![]() We couldn’t have done it in the old engine, but our action has always been a company that’s creatively driven and the technology is designed to support creative effort.” But with these big open spaces where you’re fighting 10 or 12 enemies at one time, that’s something for which we needed to build a new piece of technology. That engine was really good for building these tight corridors and these underwater, underground structures that would appear. “For better or worse, we had to throw out everything we had in the first game because we could not build this new game on it. “It’s a very different engine than we had before,” added Levine, founder of Irrational Games. Ken Levine and his creative team in Boston decided to venture into original territory with Columbia, while tackling deep new political themes with the ultranationalist Founders and the rebelling people’s movement known as the Vox Populi, and taking a very different look at an alternate 1912. The Unreal Engine enabled the original world of Rapture to come to life leagues beneath the sea. They extended the Unreal Editor toolset rather than replacing it, but very few systems remain “untouched.” In addition to the aforementioned technology changes, Kline said almost all of the original UE3 gameplay code was rewritten and the vast majority of UnrealScript code was removed. While she’s the one the player, as Booker DeWitt, is rescuing, she actually plays a huge role in helping throughout the interactive storyline. In addition to being what Hitchcock would call the MacGuffin, in the sense that she’s the one that the various factions are pursuing in this game, she has the ability to tear through time and pull elements like gun turrets from the future back to 1912. She actually has multiple roles in the game. One of the more impressive technological accomplishments in “BioShock Infinite” – and there are many – is the computer-controlled character, Elizabeth. This allows us better understand the kinds of conceptual situations that the player, Elizabeth and AIs are in involved in at any given moment, so they can behave and speak in a context-appropriate fashion.” Another example is the ‘Pattern Matcher,’ a system that continuously analyzes the state of the game world over time to detect patterns of behavior. “For example, we developed a technology we call ‘Floating Worlds’ to allow all of Columbia’s buildings, zeppelins and barges to be in constant motion without affecting performance. “In many cases we needed to come up with entirely new systems to create the world of BioShock Infinite,” explained Kline. A small selection of systems that they have running asynchronously (depending on the platform) include collision detection, ray casting, sound propagation, garbage collection, Sky-Line geometry extrusion, spline proximity tests, AI suppressive fire calculations, data compression/decompression, animation transform and blending, audio processing, particle generation, SSAO, command buffer generation, rigid-body physics and cloth simulation. The developer has also made extensive architectural changes to allow many core engine systems to run in parallel on separate SPUs or CPU cores. Other systems were deeply modified such as physics and content streaming.” ![]() “A few examples of systems their teams developed include AI, rendering, audio, animation, entity movement, collision detection, user input. “Our Core Technology team, led by Steve Ellmore, and our Gameplay Programming team, led by John Abercrombie, have replaced or heavily modified vast portions of Unreal Engine 3 for BioShock Infinite,” said Chris Kline, Technical Director at Irrational Games. The sequel to the critically acclaimed blockbusters, “BioShock” and “BioShock 2,” has taken advantage of years of technology advancements from both Epic Games, which built the Unreal Engine 3 game engine, and the development team at Irrational Games, which has added its own additions to the core engine to bring the floating city of Columbia to life. “BioShock Infinite” has been amazing critics (with a 94 rating for PC and PlayStation 3 and a 93 for Xbox 360) and gamers alike. Irrational Games has another hit on its hands.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |