Come to GDC. See a Roach talk!

I have to say that I'm both very excited, and massively honored to be selected as a speaker at GDC 2009. My talk HALO WARS : The Terrain Of Next Gen, will cover the long story that has been the development of the Halo Wars terrain system. As many remember from the prior 2005 Ensemble talk about the graphics of AGE3, terrain is a HUGE system in an RTS game, easily taking up 75% of the visual screen, and around 40% of the time to develop a given map. So stream lining that process for maximum visibility and creation process is a huge win.

I won't talk too much about the process, or the talk, but instead encourage you to come see the talk and try not to throw tomatoes at me.

I will, however, leave you with an unofficial screen shot of our terrain system!
This pic is showing off our ability to sculpt arbitrary overhangs in the terrain system and increased UV control to combat texel stretching on large vertex displacements. If you look closely, you can see some of the highlighted features of our terrain material system; particularly you can pick up on sub-surface scattering within the ice, and emissive channels inside the shadowed areas. Also, if you look towards the edges of the screen (the overhang spikes), you'll see a great use of our "Terrain Clip-Art" system, which allows content creators to copy areas of the terrain, store them to a library, and place them later like large pieces of clipart.

click for larger image:


And to clarify, that is NOT a mesh that was 'attached' to the terrain. Rather that screen shot was generated 100% inside our terrain tool using our editing features and systems.

Viva GDC!

~Main