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Wednesday, January 10, 2007 |
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The Look of Crackdown
So the masterminds here at IGN apparently thought, for whatever reason, that it’d be a brilliant idea to give a bunch of rowdy, over-worked, tired-as-hell, middle-aged children – all of whom are in the final throes of what promises to be the most explosive game of 2007 – the means to spout our near-delusional ramblings out into the blogosphere! Truly, the inmates are now running the asylum.
But in the interest of providing you all with a closer look at the incredible madness that is “Crackdown,” we here at Realtime Worlds are happy to take the keys away from the IGN wardens and make this place our own. So sit back, enjoy – and occasionally, perhaps, forgive – our “Crackdown” blog. Let’s begin with a look at the…well…look of the game!
Jeff Cairns, Art Director
When Dave (Jones) explained the concept and sheer scale of Crackdown to me it became abundantly clear, firstly that my underwear was clearly not robust enough and secondly that we needed to make the game’s styling as over the top as the action he wanted. Everything he talked about was turned up to 11 so a world of drab grey and brown tenement buildings didn’t seem to be the best way to stage this. It was obvious to me from the start that the best reference point for this type of game already existed in comics and graphic novels which, despite having a variety of visual styles, all have the same fundamentals in common… they aim to depict a mixture of great drama and intense action in every page and often with an exaggerated palette that accentuates it all.
We immediately set about creating a detailed Art Vision document since an art style as different as this one would need to be communicated very clearly to everyone working on (and paying for) the game. We looked at a lot of different comics and graphic novels (always in abundance in a games studio?) and it was the intensely detailed and dynamic works of Frank Miller that really seemed to hit home as what Crackdown should be all about. There were also a number of movies that influenced our design; ‘Batman’ for the inimitable Deco/Gothic style of Gotham city, ‘Equilibrium’ for its austere and foreboding buildings, ‘The Fifth Element’ for its bold palette… and a Manga movie called ‘Blood – the Last Vampire’ for its sumptuous lighting. An eclectic mix if ever there was one but the fact was that we wanted to create something new that would be uniquely ‘Crackdown’ and although all of the above had something to offer us in terms of inspiration, none of them encapsulated the whole vision.
A few hundred concept drawings later and we began work on the 3 districts in the game each being a discreet island and with its own unique look derived from the above influences. Good working practice dictates that an environment should be built first and foremost to accommodate gameplay and this was exactly our approach. We designed all districts at the same time and blocked them out to accommodate our Agents abilities and the skill level he’d likely be at when entering each area… a challenge in itself. The Artists and Designers worked closely together to ensure that neither gameplay nor the aesthetics of the vista were ever compromised. The heights of buildings, shape of terrain and even the position and shape of the bridges were all carefully crafted to make sure the vista was as compelling to look at as it was to play in.
Once we were happy that the environment was a good place to play in, we got our heads together and planned out the cutting edge tech that would be most suitable to achieve our lofty goals… a previously-unseen world where thousands of people and hundreds of vehicles are visible at any one time in an environment that, from the always-accessible rooftops, can be seen in full. This had never truly been done before, certainly not in terms of the kind of scale and density the game would require. There have been criticisms leveled at the game about our not using next-gen graphics technology and suggestions that we are a cel-shaded game but nothing could by further from the truth on both counts. In fact the irony is that we actually had to use some extremely cutting edge techniques in order to achieve the look and detail we wanted given that our budget had to be spread so thinly across such a large volume of assets on screen at once. The following are just some of the highlights of this technology that we are particularly proud of:
Ambient occlusion textures - As part of the lighting setup, we run a radiosity simulation over the entire city which works by firing 16 million million photons (that is 16x10^12 photons) into the geometry. Their effect is then measured at approximately 32,000 million points. We save out the results as textures and apply these to the environment. We wrote our own custom tools to achieve this which, as well as being of a much higher quality than those from our 3-D package, they also meant a 100X reduction in computation time!
Surface textures - To get all the detail, blending, and radiosity effects in the environment requires no less that six texture maps - four for colour, and two for lighting. Also, the blends between all those maps vary across the surface to provide more variation which is a gigantic amount of data to set up on each surface. Again our need for full precision control meant we produced custom tools for the job.
Outlines on everything – This is a fundamental part of the game style and we wrote three versions before finding a method that was antialiased and had a reasonable render cost. We're achieving the effect by leveraging the Xenon's MSAA hardware in a new and unusual way.
Fake window interiors – The technology we're using for windows is the next generation beyond parallax mapping. For every pixel of every window, the shader simulates raytracing through the blinds, through the interior window box, and finally into the room until it hits the floor or ceiling. And after that, the full lighting equation is run.
Procedural Sky – The whole sky including the clouds is completely procedurally generated. The sky is blue and sunsets are red because of Rayleigh scattering - the effect of blue wavelengths of light being more likely to bounce off air molecules than red ones are. We run an approximation to the double integral needed to compute Rayleigh scattering - and we do it for every pixel of sky, for every frame. In addition, the shape of the clouds is procedurally generated by the GPU. Like the sky, all the lighting on the clouds is run by the GPU for every single pixel of sky, every single frame.
As with any games project (particularly one where you are going for a unique look) we’ve certainly had our trials along the way and we had to make some difficult decisions regarding the rendering direction of the game. We knew we would never be able to afford lots of complexity and detail in each individual asset so we decided to always favour the overall visual impact of the scene and have it compliment and facilitate the sheer volume of stuff and non-stop action.
Well designed lighting was going to be the key to the success of the Crackdown look but after some months experimenting with the basic system, it was evident that it wasn’t going to cut it. The exaggerated palette was very sensitive to even the slightest lighting changes and on occasion this unfortunately meant we submitted screens from builds with some pretty garish colouring (our orange and purple extravaganza at X05 was not one of our finest moments  )
 -Click Here for larger image
We remained stubbornly confident that this could be resolved and, over time, we resolved the issues we had bit by bit. We introduced a huge number of controls to allow a much greater level of refinement and this allowed us to stabilise the problems we were having and ultimately nail the unique Crackdown look that we had worked so hard for 
 -Click Here for larger image
 -Click Here for larger image
Our decision to go with our impressive deferred lighting technique to allow thousands of lights visible across the world at any given time was the making of the night time vista and this was the icing on the cake that we think helped people to truly appreciate the decisions we’d made. This can only be hinted at in a screenshot but to see the entire city with thousands of streetlights to the distance, thousands of characters walking around and hundreds of moving vehicles with headlights really is an impressive sight.
 -Click Here for larger image
There is a genuine buzz of excitement among the team now about releasing the game into the hands of the apparently eager public as we’ve always known that it’s only when the game is experienced first hand that all the pieces slot into place and people will get to see what we have achieved.
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