Remedy Interview - Part 3: "The Power Behind Wake"
YouGamers: So - last two questions, we promise! The biggest things with PCs at the moment are Windows Vista and DirectX 10. Anything special for DX10? Mäki: [puts on a formal-sounding voice] We haven’t announced anything for DX10 yet… YouGamers: Just to confirm things then, the PC version is only for Windows Vista and not for XP machines… Järvilehto: That's correct - the game is Vista exclusive
YouGamers: Lastly, since this a tech talk, is there any part of the graphics or engine of Alan Wake that, when you made it, you thought "this is so cool"? Mäki: I think we are most proud of the terrain and landscape system that scales dynamically and provides minute detail with a fairly small memory footprint and with a good performance. Järvilehto: [nods] We could go into a 20 minute lecture on how cool the environment system is; how we manage a forest and how it applies its own parameters, how it contains all its reactive definitions…audio…streaming… and most of all how all of the light in the game is dynamic and volumetric and how that ties into the gameplay, but personally, I'm really happy with how seamlessly it all works together. Even though we do get massive kicks out of building cool tech, it's all built so that we can create something new for the gameplay. ====
For us, the most impressive technology was the lighting but we didn't see enough of the forests to know whether Markus and Petri were right about their choice. Watching beams of light break through small gaps and highlight specific areas, it's hard not to be impressed at the gameplay possibilities this feature can bring. So what's this "secret" we've been mentioning about the demo? Well, okay, it's not really that much of a secret but remember how Remedy ran Alan Wake in IDF on a quad core machine? Well, they showed it to us on a dual core processor in a machine with around 2GB of RAM (perhaps more) and a single ATI Radeon X1900 series graphics card - all running perfectly well on a massive HD screen with anti-aliasing enabled. In other words, if you've got a reasonable dual core CPU, a good DX9 graphics card and plenty of memory, then Alan Wake is going to look and play superbly. As to what benefits a DX10 GPU will bring you - we'll just have to wait a little while longer! We would like to give our sincere thanks the nice people at Remedy for allowing us to visit their office. They are busy fellows but one of the nicest developers out there. Many, many thanks to Markus "Quote Machine" Mäki and Petri "God of Guitar Hero" Järvilehto for giving up so much of their time to do this! P.S. Polar bears aren't really walking around in the capital of Finland either. It's a nice legend that someone came up with years ago (namely Mr Renqvist!).
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All images in this article are the sole property of Remedy Entertainment, unless otherwise stated.
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