Medal of Honor

Game in progress
We got to speak not only with the executive and management of the game, but also some grass-roots coders and devs in the studio.

Our first thought: Wow - what a cool place to work.

The team has surrounded itself with the tools of the SpecOps trade. There are posters explaining the working details of dozens of weapons systems, from M4s to Glocks to RPGs. There are location photos, operational planning posters, and whiteboards aplenty for sketching out everything from what order a squad will enter and clear a room to highly detailed to-do lists. 

And of course there are weapons, both of the alarmingly real variety (a Colt M4 with tactical rails and foregrip rests next to a Sig pistol and a well-maintained AK-47 in a cabinet near the lifts) and happily plastic (Nerf guns are probably much better for blowing off steam than the real ones).

One of the more revealing posters we got to see was an AI map of a given area, delineating what is cover and what isn't, and how the AI should behave in any given circumstance. 

The game's being coded in the Unreal engine, at the moment, and while that brings a lot of advantages, it doesn't bring a lot of smarts. The basic AI in Unreal is, well, basic, so the developers are adding much more involved triggers into the environment. The levels are very porous, with many places to seek cover or advance from spot to spot, so having an AI that can take advantage of that is important.

At the same time, the game also needs to be focused around what the player can see and do, so scripting sometimes needs to take precedence over procedural behaviour. As you read this, that's the main effort - balancing an organic AI that is nonetheless entertaining while still being challenging.

The AI design is so level dependent that the same time is working on a lot of level design. We got to see a coder's eye view of the Gardez demo level;, it's so far set to take about 45 minutes to pass through, and while it is essentially a classically linear design of streets the player must traverse, the buildings and shopfronts on these streets are all very detailed.

"It's important that players can see a lot of stuff, that the levels be very porous so that players can do a lot of different things," Lance Powell, the game's lead developer. "But that of course means that we really push our view distance at times. When you're on a rooftop, you can see up to three miles around you."

"And that gets even more important when you get into an Apache," adds Greg. 

From there, we got to see the effort that's going into the lighting of the game. In a word - it's impressive. The designers are constantly running up against memory limits per frame, but rather than strip back detail, the aim is to find elegant workarounds that preserve the great design work that's been fed through to them.

We saw two frames of a scene, from two different render passthroughs, and in just a day's work it's amazing to see what can be done. From a relatively flat scene of a rocky hillside with a scatter of mud huts, we get a brightly lit, sun-drenched view that practically drips with atmosphere. Then we get to see that level live, to look and peer around, and it's even more amazing.

Light bloom occludes the edges of objects; an unsecured tarp ruffles in the breeze, along with the plants on the edge of a path. Hard shadows mingle with dynamic lighting effects to deliver a stunningly realistic location. In fact, we mistook some test renders for location shots, it's that good.

"And all that great lighting? When you get bullet holes appearing in thin surfaces, you'll get point-beams of light flooding through," says Greg. Of course, the lighting guy (who we interrupted while he was working on getting cloth looking right in night-vision) blanched at hearing that. "Hey, I never promised anything!"

Well, we guess he has now. Even without such detail, the lighting engine is going to be a big part of the game, and Greg went on to say that even if his team can't get such impressive effects into the console version, they should at least be accessible on a PC that meets higher hardware requirements.

The village level also highlighted another aspect of the game that the Tier 1 Ops have been able to influence. There are all kinds of odd details, like hand-woven baskets and lawn chairs on rooftops, that the operators have suggested be included - it all goes toward making it seem as real possible.