In this week's featured video, Project Offset technical director Sam McGrath shares demo footage for the studio's first-person shooter, Project Offset (working title), which takes advantage of future graphics cards. Built on the developer's Offset Engine, the game is set in "an epic fantasy world rendered at cinematic quality.

As McGrath points out, all of the game footage in the above video is rendered in real time inside Project Offset's game engine. "Every object in the world casts and receives shadows, including corrective self-shadowing on all objects, even complex objects."

The engine is also capable of rendering thousands of particles, each casting its own soft shadow into the scene. He adds that the engine also performs motion blur instead of process: "Rather than being a simple special effect that only works in certain situations, the motion blur works uniformly on everything."

Posted by Eric Caoili at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Simulating convincing fluids in computer games is not only computationally expensive, but often mentally expensive as well, with even introductory papers on the subject requiring the reader have math skills at least at the undergraduate calculus level. In his technical article originally printed in Game Developer magazine, Neversoft co-founder Mick West explains how fluid effects work without using advanced equations, providing example code and explaining how to simulate fluids without expensive iterative diffusion and projection steps.

West begins by describing the two common styles for simulating the motion of fliuds - grid methods and particle methods. When the grid method style, he explains, "The fluid is represented by dividing up the space a fluid might occupy into individual cells and storing how much of the fluid is in each cell. In a particle method, the fluid is modeled as a large number of particles that move around and react to collisions with the environment, interacting with nearby particles. Let's focus first on simulating fluids with grids."

He then notes that the simplest way to discuss the grid method is in respect to a regular two-dimensional grid: "At the most basic level, to simulate fluid in the space covered by a grid you need two grids: one to store the density of liquid or gas at each point and another to store the velocity of the fluid."

In addition to the two grids, programmers can use any number of other matching grids that store various attributes: "Each will be stored as a matching array of floats, which can store factors such as the temperature of the fluid at each point or the color of the fluid (whereby you can mix multiple fluids together). You can also store more esoteric quantities such as humidity, for example, if you were simulating steam or cloud formation."

Posted by Eric Caoili at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)