worked
7:53out ahead of time and saved into points
7:55across the map so the game didn't have
7:56to calculate it live. And fog got the
7:58biggest upgrade. In GTA 5, fog was a
8:01flat layer painted over the screen. In
8:03RDR 2, the space in front of the camera
8:05was split into a 3D grid of tiny boxes,
8:08and each box has its own amount of fog.
8:10Because the fog now has real depth,
8:12sunlight can pass through it properly.
8:14That's how you get separate sunbeams
8:16shining through the trees in a forest.
8:18And then, GTA 6 adds ray tracing, which
8:21means the game traces the actual path
8:23light takes as it bounces around. It's
8:25used for lighting and for the soft
8:26shadows in corners and cracks. Ray
8:28tracing takes a lot of power, so
8:30Rockstar had to make it work on
8:31consoles. The game limits how many light
8:33rays it uses, and instead of testing
8:35those rays against the full detailed
8:37world, it uses a simpler low-detail copy
8:40of it. That copy is organized in a
8:42structure called a BVH, which lets the
8:44game quickly skip over parts of the
8:46world that light can't reach. Rockstar
8:48has also filed a patent for a cheaper
8:50way to show light bouncing several
8:52times. It makes something called a
8:53bounce map from a top-down view, which
8:56looks realistic without needing as much
8:57power. That same kind of BVH structure
9:00also decides which part of the map gets
9:02loaded in the first place. And speaking
9:04of loading, Rage splits the whole map
9:06into a grid of small sections. Each
9:08section can be loaded or unloaded on its
9:10own, and the BVH structure from earlier
9:12keeps track of all of them. Any part of
9:14the map that's behind you or blocked
9:16from view gets cleared out of memory
9:17right away. At any moment, most of the
9:19map isn't loaded at all. The work of
9:21figuring out what to load and what to
9:23hide happens separately from the main
9:25game. That way, the game never has to
9:27stop and wait, and it stays smooth even
9:29when you're speeding down a highway.
9:30Textures, the images that cover every
9:32surface, work the exact same way. Every
9:34frame, the game checks exactly which
9:36pixels are on screen and only loads the
9:38level of detail those pixels need. When
9:40you're driving fast, that stops the game
9:42from wasting memory on detail you'll
9:44never even get close enough to see. Then
9:46comes making the details on the fly.
9:48Placing millions of rocks, trash cans,
9:50and bits of junk by hand would make the
9:52game's file size huge. So instead,
9:54artists label areas with tags like
9:56industrial or run-down. Then the game
9:59creates the clutter, junk, and plants
10:01while you play, based on the type of
10:03land, how steep the ground is, and how
10:05rich or poor the area is. Inside
10:07buildings, it works the exact same way.
10:09What's inside a house depends on the
10:11neighborhood around it. Some choices are
10:13a simple yes or no, like whether a room
10:15has a carpet. Others are more of a
10:17scale, like how dirty a wall is. And
10:19that's basically the city. Next up are
10:21the people living in it. In most
10:23arcade-style games, your character moves
10:25the instant you push the stick, but rage
10:27handles it differently. It treats your
10:28stick as the direction your character
10:30wants to go, then works out how a real
10:32body would get there. It checks where
10:34the feet are, keeps the body balanced,
10:36and uses fake muscles to push off the
10:38ground. That's why movement in Rockstar
10:40games feel heavy and realistic. It's
10:42also why there's a tiny delay between
10:44pushing the stick and your character
10:46actually moving. And two systems
10:48actually share the physics work. The
10:50first is based on a free physics tool
10:52called Bullet, which Rockstar has
10:53upgraded over the years. It handles
10:55things crashing into the world, like
10:57cars hitting walls or boxes falling down
10:59the stairs. The second is called
11:01Euphoria, made by a company called
11:03Natural Motion. Euphoria handles how
11:05characters keep their balance and how
11:07they react when something hits them.
11:09Zinga bought Natural Motion in 2014, and
11:12since then Rockstar has become one of
11:13the only big studios still using this
11:15kind of tech in its games. Now, say
11:17someone gets shot in the left leg. The
11:20game compares how hard the bullet hit
11:22with how the person's weight is balanced
11:24and figures out that the leg can't hold
11:25them up anymore. Their fake muscles push
11:27back to try to keep them standing.
11:29Depending on where they are and how they
11:31were moving, they might stumble, lean to
11:33the right, or reach out and grab a wall.
11:35None of that is a pre-made animation.
11:37The game works it out right in that
11:38moment. Animations also change based on
11:41each character's height and weight. A
11:42heavier person moves differently than a
11:44skinny one. In GTA 6, Jason and Lucia
11:46even climb through the same window in
11:48different ways. Rockstar also has a
11:50patent for a system that makes liquids
11:52like sweat, tears, and blood move
11:54realistically over a character's body.
11:56It keeps track of how thick each liquid
11:58is, how much of it there is, and how it
12:01clings to the skin. Sweat will build up
12:02over time and then drip off. When a
12:05bullet hits someone, the blood flies off
12:07based on how hard the hit was. Other
12:09patents cover characters leaving tracks
12:11in snow and mud. And then there are the
12:13tiny details that most people will never
12:15even notice. Hair and clothes have their
12:17own weight, so they move separately from
12:19the body. Couches sink a little when
12:20someone sits down. Coins move inside of
12:23cash registers, as well as a million
12:25other things. So, yeah, in 2006, Rage's
12:28whole job was to make two ping pong
12:30players sweat in one small room. 20
12:32years later, that same engine is
12:33handling sweat, blood, and salt stains
12:36across an entire state. If you learn
12:37something about the tech behind GTA 6, a
12:39like and subscribe really help me out.
12:41And if there's a part of Rage that you
12:43think I missed, let me know in the
12:44comments. My name's Gloobie, and thank
12:46you for watching.

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