Cause and Effect

Opening a can of endedness
In the introduction we compared Just Cause to Grand Theft Auto, and for good reason. Just Cause not only has cars for you to drive, but parachutes too. You’ll have many a chance to perfect your controlled falling skills as you descend on your hapless foes.

‘The world of Just Cause is one of the major features of the game. It is the first game using the Avalanche Engine which enables players to go anywhere at any time without encountering weird invisible walls… or other strange limitations,’ explains Christofer Sundberg, the game’s creative director. Sundberg is responsible for coming up with the original concept for Just Cause.

‘We also have the parachute which is an excellent tool to have lots of fun, but also a tool to help you complete the missions in the game. Players can use the parachute for carjacking, sneak attacks, spectacular escapes or simply for base-jumping, parasailing and skydiving.’

In fact, the player has many, many options at their disposal to complete the numerous assassinations, race missions, collect missions, deliveries, hijackings and other tasks available on the fictional landmass of San Esperito.

‘The player is free to perform hundreds of side missions and roam to their heart’s content across the 250,000 acres of land that is San Esperito,’ says Ahlgren. That doesn’t at all mean the developer has gone equally crazy with the central plot.



‘The storyline itself is straight as an arrow and sharp as a razor. We want to present an equal mix of freedom and scripted events.’

Cramming 250,000 acres with content is a big task, and proved a challenge for the fresh faces at Avalanche. The developers decided to tackle the problem on multiple fronts by using a combination of fixed features (such as story points) and random encounters to make the world a dynamic, interesting place. There’s not much point in having an entire island to play on if there’s nothing to do.

Suave engines
Technological flexibility was important for Avalanche when creating Just Cause. With the freedom available to the player in the game, it only made sense to incorporate the trait into the engine. To this end, Avalanche has embraced new graphics technology while keeping a close check on the minimum requirements.

‘We’ve based the engine around Shader Model 2.0, which has a really large install base and is powerful enough to let us do everything we need,’ explains Linus Blomberg, co-founder and technical director on Just Cause.

‘We have full HDR rendering, most models have normal maps and specular maps. We even use parallax mapping for the terrain, which gives a great sense of depth and detail. We also have soft shadows through dynamic volumetric shadowing.’



The Avalanche Engine took three years to create and perfect. Blomberg and the rest of the team starting from a blank slate, with the only middleware involved being Havok for physics. Avalanche did consider PhysX but wasn’t satisfied – the API just didn’t meet the needs of the game.

‘We haven’t used PhysX for this game, mainly due to the lack of a good vehicle component. But that doesn’t mean we won’t use it in the future,’ says Blomberg.

The world itself is created using procedural programming – that is, content created through fixed functions rather than by hand – and Blomberg has a great deal of experience in this regard. The landscape rendering for example is done via procedural coding, greatly reducing the development time of the game as far as assets are concerned.

Juse because
Just Cause is buzzing with development – in a good way that doesn’t involve bees – and we can’t wait to check out every metre of the 250,000 acres of area in the game.

‘We are very excited to see Just Cause coming to a completion after over three years in development,’ says Sundberg.

‘As we started up we were six guys sitting around three desks in a corner of an office. As Eidos showed confidence in the project it’s been a really interesting development for Just Cause and Avalanche as a company.’



The developer is now working at full steam and the game is due out in just a few months. Avalanche won’t be sitting idle once it’s done though, and in fact is already working on three other projects, which we hope will be just as ambitious and open-ended as Just Cause.

‘After growing 400 percent over three years, we have now established the company,’ says Sundberg, ‘both as a new developer on the tough international market but also as a good employer of development talent, which is very flattering considering we haven’t released our first game yet.’