War Front: Turning Point Interview (con't)

FiringSquad: What can you tell us about the graphical features in the game?

Istvan KissWe are using an engine developed in-house that has a great deal of modern features like per-pixel lighting, high quality dynamic shadows, high quality landscape visualization, an effect system with several kinds of sub-effect types (particle systems, etc), an atmosphere system (dynamically changing lights from dawn till night, changing clouds depending on logic-controlled weather), a trigger system for scripting levels, a fast asynchronous pathfinder, real-time physics and many more.

Our main goal was to beat every other competing base-builder RTS in terms of graphics and visual impressions. To achieve this goal we set the following objectives for ourselves:

To have real-time lights in the game with projective textures that can be cast on every kind of surface or object.

To give the player a dynamic environment, where he will never have to stare at a static screen.

To create models of never before seen detail both in terms of polygon-count and textures.

To make the terrain look detailed from game view (1:1 pixel ratio)

To have water with realistic reflections

In terms of cut-scenes, the most important highlight is that all the have been created with the game engine.We are using CSM (cascaded shadowmaps) for higher quality dynamic shadows, ATI and Nvidia hardware possibilities for rendering fast shadows (PCF, Fetch4), per-pixel lighting for dynamic lights (including directional, point and spot lights) and we can render a large amount of lights at high FPS, which gives a good atmosphere for the levels. We use two kinds of physics: a rigid body physics system developed in-house, and a brand new atmosphere simulation. Wind, explosions, helicopters, sonic weapons and some other things as well create atmospheric effects that affect physical objects, particles generated by the effect system, or, for example, the movement of trees. Physics have an indirect effect on game logic. For example, planes behave differently in a storm, and the physics engine helps to visualize this.


FiringSquad: Will there be a demo of the game released and if so what will its contents be?

Elmar Gruenenberg: Next will be a multiplayer demo and (of course) later a single player demo which will be out close to the game's release in September.



FiringSquad: What can you tell us about the status of the game's progress and when will it be released?

Elmar Gruenenberg: The team is progressing very well at the moment we are close to content complete, which gives us time for improving the performance, bug fixing and to polish the pathfinding.


FiringSquad: Finally is there anything else you wish to say about War Front: Turning Point?

Elmar Gruenenberg: Check out the demos when they become available – this game is really special!!!