The sequel to Gears of War is getting a visceral treatment. Not only does it include top notch visuals but it might also implement the world famous Natural Motion engine that has already been quite a rage with developers currently providing “Dynamic Motion Synthesis to create high-quality 3D character animation in real time by combining artificial intelligence, biomechanics, and dynamics simulation.”
This engine has already made its way into high end games being released this year including Grand Theft Auto IV, Star Wars: Force Unleashed and the next Indiana Jones game. A recent job posting at Gamasutra reveals that the Oxford chaps are looking out for a lead engineer with the following job profile and description:
- Job Profile: Lead Integration Engineer (UE3)
Description:
“The Lead Integration Engineer will work on our acclaimed euphoria and morpheme products and will be responsible for leading the integration of NaturalMotion’s technology into game engines such as Unreal Engine 3. This role will involve a mix of core product development work and engine integration work. The Lead Integration Engineer will work alongside the development and sales teams. In addition, the Lead Integration Engineer may have occasional onsite visits to customers and technology partners.”
This might just make the game drool worthy even more considering the amount of technology we saw being demoed at Game Developers Conference in February.
“The video showed several demonstrations of the improvements, the initial being improvements to the in-game lighting through a post-processing method labelled ‘Ambient Occlusion’ in which dynamic shadows could be generated through the use of a pixel shading technique to render more realistically lighted and shaded objects and actors, illustrated through comparison between character and environment models in the original game engine to that of Unreal Engine 3.
Also showcased was the ability of the engine to render hordes of actors within the engine, as demonstrated with a large crowd of locust flocking through the ‘gridlock’ multi-player map from the original game. Alongside this technology was improvements to ‘Matinee’, an artistic tool used for the rendering and editing 3-dimensional scenes within the game.
Other physics-based features included improvements to the rendering of water in which specular light and physical interactions with were displayed more realistically, improvements to soft body entities demonstrated with a ‘meat cube’ and a floating ball possessing properties similar to that of liquid helium.
The largest of these physics engine related changes was the introduction of destructible environments due to the implementation of real time structural analysis tools to generate the damage of the materials and subsequently their deformed shapes based upon resultant forces placed upon them. This was demonstrated with the use of explosive arrows fired from the ‘torque bow’ of the original game causing damage to wooden planks, and also revealing rebar present after destroying areas of a stone structure.”
In addition to this, reminder to all pot heads who suffer from short term memory losses and yet choose to live in a subliminal world infested with gore and violence and the geeks who love drooling when they see Cliffy B dressed up in a bunny suit. The game also includes “Mova Contour Reality Capture System”
“Perlman says the cost of a Contour motion-capture session isn’t appreciably higher than that for a traditional marker-based capture session: anywhere from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand dollars, depending on the length and complexity of the shoot. The real savings, he says come in the post-production. “Unlike marker-based capture, which has a big manual clean-up process before you see results, with contour it’s purely computational,” Perlman said. “We’ve talked to people, and one of the reasons when they announce delays for complex games is because they’re fighting to try and make the faces look good. With Contour, you send the guy in, he does a shoot, and we send you a face that looks nearly perfect. It’s no longer one of the risk issues for your schedule.”
Now if we were to kindly do out addition we would come to a reasonable figure that Gears of War 2 might not, correction, will not suck according to some lame arse retards on the internet who fail to acknowledge any form of technological improvements. Helghast, Chimera or Locust, too many aliens to shoot, saw or butcher, am sticking with my good ‘ol terrorists, family feuds and manics trying to take over the world, they at least give me a planet inhabited by humans.
By Neelesh Mukherjee