Remedy Interview - Part 3: "The Power Behind Wake"
YouGamers: If you read some of the technology discussion boards, a lot of people rant on about how it's really difficult to make a multiple threaded engine that works very well on multicore CPUs in PCs or the processor in the 360 - is there any substance to those claims or is it just noise? Mäki: I think it's of course a lot more work but I think it's just stuff you need to handle if you want to stay in this business - it's "business as usual" creating a multithreaded engine nowadays. It's just like a leap from C to C++, it's like… Järvilehto: …software rendering to 3D acceleration. [Mäki nods in agreement] It is a lot more work but then again, you can do a lot cooler stuff. Mäki: Yeah and if you can't take that leap, then you have no business being on the leading edge of game development, really.
Volumetric lighting in action - note the light beams from the trees and how they reflect off the dust in the air.
YouGamers: One of the key things from the YouGamers side of things is that we're trying to give the readers the right information they need for each game - what it's going to look and feel like on their system, so are people with just a year or two old single core CPU going to be significantly… Järvilehto: [shakes head] We're not going to talk about system requirements yet. YouGamers: We ask the question because you showed the demo of Alan Wake at IDF 2006 with a quad core CPU and the impression is that you need four cores to run the game… Mäki: Well don't forget that you saw it running a dual core CPU system… YouGamers: Good point! Will the gameplay be different though with just a one core CPU? Mäki: Well we can't make the AI scale but it's like with all PC upgrades - you just get a better experience if you have a faster PC. Järvilehto: I don't think I've seen a PC game ever scale in the fashion where the actual gameplay will change…[everyone agrees] You can make the game look more impressive and you can add a lot more stuff to it but you never mess around with the gameplay. Mäki: I don't know whether I'm going to give you too many sound bites…[everyone laughs]…not just for Alan Wake but if somebody is still using a single core CPU, then they should seriously consider an update - asap. [much nodding of heads all round]
YouGamers: The one thing we really noticed in the demo were the real-time, dynamic shadows - nicely shown off with the time changes and movement of the Sun. Have you stuck to "well known" methods or did you use something pretty new and cool? Mäki: There's lots of pretty new and cool stuff going on in the engine [smiles]; I know that some of the techniques have been shared by 3DMark06 in the past. If you look at the volumetrics going on, there's lots of cool stuff going on…  Real-time shadows nicely displayed in this image - the railing and trees cast dynamic shadows onto the road; the edges of the shadows are smoothed out to make them more realistic. YouGamers: It looked like shadow mapping; with software filtering going on? Mäki: Yeah, it's done in a graphics shader… YouGamers: So it's a known approach… Järvilehto: An "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" approach. There's the dynamic lighting, ambient occlusion, volumetrics and so on… Mäki: …but the basic shadow solution is cascaded shadow maps. YouGamers: Do you believe that it's a future proof method? Mäki: Depends on what you want to do. For us - yeah - but it's not for everybody. I think you will still need to use a mix of techniques and we have our mix; I think every developer has their own special blend of commonly known techniques.
YouGamers: We fully appreciate that the demo you showed us was from last year and there has been a lot of development since then, but we saw a couple of places where there was shadow map aliasing taking place… Järvilehto: Yeah, that was very much "work in progress"… [laughs] YouGamers: So are you aiming for "soft" shadows through the usual techniques or do you think it's feasible to go for "full on, proper" soft shadows, rather than just filtering the edge of a shadow map? Mäki: I think it's just about the compromises because the performance, you will run out of it at some point - that's for every developer to decide what’s important for them and what's not.
For a beginner's introduction to volumetric lighting, please click here. To learn about cascaded shadow maps, read this page.
Related Stuff Games: 3DMark Vantage
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