And it was worth the wait! Intruiging visuals and beautifull music, what more does a GKfan need? A demo perhaps! :)
There's a lot of content in the trailer that made me think, think enough to
write an article about it.
To find out what it's all about, the best thing to do is to download the
27mb trailer (believe me, it's worth it!). It is also available in Real Audio and
in smaller files.
This article will go in depth on the graphical side of the trailer. Foremost I'd like to thank Adam Bormann for replying to some of my questions.
THE BENEFIT OF 3D
We all know it's 3D, but to find out how it REALLY works we need to see
more than just a few character AVI's..the trailer was the perfect thing to give us
a more accurate view on the G-Engine.
What struck me most was the kind of detail that this engine can produce. I
have yet to see a shoot-em-up game which gives this kind of detail to
textures.
Not even UNREAL seems able to beat the 'level of detail-system' G-ENGINE
provides.
What is level of detail?
In short: Imagine to be in a 3D room where you see a painting on the wall,
you move your camera closer so you fill your screen with only the texture
of the painting.
What most games offer is either a collection of pixels OR (providing that you have a 3D-card) a collection of pixels nicely smoothed out. GK3 is nothing like that, when you zoom in on a texture you get to see a highly detailed bitmap.
This effect is acquired by the constant swapping of textures when you move the camera, so you get a prerendered level of quality.
As an example:
In the trailer, the camera zooms in on a skull of an altar painting.
The camera keeps on zooming until the skull entirely fills the screen, in the end we see this skull as a highly detailed image. THAT is how the
G-ENGINE works.
Of course, a good engine is still nothing if the artists don't do their best to make things looks as lifelike as possible for a real-time rendering engine.
Below here is a screenshot of the church in GK3 and
a picture I took in the REAL church while visiting Rennes-le-Château. Just look for yourself, the resemblance is amazing.
