Hellgate Guru

The one that got away! Skipped right over this as I was reporting on YouGamers’ Game-o-Meter for Hellgate: London. The site also has just posted an interview with Flagship Studios’ Director of Technology, Tyler Thompson, about Hellgate: London and the benefits DX10 will provide for gamers.

YouGamers: Having concentrated on just a PC version for the moment (and possibly, for good), did this mean your artists and coders had much more freedom in what they could achieve with the visuals and performance?

Tyler Thompson: Making games for the PC requires thinking about a broad range of hardware. Our artists and programmers had a lot of freedom in some ways, and this allowed them to make some assets and shaders which are relatively complex. We also had to make simplified versions of everything so that we could have a low min-spec.

YouGamers: Since Hellgate: London can use SM4.0, what effects will gamers notice them looking better than in SM2.0?

Thompson: Our DX10 engine has several effects. We have interactive, volumetric smoke which uses the render to volume feature in DX10. We have rain that factors in the direction of the eye and the light direction to read from a texture array. We have a few forms of motion blur. We have soft particles – which helps remove that hard edge that many particle systems display when penetrating the background. We have a better method for computing shadows. We use the improved normal map compression method in the DX10 target as well.