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Circlebreaker
May 14th, 2005, 01:43 pm
Gamespy has an interesting article (http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/hellgate-london/613490p1.html) about the technology behind the randomly created levels of Hellgate: London. :thumbup: Looks pretty good.

Of course, any 3D engine programmer will tell you what sounds simple on paper is a completely different animal when you try to put it on the screen. That's because modern 3D engines do tons of pre-processing to figure out all of the lighting and to calculate which parts of the level players can see from wherever they're standing. The moment you decide that the level is going to be random every time the player fires it up ... well, you've got to come up with a whole new approach for rendering it onto the screen.

Jagndeke
May 14th, 2005, 03:17 pm
Yep... I sure like the concept. Random levels generated everytime you play. Talk about replay value!!!

When's the game set for release?

Mara
May 14th, 2005, 03:35 pm
Next year.

http://www.3dgamers.com/games/hellgatelondon/

:read:

SupaTroopa
May 14th, 2005, 05:06 pm
Yeah even some of the enemies (zombie types I think) will have randomnly generated clothes every time.

These are little things that go a long way to making a game great - something their Diablo series did very well.

The game also seems to have that balance of cutting edge graphics and playability built-in to it much like WoW does - nice graphics that don't rely so heavily on technology making system specs reasonable and the gamepaly ultra smooth (hopefully) without sacrificing atmosphere and eye candy/immersion.

Far Cry comes to mind when talking about games that are little too far ahead of the curve - my system still struggles with that game at high detail and will ruin the experience unless I tone down everything just right - a bit of a pain.

Mara
May 14th, 2005, 05:11 pm
You might also be interested in reading this thread.

http://forums.gamers.org/showthread.php?t=5837

:read:

Rafal Dudek
May 14th, 2005, 07:22 pm
I have a feeling though the random levels will be simple in terms of design. I havent read the article but I've been thinking over how random generated levels can be done. The only way I came up with this is in terms of "blocks" Each room might be a "block" and there will be several versions of each block so the random generator will be able to piece them together on the fly without worrying if there will be any "leak" (like going into VOID).