It is standard to expect a sequel to get a visual face lift, but not often do we get insight into exactly what aspects of the engine are being improved. Irrational Games’ technology director Chris Kline recently revealed details regarding the tweaks the team is making to the Unreal Engine 3.
“All major FPS engines (CryEngine 3, UE3, id Tech 5) are designed and optimized for static environments that the player moves through, which is a reasonable choice because, even if there are trees moving in the wind, the ground under the player’s feet isn’t going anywhere. Unfortunately for our tech team (but good for you) everything in Columbia is capable of moving.
The very ground beneath your feet could fall out of the sky at any moment, which makes for some awesome gameplay and visuals but required us to create a completely new technology that we’re calling “Floating Worlds”. You saw a little of this in the gameplay demo video (in the part right after Saltonstall jumps on the Sky-Line) and you’ll be seeing a lot more of it in the future.”
In order to squeeze as much performance as possible out of current generation consoles, Irrational “built a whole new parallel processing framework (a ‘job architecture’, in programmer lingo) that lets the engine take advantage of as many cores as you can throw at it. This will let us eke out all the power of the PS3 and 360, and also give hardcore PC gamers something to show off their rigs with.”
The game will also make use of “deffered lighting”, a rendering technique used in some of the best looking games released to date, including Uncharted 2 and Killzone 2.
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