Choosing areas of questioning to ask game developers is a difficult and demanding task here at Sharky Extreme World Headquarters. After several minutes of serious discussion, heartfelt arguments and throwing darts blindfold at scraps of paper, we narrowed our possible subjects for this article down to two possibilities: T&L (Transformation and Lighting) and T&A (T…and…err…A). We quickly decided that asking developers what they thought of T&A would be a bad idea. We envisioned answers like "Right on!" and "I'll buy that for a dollar!"
The more we thought about it, the more we realized how important the perspective of developers is on the support of the next generation 3D accelerators that include features T&L, bump-mapping, texture compression, and the like. While we can and do write in-depth and accurate articles on the GeForce 256, Savage 2000, 3dfx' T-Buffer and games you're interested in, the developers are the ones that actually decide to use (or not as the case may be) those features in the games they design. So we approached several developers including Dynamix and Infogrames with three questions to get a broad view of developer opinion on current and upcoming 3D hardware feature support including T&L. The questions are:
1. Will your upcoming games support hardware transformation and lighting in D3D or other non-OpenGL API's?
2. What advantages, disadvantages and issues are there for you as a game developer in doing so?
3. Will your upcoming games support texture compression, environment bump mapping, T-Buffer, or any other current or upcoming hardware technology that is not widely developed for yet?
So without further ado, here are the developers' answers straight from their own keyboards:
The Game:
Max Payne
The Company:
Remedy Entertainment
The Speaker: Markus Stein - Lead Programmer and Petri Jarvilehto - Project Lead
Q1.
MAX-FX, the game engine Max Payne is build upon, will be able to take full advantage of D3D HW T&L. That way we can be sure to perform well on future generations of hardware accelerators.
Q2.
Most geometry and materials should work very well when rendered with HW T&L. Developers will probably end up with a fallback software pipeline in case they want to use features not supported by HW T&L, or not generally
supported by all HW T&L capable hardware. But in the end, letting HW T&L handle all the geometry that it can handle is going to increase overall rendering performance.
Q3.
We will have support for texture compression. It makes game environments a lot more believable if texture resolutions are higher. And that without the need for additional memory.