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Frågor och svar om CryEngine
Denna artikel är ett samarbete mellan NCsoft och Aion Online Sverige, och publiceras exklusivt för våra medlemmar. Samtliga frågor har besvarats av personer verksamma inom det koreanska utvecklingsteamet.
Det skall noteras att vi gärna hade låtit er medlemmar bidra till frågorna, men inte hade möjlighet till detta p.g.a. artikelns utsatta deadline. Vi hoppas att kunna låta er medlemmar bidra till framtida artiklar.
Frågorna är ställda av oss i redaktionen, i synnerhet Klingsan, Akie och Pregnant Orc. Svaren har översatts till engelska av NCsoft West.
Frågor och svar om CryEngine
1. Far Cry, the first game to use the CryEngine, was hailed for its amazing sceneries, much thanks to the engine's impressive draw distance capabilities. To what extent have you been able to use this to your advantage in Aion, a game that seem to feature a lot of open areas?
When rendering out scenes you need to prioritize what is drawn and what is not. We put significant emphasis in the big picture when viewing the world of Aion. This means that we spent time on representations of details and were able to recreate the entire scene without bogging down the users system.
CryEngine's ability to express precision in draw distance increases the depth of the environment, which is very useful in creating immersive scenery.
2. There is a lot of light-play going on in Aion, with glowing armors, spell effects and environmental lightning featuring heavily. What precautionary steps are you taking to make sure the engine doesn't become sluggish when several players feature on-screen at the same time?
We try to prevent overloading the engine by focusing the majority of lighting to spawned objects or objects with high importance. Simply put, we would much rather light up a player's armor than the grass or rocks they are standing on.
3. Are you planning to make use of the CryEngine's capabilities to feature polybump in Aion?
Yes, we are already taking advantage of this in Aion.
4. Will you use the CryEngine to perform a lot of pixel shaders and use High Dynamic Range, such as in Far Cry?
Aion uses various pixel shaders. We have decided not to use HDR based on our art direction.
5. Aion seems to feature a lot of diverse environments. In what ways have you used the capabilities of the CryEngine, for example weather effects and realistic shadows, to spice these up?
We took the existing particle and shadow map system in the CryEngine and modified it to create the current shading/weather effects. CryEngine provided that base and we molded it to fit the world of Aion.
6. We've seen a lot of impressive outdoor areas, but how are the transitions between outdoor and indoor areas, and to what extent does indoor environments feature in Aion?
CryEngine doesn't distinguish between outdoor and indoor, so there were not any special transitional functions built in. For indoor scenes, we modified the existing light map routine to create a more realistic experience.
7. Are you planning to make any greater use of the physics engine built into the CryEngine? If the answer is no, are there any plans to include such features in the future?
In an MMO the application of physics puts a huge amount of stress on the client and server. Each end has to sync with the other and it creates a great deal of network traffic. For this reason, we tried to steer away from overusing it.
8. Have you made use of the ability to include 5.1 surround sound in Aion?
Our latest update includes 5.1 surround support in Aion.
9. Apparently the CryEngine is very scalable, and can be run well even on lesser hardware. Does this level of scalability also apply to over-the-top gaming systems? How well does the game support technologies such as SLI and Crossfire?
Both SLI and Crossfire are supported. In order to create a game that allows as many gamers to play, we have modified the engine so that scalability applies to all spectrums of gamers.
10. We've been told that the CryEngine have been heavily modified, compared to the original version featuring in Far Cry back in 2004. Could you give us some concrete examples of the differences between now and then?
The biggest modifications came in adapting the engine for use in an MMORPG. This sounds like a simple difference but it is by far the determining factor in most of our modifications. For example we cannot control the number of players that enter a specific area at one time. Predicting users’ locations and duration of play becomes a nearly impossible task and because of this it was necessary to optimize and make structural changes to the engine.
We started with the terrain routine and modified it to draw a dense-looking landscape in a wider area. We then optimized various areas in order to display more characters on the screen at one time. We also modified the memory management to allow for longer play sessions. The particle system was modified in order to display a variety of visual effects.
As you can see the engine was used as a base but by no means was our job over.
Stort tack till NCsoft Korea för svaren!
Källa: NCsoft Korea/West
Datum: 2009-08-03 22:15
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