Hellgate: London developer diary

[Mr. Teatime]

<strong>[Game -> Preview]</strong> - More info on <a href="http://wikipocalypse.duckandcover.cx/in ... itle=Chris Lambert">Person: Chris Lambert</a> | More info on <a href="http://wikipocalypse.duckandcover.cx/in ... e=Hellgate: London">Game: Hellgate: London</a>

<p>There's a <a href="http://pc.ign.com/articles/610/610199p1.html" target="_self">developer diary up on IGN for Hellgate: London</a>, written by one of the game's designers, <strong>Chris Lambert</strong>. It's about lighting in the game and making it look pretty:

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<blockquote><em>
If ever the frame rate drops below a certain threshold during
development, the onus is on the graphics engineer to prove it isn't
graphics causing the slowdown (maybe physics or AI) or fix it, if
graphics code is indeed at fault. In that way, the graphics engineer in
a small development team like ours becomes the chief performance
engineer as well.

</em></blockquote>
<blockquote><em>
I spend a lot of time profiling the game both for video and CPU
performance. My goal is to keep the balance of features, cost and
workload between processors in a Happy Place(tm). Every feature has a
cost, a minimum hardware spec, a fallback method and a visual or
performance benefit. For example, consider full-screen distortion
effects like heat shimmering. Their cost is almost purely in pixel
shading and texture and framebuffer bandwidth (transferring pixels to
and from video memory). That means on computers with really high-end
video cards where the CPU is the limiting factor, they are essentially
free. Conversely, on the machine with an average video card where
pixel-pushing is the bottleneck, they can be incredibly costly. A
fallback for those cases would be a cheaper effect (perhaps reducing
the number of passes on the effect or using a simple texture lookup in
place of more interesting and complex per-pixel math) or getting rid of
it altogether. The min-spec would obviously be defined as the point
where the technique is unusable. If that's too high and the benefit of
the effect is too low (say, it's only used on a tiny stained glass
window high up in a wall that you never get close to), it may be
dropped in favor of an effect with more bang-for-the-buck.</em></blockquote>
<p>I guess in a <em>Diablo</em> type game, looking good is one of the main appeals.

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