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Gaming n n n n Painting with Light Albion is a world of painterly, almost picturesque, beauty. In Brightwall, for ex- ample, a footbridge arcs over a stream as the moon hangs large overhead, its silvery light softening the edges of clouds and trees, sparkling off the water, and coruscating off the limestone as a mill turns placidly off to the side. Artists lit the levels with both real-time dynamic lighting and off-line baked lighting stored in light maps. In turn, these lighting methods can be enhanced by mist patches, atmospheric scattering, post-process effects (such as dust storms and crepuscular rays), and a tone-mapping pipeline. “The main light is a shadow-casting parallel light source that corresponds with the time of day and is controlled from [FableEd’s] Theme Editor,” says lead engine programmer Don Williamson. “This connects live to the running game and allows artists and level designers to design the look of any region in real time and at any time of day.” For flickering light and shadows—from the torchlit, snow- and ice-bound vil- lages of Mist Peak to the wall sconces adorning the castle—artists used standard dynamic lighting and shadowing from spotlights, all of which are composited in screen space to allow as many shadow-casting spotlights as the frame allows. Furthermore, the water system received an upgrade for Fable III, and it now supports real-time reflection and masked, screen-space refraction with a more appealing and realistic Fresnel model applied to its lighting. Compared to Fable II, which Williamson calls a fairly flat affair with not too many lights, Fable III is aglow in lights as far as the eye can see. Lights vary in type and will bounce around to fill out dark corners of the world. Bridges received soft, blue glows from the water underneath, while caves catch natural bounces of light through openings; all of these effects and more are modulated by an artistically driven ambient occlusion model. This model was made possible by Lionhead’s off-line global illumination lighting baker, which runs entirely on the GPU and accelerates the baking process from days to an hour on a single ma- chine, according to Williamson. –Martin McEachern In Fable II, the one-to-one interactions be- tween hero and villager utilized specific loop- ing animations for the hero. To play against the hero’s expressions, the villagers then drew from a bank of varied reaction animations, depending on their emotional state. During these exchanges, physical contact and inter- action with the hero were either avoided or kept to a minimum. If good acting is reacting, this was a serious problem, which Lionhead sought hard to rectify in Fable III. “In keeping with the touch-design pillar for Fable III, we expanded our expression system to accommo- date highly bespoke reactions directly linked to the hero’s actions,” says Jacques. Having a second character reacting to the hero in perfect synchronization was a large hit on the animation schedule; whether they were shaking hands, dancing, or so forth, it was a slow process that required smart design and all departments working closely together, adds Jacques. Tis “huge hit” resulted in more than 2000 animations for the hero, not in- cluding cut-scene specific animations. “In to- tal, our Fable III branch of Alienbrain [Avid’s asset management software] holds 1,304,548 frames of animation, which equates to over 12 hours of nonstop animation,” says Jacques. To blend the hero’s cycles, Lionhead’s ani- mators designed a blending system controlled via Lua scripts, which can be edited by the ani- mator and then reloaded for testing on the de- velopment kit. Unlike the hero’s animations, programmers control the blending of almost all the other animation in the game. Artists hand-keyed all the facial animation for the in-game performances and the highly expressive turns in the cut-scenes, which fea- ture the vocal acting of Jon Cleese, Simon Pegg, and Ben Kingsley. Built in Softimage, Lionhead’s custom facial rigging system is bone-based, which, says Jacques, is more effi- cient for the engine than storing blendshapes. With more than 470,000 words of dialog in the game, however, Lionhead required a pro- cedural solution for lip sync. To that end, ani- mators turned to Annosoft as their middleware solution for the in-game and cut-scene anima- tions, working tightly with programmers dur- ing the syncing process. “By reducing the number of face shapes we fed into Annosoft down to 12, and applying some simple rules on top so the mouth wouldn’t be trying to hit every syllable of every word, we were able to achieve a good result,” notes Jacques. Moral Mettle Indeed, the moral choices in Fable III are nev- er easy, each one fraught with potential loss to oneself or the people of Albion. “Choices and consequences have always been an important part of the foundation of Fable, but this time we really wanted to move beyond the simplis- tic, binary choices we’ve had in the past,” says lead writer Mark Llabres. “When you present an obviously good option and an obviously evil one, you’re really not giving the player a choice at all, as they will typically have decided at the outset which path they’re going to fol- low and will stick to it. “However, we’ve moved away from simple good and evil,” Llabres continues, “so the morphs are less extreme in the hero than they have been in the past. Fable III isn’t about be- coming a devil or a saint. It’s about being a human being. Just one who happens to wield enormous power.” One weapon. One immersive environment uninterrupted by the overwhelming minutiae of GUIs. One action governed by choice and consequence in sometimes morally-nebulous conflict. Tese are the new ideals embraced and realized to perfection in Fable III, ideals that may not represent a new era for the RPG, but certainly a bold new direction that has raised the bar and could spur a sea change for the genre, one that may lure a whole new demographic normally disenchanted with such games. Still, design director Josh Atkins believes there is a place for the old school. “Classic RPGs—with their numbers, bars, meters, and interesting upgrade systems—have existed for decades, and, personally, I hope they continue to exist,” he says. “However, since Fable I, we’ve never felt that really intricate and complicated RPG system was right for Fable. In Fable III, we still have the fun stuff relating to hero cus- tomization and upgrading, but I think we’ve developed a system that suits our game and what we want players to feel.” Right now, that system is the sole domain of the Fable world, but like all good ideas, it could spread rapidly throughout the RPG universe in the near future. n Use your smart- phone to read related story Martin McEachern is an award- winning journalist and a contribut- ing editor for Computer Graphics World. He can be reached at martinmceachern@hotmail.com. January/February 2011 31