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Thursday, February 08, 2007 |
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Technology, Look & Feel
Hello GRAW fans, I’m David Reizer, Lead Engineer on GRAW2 Single Player. I’m here today to reveal to you the secrets of the technical magic behind the GRAW 2 in the next instalment of our developer blogs here on IGN. The deal is pretty simple: what’s the strategy behind creating gorgeous effects, stunning lightings & impressive game features, and make sure everything is running smoothly the day you want to show off with your (friends/mom/brother/geeky girlfriend, check the relevant)
The first step is to start from a strong basis. For deployment, we had an in-house game engine, built from scratch within UBISOFT, the YETI engine, used for the original GRAW. This included nice features at the time like:
Real-time dynamic shadows & dynamic lighting
Heat effects & heat waves
Highly detailed normal mapping & impacts
Dynamic physics system & interaction with the world
An array of filters and post processing
Combination of HDR (High Dynamic Range) lighting & powerful anti-aliasing
We’re using a vastly improved version of YETI for GRAW2, which includes and improves all those native technologies.
The second step, to challenge the console a bit, was to add tons of new technologies to make sure the Xbox 360 is at its best.
Light & Shadows technologies:
Ambient occlusion – Ambient occlusion is a visual technology feature that accurately reproduces the way shadows appears to the human eye in real life. In most games shadows tend to appear the same regardless of the nature of the shadow, the surface, time of day etc., while in real life shadows differ in many ways. For example when you face a building that casts its shadows toward you, the intensity & darkness of the shadow evolve depending on how close the building is, and continues to evolve depending on how close to the building you move.
Object Translucency – Object Translucency simulates the effect where certain surfaces, while they stop most of the light, the human eye can still perceive shapes through them depending on the direction of the light source. It is often the case with plain thin surfaces such as tree & plant leaves, and certain textile surfaces.
God Rays - God rays simulate the way light goes around the surface of objects that stop the sun light. When the sun light is blocked by certain elements you can always see at the limit of those elements a particular light ray that has a blurry unreal feel to it, for example when you are at the limit of dense forest with the sun in front of you & you look at the top of the trees, you can see the light penetrate the depth of the forest in distinct “rays”.
At that stage, your console should look fine, the green lights of the console brightly looking at you. This is why you should add in the mix dangerous fire & smoke effects.
Fire & Smoke technologies:
Dynamic fire & smoke - Dynamic smoke & fires, while very difficult to develop & master, is pretty simple to explain. This features allow us to reproduce the way fire & flames & smoke behave in real life. Fire & smoke will look much better in GRAW2, but what is most interesting about them is the way they will evolve & interact with the environment, and other contributing factors in our physics system. For example in real life when there is wind, fire & smoke will dynamically change their trajectories pushed by the wind. They will do just that in GRAW2. To give you a couple example of how this will translate in game if you have 2 cars burning in a street & an helicopter lands between them, the columns of smoke will move away from the helo pushed back by the wind it is creating. This also translates to explosions and or gunfire. Explosions will dramatically affect the behaviour of smoke and fire, and give the sense of realism, further immersing the player in the game world.
Depth Sprite - Depth sprite is a near invisible feature that makes an amazing amount of difference to the immersion factor of GRAW 2. A very strong challenge in terms of visuals is to obtain a smooth and natural visual interaction between fixed objects & dynamic visual elements. For example when dynamic smoke is spreading & colliding with the floor & other elements such as cars or boxes (fixed objects). Depth sprite makes a world of difference in turning this aspect from a clunky weird looking collision that automatically reminds you that you are playing a video game to a natural appearing, real life collision where the smoke interacts smoothly with the different world elements. Actually this is the kind of feature that you might not notice when it is there because it looks so natural but as soon as you will have seen it, you will always notice it is not there whenever you will see other games that don’t have it.
This is a crucial moment, the point of no return. If you’re a skilled commander, knowing exactly your strength and the enemy weaknesses, you should try a last blow:
Real-time day & night cycle - In GRAW2 as time passes the world will change around you, the sun will raise and set dynamically, shadows will adapt to this moving in real time, ambient occlusion will reflect this as the shadows intensity will evolve realistically along with the time of day, position and intensity of the sun, weather conditions (clouds or overcast) etc.
For GRAW2, the strategy was a blitz attack, with simultaneous offensives:
What is very important on top of what each feature is bringing individually is the way they combine and dynamically interact with one another. For example, Ambient Occlusion combined with HDR lighting (that accurately simulates the intensity & variations of different sources of life and the way the human eye gets accustomed to them) makes the world much more believable & immersive. This will really allow us to be much more photo realistic than GRAW 1.
This is what makes your strategy a success: combination.
The combinations of all of these new and advanced technologies are not just for visual enhancement, they also have a consistent affect on gameplay. Like we are working together with Corinne (the Artistic Director on GRAW 2 single player) to bring her the features that she needs to execute the Artistic direction she wants for the game, we also work with game designers to bring them features that will impact gameplay the way they envision. For example if you couple time of the day and translucency you can get very interesting situation for gameplay. Imagine an enemy is hidden in a tent. Thanks to translucency you could see him through the tent “wall” if the light source hit this wall in an appropriate way. Having the night/day cycle feature in the game it means that depending on the time of day you will see the shape of this enemy through the tent or not. Hence you have to be careful and assess the lighting situation before concluding whether there could be an enemy hidden behind a given object.
To get a good visual run down of these technologies in motion ,and their imapact on the gameplay in GRAW 2, be sure to check out our behind the scenes video developer diary here
Until next time… Thanks for your attention, men!
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Thursday, February 01, 2007 |
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Team Leads Intro
Hello, and welcome to the first instalment of the Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, or what we affectionately call “GRAW 2”, developer blog. For the first entry we want to give you a brief intro and a bit of background information on a few of the team leads from both of the studios we have working diligently on GRAW 2. The studio at Ubisoft Paris is developing the single player portion of the game, while Red Storm is once again at the helm of all things multi-player. Many of these names and faces you will see throughout the upcoming blog entries, so we should get acquainted no? Without further adieu, meet a few of our GRAW 2 dev team leads…
GRAW 2 Single Player Team Leads – Ubisoft Paris
 Jean Bernard Jacon:
Knocking around in the videogame battlefields for some years, Jean-Bernard Jacon has fought for the Ubisoft Army on many fronts. He eventually joined the elite GRAW battalion, serving as an Associate Producer on the most explosive sequel of the year. A specialist in lethal game production techniques, he loves nothing more than brutalizing bugs databases, pressuring teams and crushing deadlines…
 Olivier Dauba:
Olivier Dauba was a rocket scientist for the European Space Agency. After a few Ariane 5 crashes, he decided to recycle himself in an industry where massive explosions, destruction and going down in style would actually be a success, gaming. He is now designing the only battles that a French strategic mastermind can win, i.e. virtual ones. But the Art of War has never been so stylish.
 Olivier Didelot:
Hi, my name is Olivier. I took command of the Gameplay Programming team for GRAW 2. Our mission was clear; to take care of the basic needs for the rest of the team. Meaning we must provide them all the tools to make the best combat simulator ever. Our main task was to enhance as much as possible the capabilities of all the fighting forces in GRAW2.
 Vincent Hamache:
“Hi, I am Vincent Hamache, i served under commandment of the Lead Level Designer and I worked on various content of the game, such as the Timeline, the Features Distribution, and the Learning and Difficulty curve. Our goal was to improve the immersion feeling by providing tactical challenges in very wide urban and natural environment. I think we succeeded in creating realistic maps that present a variety of interesting situations to take advantage of the powerful and deadly arsenal of the ghosts.”
 Philippe Bayle:
Philippe Bayle served as coordinator with Army Music conductors during his military service. Senior Producer duties are indeed similar to those of a conductor: set the tempo, anticipate next measures and beats, listen and shape the sound of the Ubisoft Paris “Philharmonic” GRAW team: 160+ developers devoted to provide gamers the best, most immersive and memorable tactical shooter experience.
David Reizer:
After 9 years in the industry, David has acquired all the experiences necessary to master the development of a truly next-generation tactical shooter: the secret is no need for a high precision technology, no deal with an advanced tactical weapon, if your development kit is defective, just KICK ITS F*#$$ &$$
Multiplayer Team Leads – Red Storm
 Christian Allen - Creative Director:
Christian is the Creative Director here at Red Storm Entertainment and his latest project is GRAW2. His creative director responsibility include basically carrying the vision of the game (and with this comes lots of meetings?). He has over 3 years of professional experience in the industry – all of which has been spent at Red Storm, and also 3 years prior making MODS. His previous positions at Red Storm include: Designer, Weapons Consultant, Lead Designer, Lead Multiplayer Designer, and now Creative Director. Prior to life at Red Storm, he was in the Marines and working various government jobs, as well as making mods for R6: Rogue Spear. In his free time, he is an avid firearms enthusiast and like all the team members, a devoted gamer.
 Prince Arrington - Associate Producer:
Prince Arrington is the multiplayer associate producer for GRAW2 on the Xbox 360. Prince has spent 5 years in the video game industry, all at Red Storm Entertainment. Along with being the associate producer on GRAW and GRAW2, Prince has been a QA analyst on Ghost Recon 2 (Xbox) and Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike (Xbox). All of Prince’s game credits include Ghost Recon (PC), Ghost Recon (Xbox), Ghost Recon: Desert Siege (PC), Sum of All Fears (PC), Ghost Recon: Island Thunder (Xbox), Ghost Recon 2 Xbox, Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike, and Ghost Recon 3: Advanced Warfighter on the Xbox 360. Prince can be found on Xbox Live on his 360 playing anything from sports games to you guessed it, GRAW.
 Chris Bray - Lead MP Designer:
Chris is the lead MP designer on GRAW2. He has been working in the games industry for two years where most of that time has been at Red Storm Entertainment, where he was scripter on GRAW Chapter 2 DLC, GR: Summit Strike, and Rainbow Six: Lockdown. Prior to his time at Red Storm, he began his games industry career interning at Image Space Inc. working on the title NASCAR Thunder 2004. As a side note: Chris is the internal developer GRAW 360 Multiplayer champion.
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