The Order: 1886 screenshots show PS4 power

The Order: 1886 is a Playstation 4 launch title in development by Ready at Dawn and Sony Santa Monica studios, putting players in an alternate steampunk universe that appears to be set in 1886 in London during the reign of Queen Victoria.

Ready at Dawn has said that the game is “a third person action adventure with shooting mechanics, but also a filmic experience interacting with real people, events & places.”

New screenshots have surfaced detailing some aspects of the game’s development and how the new technologies inside the Playstation 4 are being used to give the game a more realistic look.

The pictures accompany a very technical white paper detailing how the developers are using the GPU to model shaders on objects more accurately and give them a softer, more realistic look. New methods to map textures to objects with accurate lighting models are also discussed.

The papers were part of a course that was held for aspiring game developers at SIGGRAPH 2013, where various game developers, industry experts and companies that worked with 3D design and modeling come together to discuss new technologies and methods for rendering objects in 3D.

The paper was titled “Crafting a Next-Gen Material Pipeline for The Order: 1886” and was presented by Lead Graphics and Engine programmers for Ready at Dawn studios, David Neubelt and Matt Pettineo.

The Order: 1886 makes use of some very advanced technologies that have been used in games like Crysis 3 and in Nvidia’s Digital Ira benchmark. Ambient Skin diffusion is one of them, helping to more accurately model lighting in-game bouncing off an object.

There are also examples of advanced texture mapping, skin shading and material layers, which more accurately mimic how ojbects in real life may react to one another (for example, water and sand become mud, and fill in the cracks between a paved brick road).

The Order: 1886 will remain a Playstation 4 exclusive and Neubelt told attendees at SIGGRAPH that their work wouldn’t be possible on any other platform, owing to performance differences and too many variables and overheads on the PC platform.