Amazing new PGR3 shots

[robofunk]

'scuse me?

was a little late with the rolly eyes

 

[Qroach]

There are some people that will just always have the hate on. No matter how good the game is.

 

[_phil_]

Yeah I think they're saying that calculating the HDR lightmaps takes a while.

I think they calculate ambiant occlusion maps or baked to vertices .this can be VERY long on a whole city.

 

[pipo]

I've read that somewhere before too...

Found it: http://projectgothamracing3.com/behindthescenes/Behind the Scenes - Issue 3.htm?c00=1

The scenes are just enormous now. Each city is hundreds of megs of geometry, and literally gigs of texture data. Every step of the pipeline from Maya to the game has to be engineered for scale. Those stages that can't actually fit into Windows 2GB limit have been moved to 64bit. New tools have been written just to load and export Maya scenes to our native format to save artists having to wait for their scenes to load.

The lighting tool and visibility processor are the most CPU intensive processes so we made them distributed applications, running across every spare PC in the office a la Seti@Home. To give you an idea of the processing in the tools pipeline, to light one city currently takes over a billion raytraces through a scene consisting of millions of polys, and the next version will be an order of magnitude more intensive.

And

Then there are the standalone tool pipeline processors, namely the lighting and visibility tools, both developed by Jan. The lighting tool is a raytracing lightmapper, which stores the light colour and direction for every point in the game world. Light is cast from the sun and the sky dome, then bounced around within the city giving an amazingly realistic result. Even dynamic objects are lit using this information, so they sit convincingly in the game.

The visibility processor allows us to calculate what objects are visible from a given location in the world, which means the game doesn't have to render everything all the time. As both the lighting and visibility tools are processor intensive they are designed to split the load across the office LAN, so each PC runs a screensaver which processes tasks as needed whenever the machine is idle. Think Seti@Home, but with fewer graphs.

 

[mckmas8808]

Man these guys are really hard at work. Makes you wonder what devs will be doing 3 years from now.

 

[Acert93]

The lighting tool and visibility processor are the most CPU intensive processes so we made them distributed applications, running across every spare PC in the office a la Seti@Home. To give you an idea of the processing in the tools pipeline, to light one city currently takes over a billion raytraces through a scene consisting of millions of polys, and the next version will be an order of magnitude more intensive.

W00t! More PGR3 goodness. Hopefully they take up the graphics and(!) then gameplay a couple notches.

 

[pipo]

Just to make sure; this interview is rather old...