World in Conflict Interview with Massive Entertainment
DirectX 10 support and exclusive featuresWestberg: DX10 performance is hard to comment on, because we only recently started optimizing the engine. We got the DirectX 10 renderer fully functional maybe two months ago. We're working closely with NVIDIA for optimizing the drivers for World in Conflict. The DX10 and DX9 and on par right now in terms of performance, DX9 might be slightly ahead but it's not a huge difference. It's hard to say what's going to happen with a few months to go with optimization. You can do a lot more on the video card in DX10, draw calls are cheaper - you can put a lot more on the card, and just tell the card, "now do that thing I told you to do earlier", instead of sending a lot of information every frame, which is what you had to do with DX9. You save a lot of data transfer this way. We have high hopes for DX10 [...] but that's really all I can say right now.
Westberg: It wasn't too bad for us, because we have a really nice engine architecturally. All the DX9 stuff has always been separate from the rest of the renderer, so adding the DX10 path was only 1-2 man-months of work. From our perspective, that's not very much at all. So that was quite easy, and we had a lot of help from the NVIDIA guys, who've really prioritized our title. It's been great - when we've had a problem, they've helped us - they're actually in our office helping us. I don't think I've mentioned this before, but there will be DX10-exclusive features in the game (emphasis added). There will be one or a few of those, and they will look pretty amazing. We're not telling what they will be yet, but they're up and running at our office right now, and we're experimenting with them, but they look amazing. Karlson: I can confirm that! YouGamers: But that's going to only affect the visuals and not the gameplay? Westberg: Yes, that's right. We want network games to work the same for all players, so there's nothing that affect the gameplay - except that you may be so amazed of how the game looks, you'll forget to play all your moves!
Westberg: We've been working with NVIDIA and Intel a lot, but we've also been working with ATI and AMD - but NVIDIA and Intel have been our main contacts and closest partners. Still, ATI and AMD are helping us out with hardware and support, making sure that the game runs great on [ATI and AMD based] systems too.
Westberg: We had a discussion where we had to decide whether we would go ahead with it or not, and we looked at our schedule and decided we could do it. What did affect our schedule was single player... Karlson: But we're not talking about single player. Westberg: We're going to have a kick-ass single player game, I suppose that's all we're saying. We've been really serious and dedicated about that, but I guess we'll save the rest for later.
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