Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Hello everyone and welcome to yet another Crystal Dynamics appreciation thread 
.
I apologize for the horizontal width of this post, but I tried to toy around with the text's formatting (going to a new line every so often) to make sure it is easier to read.
Before doing anything (especially if you have only played either the PSTwo or the PSP versions of the game) go at this web site and admire a collection of shots
from Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider Legend Xbox 360's
Lead Artist:
http://www.drewmedina.com/drewart/legend/tombraiderLeg.html
IMHO, porting this game to Xbox 360 was a good learning experience for Crystal Dynamics
and the results should pay off in their Next Generation projects (including their new Tomb Raider game CDC, or
whatever is called, for Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3):
they managed to sell a decent amount of copies and also to use in a practical scenario the research work they were already doing
for the next-generation consoles and DX9-DX10 PC's which involved also their art tools pipeline, a new fully dynamic lighting and shadowing engine,
new material shaders, reflections, refractions, depth of field, etc...
They managed to take a great engine
(which worked quite well on PSTwo and PSP [which is in itself quite an achievement
judging the performance of this game on both machines] already).
This should not surprise anyone who already experienced how Crystal Dynamics usually does ports.
If you played Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver on PSOne and Dreamcast you will see the
very nice jump forward in quality from the PSOne version that the Dreamcast version represents:
more detailed characters (Raziel and other NPC's have been tweaked and now they are made of more polygons
and have higher resolution textures mapped on them),
draw distance massively increased, higher resolution textures for background objects, etc...
Crystal Dynamics seems to quickly adapt to new platforms and how to push them:
this generation IMHO will not be an exception (Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2
was not a bad looking title at all).
Now...
several games this generation got the idea of fully dynamic lighting and shadows being casted by any object and received by any object: Condemned:
Criminal Origins is a good example of that.
The shadow maps relative to each light were dynamically generated while rendering the
scene thus when an object moved in front of a light source (thus becoming an occluder) it would start casting a shadow on the rest of the scene.
To simulate a flashlight, or another light source or to fake lighting through say an opening which has a strange pattern
semi-blocking the light passing through, we can project a particular gray scale map from the light source we use as flashlight:
this map can be blended in such a way that areas that are between more than than 50% black darken the color they blend and areas that are less than 50% black
(0% black intended as pure white) brighten the color they blend (blending map and color texture of the receiving object with a function like modulate2x is a way you can use to achieve this effect
[it multiplies the colors and the doubles the result: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19981009/multitexturing_01.htm]
... why ?
Well, imagine color channels going from 0.0f to 1.0f and take Color_base_texture as 0.6f 0.6f 0.6f [a bit of a light gray].
Now take two texels on the gray scale map: TX1 which is 0.9f 0.9f 0.9f and TX2 which is 0.1f 0.1f 0.1f [a very dark shade of gray].
Res1 = Color_base_texture * TX1 * 2.0f;
Res2 = Color_base_texture * TX2 * 2.0f;
We have that Res1 is 1.08f 1.08f 1.08f [which will all get clamped to 1.0f
which means that Res1 is pure white also known as 255 255 255]
and Res2 is 0.12f 0.12f 0.12f.
)
Condemned is also an example of another feature of those games: not all lights do cause occluders to cast shadows.
In Condemned flashlights do not cause objects to cast shadows (but all other lights in the game do).
In Tomb Raider: Legend ALL lights generate shadow maps and the character's flashlight is no exception,
it is just another light-source in the level...
(excuse me the grainy pics I have shot, please do tell me if they need to be rehosted...
in case you cannot get to them, you should find them here: http://panajev.blogspot.com/2007/04/but-but-someone-still-knows-how-to-make.html [I need to really work on this more...
the Kutaragi news watch is still ignoring the recent turn of events... retirement])
and just because I like this scene:
.I apologize for the horizontal width of this post, but I tried to toy around with the text's formatting (going to a new line every so often) to make sure it is easier to read.
Before doing anything (especially if you have only played either the PSTwo or the PSP versions of the game) go at this web site and admire a collection of shots
from Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider Legend Xbox 360's
Lead Artist:
http://www.drewmedina.com/drewart/legend/tombraiderLeg.html
IMHO, porting this game to Xbox 360 was a good learning experience for Crystal Dynamics
and the results should pay off in their Next Generation projects (including their new Tomb Raider game CDC, or
whatever is called, for Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3):
they managed to sell a decent amount of copies and also to use in a practical scenario the research work they were already doing
for the next-generation consoles and DX9-DX10 PC's which involved also their art tools pipeline, a new fully dynamic lighting and shadowing engine,
new material shaders, reflections, refractions, depth of field, etc...
They managed to take a great engine
(which worked quite well on PSTwo and PSP [which is in itself quite an achievement
judging the performance of this game on both machines] already).
This should not surprise anyone who already experienced how Crystal Dynamics usually does ports.
If you played Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver on PSOne and Dreamcast you will see the
very nice jump forward in quality from the PSOne version that the Dreamcast version represents:
more detailed characters (Raziel and other NPC's have been tweaked and now they are made of more polygons
and have higher resolution textures mapped on them),
draw distance massively increased, higher resolution textures for background objects, etc...
Crystal Dynamics seems to quickly adapt to new platforms and how to push them:
this generation IMHO will not be an exception (Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2
was not a bad looking title at all).
Now...
several games this generation got the idea of fully dynamic lighting and shadows being casted by any object and received by any object: Condemned:
Criminal Origins is a good example of that.
The shadow maps relative to each light were dynamically generated while rendering the
scene thus when an object moved in front of a light source (thus becoming an occluder) it would start casting a shadow on the rest of the scene.
To simulate a flashlight, or another light source or to fake lighting through say an opening which has a strange pattern
semi-blocking the light passing through, we can project a particular gray scale map from the light source we use as flashlight:
this map can be blended in such a way that areas that are between more than than 50% black darken the color they blend and areas that are less than 50% black
(0% black intended as pure white) brighten the color they blend (blending map and color texture of the receiving object with a function like modulate2x is a way you can use to achieve this effect
[it multiplies the colors and the doubles the result: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19981009/multitexturing_01.htm]
... why ?
Well, imagine color channels going from 0.0f to 1.0f and take Color_base_texture as 0.6f 0.6f 0.6f [a bit of a light gray].
Now take two texels on the gray scale map: TX1 which is 0.9f 0.9f 0.9f and TX2 which is 0.1f 0.1f 0.1f [a very dark shade of gray].
Res1 = Color_base_texture * TX1 * 2.0f;
Res2 = Color_base_texture * TX2 * 2.0f;
We have that Res1 is 1.08f 1.08f 1.08f [which will all get clamped to 1.0f
which means that Res1 is pure white also known as 255 255 255
]and Res2 is 0.12f 0.12f 0.12f.
)
Condemned is also an example of another feature of those games: not all lights do cause occluders to cast shadows.
In Condemned flashlights do not cause objects to cast shadows (but all other lights in the game do).
In Tomb Raider: Legend ALL lights generate shadow maps and the character's flashlight is no exception,
it is just another light-source in the level...
(excuse me the grainy pics I have shot
, please do tell me if they need to be rehosted... in case you cannot get to them, you should find them here: http://panajev.blogspot.com/2007/04/but-but-someone-still-knows-how-to-make.html [I need to really work on this more...
the Kutaragi news watch is still ignoring the recent turn of events... retirement
])
and just because I like this scene:
