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INTEL® VISUAL Adrenaline ISSUE 3, 2009 AUTODESK®: * TECHNOLOGY WOLFENSteIN ADVANCES AS REBORN: NEXT-GENERATION Better, Stronger, HARDWARE Faster—and True MELDS WITH to Its Roots CUSTOM-TUNED SOFTWARE A Peek into the Intel® Architecture Code-Named Larrabee New Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers Empire: Total War * Takes to the Waves with Real-Time 3D Naval Battles ©2009 Mythic Entertainment** TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 Wolfenstein* is Reborn Seventeen years after the groundbreaking original, an all new Wolfenstein is true to its roots. 8 Take a Look at Larrabee Tom Forsyth shares his thoughts on how it feels to be on the leading edge of the gaming graphics universe. 13 Victory for 2008 Indie Game Developers * Three winners, three games—how 28 Empire: Total War the win from Intel has helped these Takes to the Waves game developers. Featuring real-time 3D naval battles, Empire: Total War targets the revolution and rebellion of eighteenth-century England. 18 Autodesk® Fuels Triple-A Game Creations A trio of applications from Autodesk animates and energizes Triple-A game development. 24 Launch of Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers: Virtual Graphics Support 34 Cakewalk Software: Composing Audio for Your Game Studio for Video Games Realize full graphics performance potential The audio soundtrack of a video game can make with minimum effort. the experience an adrenaline-drenched adventure. FROM THE managing EDITOR’S DESK CHRYSTE SULLIVAN It’s been a doozy of a winter for those of us in I know some fret about excessive “screen time,” but I firmly Pacific Northwest.All I can tell you is that those of us in side with Steven Johnson, who sang the praises of our immersed Oregon may have an affinity for fleece and coffee, but we digital existence in his 2005 book Everything Bad is Good for are innocent in the ways of shoveling driveways, salting You. Johnson asserts that most youthful gamers today would roads, and plowing snow. Suffice it to say there’s been more likely score better on an IQ test than their parents at a similar hunkering down than usual. age, largely because of the problem-solving skills gleaned from blowing up opposing alien armies, captaining sports teams, Faced with similar situations when I was a kid, I had a very and the like. I’m glad about this because my own kids may narrow range of options for passing the time. Now a parent someday need these extra IQ points to develop new hardware myself, the sounds in my home come from a growing library or software of the sort described in this month’s issue. of video games that my kids play, and their banter as they play them. They are digital natives. Until next time, drive safely and happy gaming. At least spring is almost here! **COVER: Image from Warhammer* Online courtesy of Mythic Entertainment. Intel VISUAl ADrENAlINE ISSUE NO. 3, 2009 1 Wolfenstein* : Rebuilt frOM the GROunD UP FOR TODay’S HARDware by GARRET ROMAINE B.J. IS bacK. William Joseph “B.J.” Blazkowicz was the gung-ho hero who single-handedly conquered Castle Wolfenstein and the man who really won World War II. One of the longest lived and best-loved franchises in gaming history, Wolfenstein* is reborn, rebuilt from the ground up using state of the art development tools and ready for today’s advanced computer hardware. First introduced by John Carmack and his friends as developers have brought to life a distinctive alternate a shareware legend in 1992 and later voted into the history for the WWII universe, with supernatural Nazis gaming Hall of Fame, Wolfenstein 3D* single-handedly wielding strange new weapons and inhabiting an started the first-person shooter (FPS) category of alternate dimension known as the Veil. Strange creatures computer games and was the predecessor to such inhabit this occult world in which space and time are venerable heroes of today as Gordon Freeman from distorted and special effects and story twists abound. Half Life* and Master Chief from Halo*. Now, 17 years after the groundbreaking original Wolfenstein 3D was Despite these updates, Wolfenstein remains true to its first released, comesWolfenstein —an all-new game from roots. Eric Biessman, creative director at Raven Software, one of the most recognized names in computer gaming. said that the Raven team never planned to simply crank out a rehash; they approached their project carefully. “I’m All-new dimensions with a nod to the past a huge fan of Wolfenstein 3D and Return to Castle Wolfenstein takes place this time not in a cramped Wolfenstein,” he explained. “We asked ourselves, ‘How can castle prison but in an expansive, intense city environment. we honor the history of the original Wolfenstein 3D and Within this sinister world players enjoy a rich story line yet still move forward?’ We still have treasures in the as our hero B.J. confronts his enemies with devastating game. Now there’s a whole new economy system. And weapons and mysterious new powers. Wolfenstein’s we’ve taken enemies from the previous games and Intel VISUAl ADrENAlINE ISSUE NO. 3, 2009 2 Visual impact in a dynamic way Raven developers used a variety of advanced tools and techniques to put a unique stamp on the new Wolfenstein. One of their goals was to showcase more interesting lighting that interacted with the environment. They saw the new Wolfenstein landscape as a dynamic world, requiring intense calculations for light interactions Out of the dungeon and into the city, BJ is back! modernized them. We kept telling ourselves, ‘Here’s the grandfather of all shooters, we can’t mess it up.’ We all came to this with a lot of love and respect for those early games, determined to honor what they were. We think we did that.” The trick was to create advanced new capabilities in the game, while maintaining recognizable ties to the past titles that everyone loved. Wolfenstein 3D was a controlled game, with set linear levels. Return to Castle Wolfenstein felt more open, and more amenable to multi-player battles. For 2009, Both BJ and the supernatural Nazis wield weapons straight out of science fiction in the Veil. developers gave B.J. the opportunity to use new weapons and move the gameplay ahead, while keeping the multi-player and physics. The addition of the Veil, with its strange hooks. It is, and it isn’t, your father’s Wolfenstein. occult influences and other-worldly effects, put additional pressure on the game’s look and feel. The Raven team Biessman serves as the Wolfenstein project lead. ultimately decided on a deferred shading renderer. He believes Wolfenstein fills a niche that no other game fills. “You get the classic id first-person shooter, Deferred shading allows for scenes with hundreds of that quick-twitch arcade experience, plus you get dynamic lights, with almost no CPU impact. Previously that unique take on WWII, moving from the ordinary Raven used a forward shading technique that consumed to the extraordinary to the supernatural. You’re not a lot of processing performance while calculating what just fighting the Nazis; you’re going deep into their lights were interacting with what geometries. With lair and pulling up the worst parts of the Third Reich deferred shading, Raven can scale up the geometry right by the roots. You’re saving the world, period.” and the lights independently of each other, without that processing overhead. What this means to the end-user is that they will experience a scene that has more Intel VISUAl ADrENAlINE ISSUE NO. 3, 2009 3 WOLFENSTEIN *: REBUILT FROM THE GROUND UP FOR TODAY ’S HARDWARE The new Wolfenstein* is a bit like . complicated geometries, and more lights and shadows—all dynamic so that the cost of moving these relative to each Checking out a reliable title to see what’s new and exciting other is small. This in turn allowed Raven to fill scenes with lots of breakables and numerous movable objects. Greeting a long lost friend you’re glad to The soft stencil shadows allowed them to render the see again highest quality shadowing and self-shadowing available, Running into that attractive in-law cousin you without the artifacts that can detract from a scene’s remember from your family reunion awhile back appeal, distracting the person playing the game. Having a great reason to upgrade your whole system Dwight Luetscher, Raven’s technical lead, explained All of the above! how they use deferred shading. “We render the unlit scene into textures: including the normals, the diffuse color, and the specular, then we use these textures to draw in light interactions into the frame buffer almost like geometries that we generate at runtime, and can it was post-process. We draw lots of lights in the scene independently light these without a concern for CPU but only pay the fragment shader cost for the pixels that overhead. We were going for rooms with hundreds of actually need the interaction. This allows us to have big, dynamically breakable objects under hundreds of lights, open, city scenes where the artists can have sunlight or something we just couldn’t afford to do with forward moonlight, window lights, bounce lights, fill lights, and shading.” However, Luetscher explained that there effect lights—all dynamic—and with very little CPU cost.” was a significant trade-off. “One down side to deferred shading is that anti-aliasing is a real challenge.” Luetscher added, “One of the benefits of deferred shading in a dynamically lit scene is that procedural Raven put a priority on aesthetics and decided that geometry does not have to concern itself with light soft stencil shadows gave the best look for character interaction.

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