World in Conflict Interview with Massive Entertainment
World in Conflict recommended system specificationsYouGamers: Can you tell us what the recommended system specifications will be? Westberg: My recommendation would be 1GB of RAM, around 2.5GHz Pentium IV, and a [NVIDIA GeForce] 6800 256MB based system, that allows you to run the game. Of course, if you want the game to look as glorious as it ever can, then just max everything out. But we've noticed that many games that shipped recently had problems with lower end machines, and we want to make sure that people can actually play our game. That's why we scale all the way back to GeForce 4 Ti 128MB, a Pixel Shader 1.4 card (GF4s are actually PS1.3 cards but Niklas is essentially talking about 2nd generation DX8 cards - Ed). Of course, you'll have to take down the level of detail, adjust the resolution and so on, but you'll still be able to run the game. YouGamers: Isn't that extra work for you, programming all those extra shaders? Westberg: Yes! [laughs] YouGamers: Well, we certainly appreciate your efforts. Westberg: That's what we've been getting, especially from retail [chains]. They've had customers come back with games, because if you can't play the game with your machine you can return it, and they've had a lot of copies returned. So when I've talked to them about DX10, they've said "that's fine, but what about low end specs?" So we've been working quite hard to make sure that works.
YouGamers: Let's talk about high end. Do you have a threaded engine for multicore processor support? Westberg: Yes, we do. On the CPU side, Intel has been very supportive helping us out, because it's a big step moving to a threaded architecture. We've been working with them, and we scale quite well, but if you have a quad-core you won't run the game four times as fast, because it's really hard to reach that. Also, if you have a quad-core, each of those four cores is pretty fast, and we still have to scale down to this 2 GHz machine that's our low-end spec for everyone to be able to run the game. So we have this 2GHz processor here, and then we have four CPU's that are twice as fast, so we have eight times more [processing power] over here. It's hard to scale all the way [across that]. It does scale, so a dual core runs faster than a single core, and a quad-core runs even faster. What we do thread is the entire physics update on a separate thread, we thread our shadow volume updates, [...] particle updates and tree updates. And then the obvious things like everybody is probably doing, like sound, voice over IP and things like that. But the four I mentioned are the [threaded processes we render] frame to frame. YouGamers: Can you scale unit caps for more massive battles if you have a multi-core processor? Westberg: Nothing that affects gameplay, we don't scale on that. YouGamers: How many units can you have on a map? Westberg: Five hundred, 512 units actually. We also found out that infantry is squad-based and that each squad, not individual soldiers count towards the unit cap.
Westberg: Not really. There are two different senses of scalability. One is going from a high-end machine to a low-end machine, and the other is seeing hundreds of units at the same time. We need to make sure we have all the levels of detail for everything. When we made our flexible system work, got the wide range of hardware and the wide range of viewing distance at the same time. We don't actually have a viewing distance cap - people ask us "what's your maximum viewing distance, it seems like you can see very far away." We don't really have a cap, you can go to one corner of the map and look at the other corner of the map, and you'll see everything. Karlson: Of course, you have to take scalability into consideration when it comes to gameplay. If we at game design knew that every single player is guaranteed to play on today's super-high spec computers, we could make decisions that would be dissimilar to the ones we make. We cannot allow gameplay to be affected by different systems, the core mechanics must be intact.
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