Hellgate: London
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ESRB:
Blood and Gore,Language - Mild,Violence
Publisher: Namco Bandai Genre(s): Action, Role Playing Game Home Page: http://www.hellgatelondon.com/
It can't have escaped any PC gamer's attention of late that hardware requirements for the most recent games have been quite a step up from the past few years. So when it was announced a while back that it would support DirectX 10 graphics, lots of people began to worry that it was going to be yet another system hog. However, the developers, Flagship Studios, have been adamant that the game will scale over a huge range of machines, and those people will medium/low-end systems or PCs three/four years old have not been forgotten. 
In collaboration with Electronics Arts, Flagship kindly confirmed the minimum hardware requirements for Hellgate: London and gave us some direct answers to questions about the relationship between their game's technology and our PC's abilities. All too often, gamers are left to second guess what benefits a dual core CPU might bring or whether their widescreen monitor will display the game correctly. Tyler Thompson, the Director of Technology (left), takes the honours as the man who knows all, and sets the record straight. Oh, and just to spice things up a bit - how about some in-game screenshots exclusive to us? As Mr Burns would say: ah, excellent!
YouGamers: Having concentrated on just a PC version for the moment (and possibly, for good), did this mean your artists and coders had much more freedom in what they could achieve with the visuals and performance? Tyler Thompson: Making games for the PC requires thinking about a broad range of hardware. Our artists and programmers had a lot of freedom in some ways, and this allowed them to make some assets and shaders which are relatively complex. We also had to make simplified versions of everything so that we could have a low min-spec.
YouGamers: When developing a new engine for a game, what sources of information and inspiration do you use - events such as Siggraph, rival games with the latest tech or benchmarks such as 3DMark? Thompson: When developing the engine we read several publications, looked at examples provided in many tools and worked closely with NVIDIA.
YouGamers: Dual core CPUs are now very popular amongst PC enthusiasts but not too many games have really taken advantage of multicore processors. Does Hellgate: London follow suit or are there specific parts which are better if played on a dual or quad core CPU system? Thompson: In Hellgate: London, multi-core machines will have faster load times and some much better looking weather effects.
YouGamers: Although there is a reasonable proportion of gamers with DX10 compliant graphics cards (and running on Windows Vista), the bulk of users still have DX9 GPUs. Will Hellgate: London target various shader models (e.g. SM2.0, SM2.0b, SM3.0, SM4.0) or just two - SM2.0 and SM4.0? Thompson: Hellgate: London supports several levels of shaders: SM1.1, SM2.0, SM3.0 and SM4.0. We have worked quite hard to make sure that we allow many people to enjoy the game without having to update their computer.
YouGamers: Since Hellgate: London can use SM4.0, what effects will gamers notice them looking better than in SM2.0? Thompson: Our DX10 engine has several effects. We have interactive, volumetric smoke which uses the render to volume feature in DX10. We have rain that factors in the direction of the eye and the light direction to read from a texture array. We have a few forms of motion blur. We have soft particles – which helps remove that hard edge that many particle systems display when penetrating the background. We have a better method for computing shadows. We use the improved normal map compression method in the DX10 target as well.
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