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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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