Inside a next-gen 3D engine

All modern game effects analysed and explained in this feature interview with Project Offset's technical art director.

As gamers we owe much to the power of the programmable shader and the graphical splendour it has bestowed on games everywhere. Since its introduction into the DirectX 8 specification, programmable shaders were destined to replace their fixed-function counterparts and once OpenGL joined in the fun, you couldn't stop developers from using them. Today, there's hardly a 3D accelerated game on the market that doesn't feature at least one shader program, even if it's just to do shiny reflective water.

Of course, back in 2000 when DX8 hit no one really knew what they were doing and the implementation of programmable shaders, both in software and hardware, had yet to mature. It wasn't until the 2002 debut of Shader Model 1.0 in DX9 and the release of compliant hardware by NVIDIA and ATI that programmable shaders really took off.

When NVIDIA tentatively added support for programmable shaders into the GeForce3 (when it was dubbed the nFiniteFX Engine), the focus of its performance by reviewers and consumers alike was raw fillrate and indeed, graphics hardware in the days before DX8 was geared toward optimising multi-texturing and transform and lightning. Today, with architectures like ATI's R520 and R580 (X1800 and X1900 respectively) transistor counts are almost completely dedicated to vertex and pixel processing units and fillrate has taken a back seat. Developers have more flexibility than ever before to create their own effects - without having to wait for support from an independent hardware vendor (IHV). When NVIDIA and ATI release chips that do not differentiate between vertex and pixel processors, otherwise known as a 'unified shader architecture', performance will finally scale with the needs of the developer.

Programmable shaders however were just the tip of the iceberg. Graphics APIs like Direct3D and OpenGL have themselves advanced and everything from realistic lighting to motion blur is possible.

With graphics technology accelerating faster than a photon abiding by Einstein's Theory of Relativity, we thought it would be a good idea to have a look at exactly what current generation hardware provides us with in terms of visuals, or more accurately, how they provide them. To do this, we've gone and recruited the help of the fine people at Offset Software and their next generation 3D engine.

About Project Offset
Offset Software's self-titled game/engine 'Project: Offset' (www.projectoffset.com) is where bad graphics go to die. Founded by Sam McGrath and brothers Travis and Trevor Stringer, Offset Software started as a small-scale apartment business with the objective of creating a game using cutting-edge graphics technology. According to Rod Green, technical art director (and now one of Offset's directors), it was engine architect Sam McGrath's goal to program an engine that would make use of everything modern graphics APIs and hardware had to offer.

'He [McGrath] took inspiration from offline renderers, such as Pixar's Renderman, to develop a unified lighting and shading architecture which could rival "movie quality" while running in realtime,' explains Green.
'The plan has always been to create a kick-arse game, but to do this you need the right tools and the right engine to survive into the next generation. When Sam started, there wasn't much out there in the way of next-gen engines that could be acquired without a hefty cost up front, so he decided to make his own.'
Green says that the engine tech is close to 70% done. The team however still has a lot planned out, both for the engine itself and the extensive toolset.

Although not part of the original team, Green has a wealth of experience in the games industry. In fact, Green is Australian and hails from several local studios including Atari Melbourne House and Tantalus. BioWare in Canada eventually stole him away, but Green has found his place at Offset and firmly believes that Project Offset will be the next big thing.

And he isn't the only one. In February this year, Red 5 Studios, a developer made up of some prominent people who worked on Blizzard's World of Warcraft MMO, including the Mark Kern, the game's team lead and Blizzard director William Petras, licensed the Project Offset engine for use in its yet-to-be-announced MMO.

Cause and effect
With Offset lending a hand, we were able to come up with a series of screenshots showing off the engine and its capabilities. As we've mentioned, Project Offset makes use of the very latest graphics technologies, along with a few effects you won't see in mainstream engines like Doom or Unreal. This provides us with the perfect way demonstrating exactly what your $1000 video card is capable of doing (and why it costs $1000).

'Each one of the following effects plays an important role in adding to the realism of the rendered scene. The challenge when developing the technology was to implement each effect in an efficient manner, so that the engine would run at a high frame rate, while achieving the goal of cinematic quality rendering,' says Green.

Many of the technologies in Project Offset have plenty of documentation available - for example, normal mapping and shadowing - while others have close to nothing. Green explains that McGrath had to create his own solution for motion blur, one that would not only affect every object on screen, but also not result in a huge performance hit. It's interesting to note that many of these effects are created via post-processing, that is, after the final image has been rendered.