Silicon Graphics Workstations / Development Workflow

Hey guys,

I've been reading Polygon's Oral History of Final Fantasy VII, and the interviewees pin much of the rationale in switching to PlayStation on real-world tests they did on SGI workstations. They created that 3D FFVI demo on a huge, $100k workstation just to see what was possible with 3D. They then tried various stress tests on SGI workstations that were roughly equivalent to the N64's target specs. When it was clear the N64 wouldn't be able to run a next-gen Final Fantasy, they jumped to Sony. At that point, they invested eight figures into SGI workstations and Autodesk software to create FFVII over the course of about 14 months.

So...

My question is: How and why did devs back in the '90s use these SGI workstations, rather than, for example, PlayStation or N64 dev kits? Were these workstations mainly for creating graphics, and then those files would be bounced to the PlayStation hardware? (This would be akin to creating a 3D model in Cinema 4D or something and then loading it into Unreal Engine.) Or did they create the full game in the workstation and then end up porting everything to the target console? If that's the case, wouldn't there be a considerable loss in graphical fidelity and the speed at which the game could run?

I guess I'm just confused as to what these workstations were really used for and how they were integrated with the actual console hardware.

My guess would be that they used those machines to create pre-rendered graphics that were used in things like cut-scenes, or maybe even backgrounds. Remember that SGI workstations were also used in making the Donkey Kong Country games. But I believe that they were specifically used to make pre-rendered sprites and whatnot.

The Indy basically had the same processor/configuration as the N64 (afaik) so it could run games in development natively.

I don't think that translated directly to PS1 but they could probably use some of the same development software for things like graphics.

So the real implications were that nothing was gonna run what their vision entailed. The demo was all done in poly's nothing was gonna be able to run a game like that in real time, even something as simple as an RPG. The compromise was 3D rendered for backgrounds and polys for the characters. The only problem was that all those backgrounds from multiple angles was going to chew up a huge chunk of space which wasn't going to jive with the cart storage then factor in the music and the choice was obvious. The Saturn wasn't capable of the poly workload at that time so Playstation won.

Is it that easy to forget the FMV cutscenes in Final Fantasy 7? That's the main reason Square would have used SGI Workstation hardware. The in-game character polygonal models? Yeah right.

HeavyMachineGun said:

Is it that easy to forget the FMV cutscenes in Final Fantasy 7?

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Jibbajaba said:

My guess would be that they used those machines to create pre-rendered graphics that were used in things like cut-scenes...

Click to expand...

Models, animation and I think textures could all be created on SGIs and then exported for use on N64, PSX and Saturn BITD.

Silicon Graphics workstations predated video cards in PCs etc and were also used for graphics in movies/tv and even research. The super computer center facility at my old school had a couple of these workstations, but mostly for grad students and their projects. However professors and other folks that paid for cpu time ran the big 3D weather simulations, molecular models, etc on giant super computers with hundreds of CPUs.

Hmm, OK - sounds like it was about what I figured: creating assets on the SGI workstations and then exporting them to the PS1 / N64 dev kits.

So I guess my follow-up question would be: What are the capabilities of the dev kits? Do devs actually create graphical assets on these? Or are they only used for creating code? Or maybe even just for running the code and graphics once everything's been compiled...?

And yeah, it's so funny looking back to a time when you needed a dedicated piece of hardware for video work instead of being able to just use a video card

Here is some information on the N64 SGI Indy development system.

http://nintendo64.wikia.com/wiki/SGI_Indy

Awesome forum for SGI:

http://forums.nekochan.net/

fakeXsound said:

Hmm, OK - sounds like it was about what I figured: creating assets on the SGI workstations and then exporting them to the PS1 / N64 dev kits.

So I guess my follow-up question would be: What are the capabilities of the dev kits? Do devs actually create graphical assets on these? Or are they only used for creating code? Or maybe even just for running the code and graphics once everything's been compiled...?

Click to expand...

This is going back awhile, but I thought the official SN Systems SDK for the PSX only ran on 32-bit Windows, so the environment wouldn't have worked on SGI machines. Saturn I don't really know anything about the official dev software, I'd guess in both cases the SGIs were just used for game assets rather than code. N64, as mentioned, is another story.