Computer Graphics World

March 2009 14 ■ ■ ■ ■ Gaming speed and power; to emphasize this, the group created animations of a lightning- quick lunge and an explosive swipe of its 12-inch claws. e giant ants and scorpi- ons capture the campy B-movie hallmark of oversized insects, while the centaurs suc- ceed on the creepy "ick" factor alone. Recession Era Gaming Highly anticipated, Fallout 3 made the top-10 PC game list in 2008. ough released late in the year, expectations had been higher than the sale fi gures deliv- ered—a situation befalling many titles, no doubt due to the economic downturn. Is this a signal concerning the durability of the gaming industry in an economic era currently as bleak as its post-apocalyptic landscape. Executive producer Todd How- ard remains optimistic about the reces- sion-resistant powers of the industry, as do many, drawing parallels with the ability of the fi lm industry to weather, even thrive, in a recession. Instead of splurging for HD TVs this year, he says, people likely will fi nd the $50 and $60 price tags of games more appealing. "Movies and video games are a rela- tively cheap way of having some fun, and particularly with the games we do, there's so much value, so much time you can get out of your money there, that I think the top-tier games will get their percentage of the money." However, Howard is quick to caution that since people may be too cash-strapped to buy multiple titles in the months to come, the games that fall below the top-ten tier may struggle for their economic lives. Indeed, it's these smaller, fl edging games that will ultimately pay for the Wall Street woes, with a casualty rate that may end up being as great as in any of these body-count games themselves. ■ Martin McEachern is an award-winning writer and contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. He can be reached at martinmceachern@hotmail.com. Rendering Intensity Players who fi nd the real-time battles too intense or would simply like to indulge in the full Grand Guignol gore of the game can make use of the Vault Tech Assisted Targeting System (VATS). Once VATS is activated, the game pauses and the camera zooms in on the enemy, highlighting his exposed areas and showing the chances of hitting them. A successful hit can merely knock a gun from an enemy's hands or have more devastating, bloody effects. "Our VATS sequences are cinematic in style," says lead artist Istvan Pely. "We did a few camera tricks to enhance the scenes, which are played in real time at a reduced camera speed. Sometimes we'll accelerate and decelerate the playback for stylistic effect." HDRI and color-tinting effects were added at times for fl avor, as was depth of fi eld and motion-blur effects. In order for these scenes to be visible in darker areas, a temporary light was added near the enemies to call them out. While Fallout 3 uses a version of the Emergent Game Technologies' Game- bryo engine, used for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Bethesda made signifi cant improvements to increase its ability for real-time rendering of large numbers of on-screen objects for VATS sequences and other cinematic scenes. This was essential for creating a world that existed in a perpetual state of disintegration and destruction. "We made many little tweaks to both the engine and our art creation pipeline to facilitate this," says Pely. "One of them gave us the ability to dynamically group individual objects under a single larger object that shared a subset of textures. This allowed us to reduce the amount of objects rendered by the engine while still allowing the environment artists the fl exibility to construct scenes from a highly modular and fl exible set of kit pieces." Other enhancements include the ability to layer image-space effects to the fi nal rendered output. This allowed the artists to dynamically adjust the bright- ness and contrast, color tinting, various HDRI, and other cinematic effects to individually stylize each game location. The team also implemented a Master Particle System to manage common particle effects, to dynamically scale the number of particles on screen at a time depending on the current render load, thereby avoiding unwanted frame-rate drops. –Martin McEachern

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