Whatever you might have thought of From Dust, there’s no denying the game was interesting.
On an annual launch catalogue that’s mostly one generic face-shooter after the next, From Dust managed to do something very different.
So what’s up next for creator Eric Chahi? “Something very original,” apparently.
“I want to continue to create systemic worlds and complex systems so that while you’re playing you interact with it. A system with emergence. But precisely, I don’t know yet,” he tells Eurogamer
“I would love to do another From Dust, but right now there is no plan. And also, I have a strong desire to create something very original. Not ambitious in terms of content, but really focused on bringing something new and fresh.”
He also talks about development of From Dust, describing some of the difficulties in creating the complex environmental simulation effects in one of the most fascinating series of paragraphs I’ve seen all day.
“It demands a lot of computation, so we had to do a lot of optimisation, optimisation that uses the power of today’s computer. Richard Lemarchand [Uncharted 3 lead game designer] was talking about the PS3 and the Cell. Typically in From Dust you are using this kind of architecture to have it running at the right frame rate. We have a big grid in the game, and each cell computes all the vegetation, and so there is a hundred thousand to around 200,000 cells to compute for each frame,” he explains.
“This has been coded not in C, but in a micro language close to the VS Assembly language. It takes advantage of processor architecture where you have a cache memory, so the computation is done so that it stays in the cache memory and can compute things very fast. This is for the behaviour of the simulation.
“Aside this we have the visualisation of the simulation. Doing visualisation of something highly dynamic, like all the terrain – you can have lava, rocks, and all this mixing – the next frame it can appear, disappear. So all the shaders have been designed to represent this dynamic world, and especially all the fluid movement.”
“We have special texture scrolling so it follows the direction of the flow. But we can’t have a texture scrolling for a long time on some vertex, or else it becomes totally distorted and it’s stretched too much. So we have to reset it, but reset in a way you can’t see. It’s really complicated to manage.”
Chahi recently wrapped up work on a 20th anniversary edition of his 1991 cult classic, Another World, for iOS devices.
Source: Eurogamer
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