Vanishing of Ethan Carter - Englisches Originalintervew
PCGH: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter uses the latest Unreal Engine 3. Can you elaborate, why this engine was most suitable for your game?
The Astronauts: When we started making the game, UE4 was not production-ready yet. And we worked with UE3 for the last eight years, so it made total sense to us to stick to it. We are of course adding our own features into the engine, but that's exactly because we know it inside out.
PCGH: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter uses 3D-Models created with photogrammetry. Did you need to adapt the Unreal Engine to use this technology?
The Astronauts: Not really, no. At its core, photogrammetry is merely a different way of acquiring assets, but how you handle these assets in the game is almost like with hand-made assets. However, we did add a couple of features, like custom compression, to make sure that we can get the most out of photogrammetry.
PCGH: Does The Vanishing of Ethan Carter use Direct X 11? What are the specific reasons why it does or doesn't?
The Astronauts: We use DX9, at least at the moment. The reason is simple: compatibility. DX9 is still unrivaled here when compared with DX11, and we did not really need any DX11 features. We did not want to add them just for marketing purposes.
PCGH: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter uses photogrammetry combined with some more conservative techniques of world-building. Can you give us an overview why you chose to use photogrammetry and what kind of pros and cons the technology offers?
The Astronauts: I recommend the big fat blog post we did on photogrammetry on our website. But in short, photogrammetry allows for highly realistic assets that would be impossible to make by hand. That is the biggest advantage of the tech. The downside is that it's misleadingly easy to get into, but quite hard to master.
PCGH: Regarding world-building, Adrian wrote: "The convincing, immersive game world needs to be indifferent to the player, and the player needs to feel like an intruder." So The Vanishing of Ethan Carter should not feel like a heavily scripted game and its environments should feel natural to the player. How can you achive that without losing control over the gameflow?
The Astronauts: Ha, that's the question, right? Tell a specific story in a way that makes the players feel like they have written it themselves. To achieve that, we are basically using everything we have learned in the last twenty years of being game developers.
One example of the approach is that we greatly trust the players. This will be confusing to some, because the game lacks hand holding. But on the other hand, the game should be more rewarding to those who appreciate being their own masters in a game.
PCGH: On your Blog, you posted some 3D-assets you created with photogrammetry. The level of detail is impressive. Can you explain how the technology works?
The Astronauts: The basic idea is you take a few dozen photos of an object, and put it into software than then spits out a texture 3D model. It's kind of black magic. If you want to dig deeper, I highly recommend checking out the blog post you mention.
PCGH: The vegetation, foliage and their behavior in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is specifically tailored to suit the realistic look you want to achieve. Can you give us some details?
The Astronauts: We are, oddly enough, not aiming for 100% realism in our visuals. After all, this is an atmospheric game full of supernatural elements, so we thought a certain stylization is necessary. So the end results is a mix of photogrammetric assets with a lot of post-processing and other tricks to make sure that we get the players into a certain mood.
PCGH: Can you take advantage of multicore-architechtures of modern CPUs to render foliage, its physics and the game in general?
The Astronauts: That is written into UE3, so yes, if necessary we can always reach for more power. But the whole point of writing a good code is that you don't need to. So it is a balancing act, really.
PCGH: Considering all the detailed objects and textures don't you need huge amounts of memory to render The Vanishing of Ethan Carter?
The Astronauts: Actually, you do. PC memory or the memory of your graphics card are more important for our game than the core processing power. I mean, we don't require anything more than a decent PC, but still, if you only have half a gig video card, you just won't be able to see the same detail as people with more video RAM.
PCGH: We can't help but to notice some similarities with "Get Even". Both your game and The Farm51's use photogrammetry of realworld-objects, the Unreal-Engine 3.0 and focus on high fidelity, realistical looks. Are you working together to spearhead the technologies used in both of the games?
The Astronauts: We know each other, both being Polish studios and all, but no, we're working on this separately and came to the conclusion on the usefulness of photogrammetry independently.
PCGH: What kind of physics-engine does The Vanishing of Ethan Carter use? And how important is it in a game that doesn't focus on combat?
The Astronauts: It's not that important, to be honest. We're not destroying stuff not killing people who then turn into ragdolls. So our use of physics is for the basic stuff like gravity or player movement. In the future we will, however, use physics for particle simulation - but did not have the need to go after that in the case of Ethan.
PCGH: What about Sound-Design? Are you using special techniques to make the game even more immersive?
The Astronauts: Yes, our approach to sound is slightly different than in all games I have personally worked on so far. We are relaying much more on ambient music than on purely ambient sounds, for example. It's going to be very interesting to see if this approach works for the players, but I am certainly hoping so. Of course that is not some sort of new general approach to sound design, but it's something I believe fits this particular game like a glove.
PCGH: Thanks a lot for the interview!
......freu!!!!!