HALO WARS reviews are pouring onto the net like wildfire, and it's an amazing thing to watch.
I realized a long time ago that HALO WARS was going to be a success. To what level I was still unsure, but I knew that people were going to remember it. It really puts things into perspective when you start thinking about the average career time of a video game developer. Most of us burn out within 8-10 years and leave the industry for something that's much nicer to our family lives.
And in that 10 years, think about how many titles you'll ACTUALLY get to ship. Maybe 2? 3? 27? (if you work for EA...) and how many of those titles will be million copy sellers? Or have a million dollar marketing budget? Or action figures? or 7-11 tie ins?
For almost 90% of the industry, the answer to those questions are "None of them."
It's quite humbling to think about luck-of-the-draw when it comes to signing on with a company that ends up producing a product that has this scale and industry response. I mean, every video game company thinks THEY are working on the next big thing, but in reality, how many of them really are?
HALO WARS is big. Really big. If you haven't read the reviews, I suggest you stop by and do so. When I stopped by WAL-MART the other day, and saw 4 separate HALO WARS posters throughout the store, I realized that I should very much appreciate the opportunity I've had to work on such a large scale game. Because who knows if I'll ever have that chance again?
Well, maybe I have an idea about how long it will be...... but more on that later..
~Main
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2 comments:
Hey
Just read your presentation from GDC and it looks simply amazing - I think the presentation was very well done, especially the highlighting of the pitfalls and the solutions to these.
I would like to try and implement a similar system to yours, but Im not sure where to start to be honest. I have read of some similarly looking techniques in GPU GEMS 3 that uses DirectX10 specific features... Is this similar?
You mention that instead of using integers to represent the height map you are using a 3D vector - is it possible using vertex textures to do the same (the displacement in more than 1 dimension) or am I completely on the wrong track?
Hope you can provide me with a bit of info - any help or a resource to read further would be very much appreciated:)
Good luck with the new studio!
The basic idea of the Halo Wars terrain is not very different from your common terrain. The terrain itself is still broken up into quad node chunks, and still receives textures. I would suggest taking a look at the GPU terrain article in ShaderX5, it's a good starting place for people.
I'm storing a 3 component (ie vector3) value per displacement texture. This allows displacement in any direction from the world space position of the grid element. The sampling occurs in the vertex shader.
The trickiest part of getting the Halo Wars terrain working on the PC is the tessellation hardware. I know that some ATI cards support the Tessellation quad patch on DX9 hardware, but other than that, you're going to have to wait for the DX11 API to be able to support it in the hardware (otherwise, you're stuck doing a software solution, like RQT)
Hope that helps a bit.
~Main
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