- Joined
- Jul 26, 2008
- Posts
- 11,010
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.
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.