Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
This wasn't a very productive day at work today. The reason? Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, coming out on the 25th. Our team had a chance to play the final version at work today (don't ask how we got a hold of it...) and that was pretty much all we ended up doing. Even though we were a bit envious, we were all blown away.
If you haven't already, check out the trailers at the link above... paying attention to the lighting effects -- freaking incredible, and all the more so in actual gameplay. Even better than Doom 3 in many places, if I do say so myself.
Our cubicle was pretty much the attraction of the day, with every team member stopping by and trying their hand at the game, or just oogling at the graphics.
The lead programmer, the other graphics guy and I were all having a field day, speculating on all the possible graphics algorithms and techniques they were using -- and it does seem like they've employed almost everything in the book to get the lighting and shadows to unprecedented degrees of realism: projective textures, z-buffer shadows, stencil volumes, etc., exploiting the advantages of each method appropriately.
Yeah, frame rate slows down -- unacceptable for some who think an action game demands 60 fps always -- but it's undeniable that the visual bar has been raised. Lighting, especially global illumination techniques, have in my opinion, always been the hardest part in real-time rendering, harder than the actual rendering, and while everything is still faked, it's a damn good job of it. =)
Gameplay-wise, it's a bit linear in singleplayer mode, but with multiplayer, who really cares? =)
Besides the game itself, what made me happy was the fact that this is probably the first prominent game for the foreign market to be developed in its entirety in China, specfically by Ubisoft Shanghai. Yes, the Frenchies and the Canadians were still running the show, but only at the executive level, and in terms of writing the storyline, etc. Pretty much all the art and all the programming were done in Shanghai by the Chinese. And this is not some cheap clone like people like to stereotype China as producting, but this is a first-rate game which we in the industry call an "AAA title" -- like a Hollywood blockbuster movie.
Anyhow, I'm proud to be in the gaming industry, and after today, I'm especially proud to be Chinese. =)