The Engine That Makes The Conduit Go
Developer High Voltage Software tell us about the 3D architecture powering one of Wii's slickest looking games.
May 14, 2009 - About a month from now, SEGA will ship High Voltage Software's anticipated Wii-exclusive first-person shooter, The Conduit. The game is coveted for its robust control system and online play, but also for its technical prowess. Using the proprietary Quantum3 engine, the team at HVS has worked hard to ensure that its title looks better than the majority of products on Nintendo's system. To learn more about the cutting-edge offering's tech, we caught up with chief creative officer Eric Nofsinger and advanced tools and technology supervisor Scott Williamson.
IGN: First of all, why do you call it the Quantum3 engine?
Eric Nofsinger: The engine's so nice we named it thrice. [Laughs]
Scott Williamson: Quantum is the codename for our internal engine technology, Quantum3 is the third generation. It's our first completely data-driven streaming cross-platform engine.
IGN: So it can be used for other platforms then.
Eric: Our engine is cross platform. But we are continuously pushing new boundaries on the Wii; our Advanced Technology Group has put a tremendous amount of effort into the Wii.
Scott: Quantum3 is on the Wii, PS2, PSP, and the PC. It also used to support Xbox but that's been deprecated. The engine is sufficiently abstract to allow our content creators to efficiently create cross platform games while allowing customizations that take advantage of features unique to each target platform.
IGN: What's so special about the engine? What does it allow you to do?
Scott: Not to sound too repetitive, but its greatest strength is that it's abstract and data driven which allows us to efficiently create content that can be shared across platforms. While this alone isn't necessarily unique, its implementation is. It's highly efficient on each platform but orthogonal from the point of view of the game programmers, artists, and designers. The shared content isn't limited to textures and models either. It includes everything; maps, regions, navigation data, collision data, UI, movies, audio, even the game logic. It really enables High Voltage Software to quickly make high quality games of any type on multiple platforms. It's also extensible; we can add new features and even platforms to the engine.
Eric: One of the genuine strengths of Quantum3 is that it allows for rapid development. That affords us the ability to prove or disprove ideas quickly. Ideas are fantastic while they reside in your head, but they flourish or die in the practical reality of a running game. Our engine and toolset are very good at fostering the strong ideas' survival.
IGN: It seems to handle a lot of effects, but how hard does the framerate take a hit?
Scott: Everything has a cost, there's no free lunch, but we have put a tremendous and ongoing effort into optimization. Every time we implement a new feature, integration and performance are key design constraints. We also put a lot of work into modularity. Features are dependent on other features only when necessary and it makes sense. That way the designers and artists have the flexibility to trade mesh or material detail for additional HDR, Depth of Field GPU cycles in an area of a game for example. Some systems like normal mapping and particles are even scalable and can turned off smoothly in the distance for continuous LOD transitions. We do our best to make sure the pipeline is as optimized and flexible as possible, then give our content creators the tools to measure and balance the load on the system for the best story telling or gameplay experience.
Eric: Artists, Designers, Programmers, and Audio Engineers are continually at "war" for their discipline and the game as a whole. It's that constructive spirit of discontent that made The Conduit what it is.
IGN: What about large environments? Conduit, for example, features a lot of corridor shooting. Can the engine handle big, wide-open locales and still maintain a solid fluidity?
Scott: "Solid fluidity," I like that! Sure the engine can handle indoor and outdoor settings. There are rendering optimizations that benefit both as you will see in at least one upcoming title. The Conduit's design is a reflection of the designers' desires rather than an engine constraint.
IGN: Is Wii really capable of true normal-mapping? Is that feasible in-game?
Scott: Yes, absolutely. Our artists create tangent space normal maps and apply them to models just as you would for any other platform. Our tools compress them into Wii specific formats and the renderer uses them for advanced per-pixel lighting, reflection, and refraction. At first we in ATG were concerned about the performance of these techniques on the Wii but found that it was capable of far more than we initially expected. Not only were we able to do normal mapping but we implemented a full unified lighting model that allowed for true per pixel lighting calculation from many dynamic lights, combined with radiosity light maps, and a projected texture light (more to come), on complex multitexture materials with detail mapping, UV animation, specularity, color gloss maps, HDR and much more, all in a unified configurable pipeline. The key was our engineers experience and understanding of the underlying mathematics and physical principals of light and rendering. We were able to remap standard rendering techniques to the unique hardware in the Wii in a way that allowed maximum flexibility, but we didn't stop there. We developed several new Wii hardware specific tricks and techniques like Dynametric Light Tightening, Reframbriance, and ¡Approxiflexion! that contribute to The Conduit's performance and unique graphics style.
Eric: The techniques our artists use to generate their art assets are functionally identical. They create high resolution meshes in Zbrush to generate normal maps which are applied to lower resolution game models.
IGN: What is one graphics technique that the Wii hardware really seems ideally suited for, in your opinion?
Eric: Creativity. This may sound like a strange answer, but in actuality the Wii afforded Artists and Designers the opportunity to focus on great innovative gameplay experiences instead of relying on gimmicks. Certainly there are many great games on other platforms with phenomenal visuals, but there are also far too many where the developers seemed to get caught up in the artifice of development techniques and dogmatic craft of "next gen" production. That's not to say Wii developers _have_ taken advantage of that opportunity; most have not. Some notable exceptions are MadWorld, Okami, House of the Dead: Overkill, and de Blob to name a few.
Scott: The Wii may not have a programmable shader unit but it does have very flexible and powerful multitexturing abilities. A solid understanding of the Wii texturing hardware is prerequisite for just about any advanced graphics technique you will implement on the platform.
IGN: What is your biggest pet-peeve, technically speaking, with most Wii games?
Scott: I'd have to say graphics. Maybe I'm biased because that has been a large part of my focus but it appears to me that other developers have assumed the Wii is capable of far less than we and a few other dedicated developers have proven it is. We feel it can be a very competitive platform graphically. That being said, what I've loved over the last 15 years working with Nintendo is their steadfast focus on core gameplay and what I'm loving about Nintendo today is their innovation, particularly how they broke away from the CPU/GPU wars and reinvented the gaming experience with the Wiimote and continue to innovate today.
Eric: Circle shadows or the lack of shadows altogether. Seriously?!
IGN: If you had to pick one thing, what would say Quantum3 does best?
Eric: Allows us to make great games.
Scott: That's really hard, Quantum3 is the culmination of High Voltage Software's development experience and expertise and it does many, many things very, very well. I'd have to say that it's most competitive in the area of Wii graphics. I'm unaware of another engine that is capable of everything we have in Quantum3, and we're adding more. On top of that, 90% of that power is in the hands of the designers and doesn't require custom programming to use. Don't get me wrong, there are other really impressive games on the Wii and I tip my hat to the other people out there working hard to get that graphic fidelity, I'm just unaware of anyone else who has pulled as much as we have into a single renderer, let alone a cross platform engine.
IGN: Are you continuing to improve Quantum3?
Eric: Without a doubt! This really is just the tip of the iceberg for us.
Scott: Absolutely, we are continuing to improve Quantum3 on many fronts, implementing new graphics features, systems, optimizing the engine, and improving the tools our creative people use to make games.
IGN: Conduit already looks fantastic. What can we expect visually from your next Wii project?
Scott: Thanks a lot, The Conduit was our first hardcore title using this technology on the Wii and the two were co-developed. We had the normal growing pains, ran into some dead ends, and have learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. That being said, current High Voltage Software Wii titles are already benefiting from these lessons, and we have much more coming in terms of features. That's just about all I can say about that.
Eric: Stop by our booth at E3. We'll have something really impressive to show you. [Smiles]
Source: http://wii.ign.com/articles/982/982962p1.html
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Sum it up, Wii is capable of much more then the infamous claims of many third party developers (which shouldn't have been doubted in the first place with the first party graphics), talking about the advantages of the engine and what you have to do to get the most out of the Wii, calling out a few thrid parties that are lazy, and a hint at their next Wii project already in development to be shown at E3 (though no word if it's a public or private anouncement)
MaxwellGT2000 - "Does the amount of times you beat it count towards how hardcore you are?"
Wii Friend Code - 5882 9717 7391 0918 (PM me if you add me), PSN - MaxwellGT2000, XBL - BlkKniteCecil, MaxwellGT2000
