Call of Duty Black Ops 3: Interview (englisch)

Hinweis: Auf dieser zweiten Seite finden Sie als Service (auch für unsere internationalen Leser) das Interview im englischen Originalwortlaut.

Please note: As a service for international readers this second page of the article on Call of Duty Black Ops 3 shows the interview in original language. The interview took place before release of Call of Duty Black Ops 3. Therefore the performance issues on PC were none known.

PC Games Hardware: Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will feature a much more open game world than its predecessors. Did you revamp the Infinity Ware Engine to allow bigger areas? If this is the case, what where the parts of the Engine you have to reprogram/program new from scratch?

Treyarch: We have significantly improved our tools and pipelines to make content creation more efficient than it ever has been before. Our world editor had to be improved in numerous ways to be able to author larger environments and still perform well under the heavy load of modern assets. New AI and path finding systems have been integrated to support the larger and more open environments and gameplay styles. And the new lighting and streaming systems are crucial parts of being able to render these bigger, more complex spaces.
The game will run great in 4K resolutions on top-end hardware.
PC Games Hardware: Watching the trailers we have spotted some advanced lighting-effects like dynamic and volumetric lighting, ambient occlusion and soft shadows. It also seems like you are using image based lighting and some form of global illumination. Can you give us some details about those techniques?

Treyarch: The new lighting engine has moved away from light maps and instead uses a voxel-based approach to global illumination. Image based lighting is used in the preprocessing steps to generate our indirect lighting data. We now have a deferred renderer that allows us to make use of countless dynamic lights instead of the strict limits of Black Ops past games. Because the indirect lighting is also applied in a deferred step, we are able to light with different pre-baked voxel-based GI data that matches the dynamic lighting, resulting in cohesive lighting that surpasses the visuals of older light-map approaches while better supporting the action-packed and ever-changing environment that is the hallmark of Call of Duty.

Additional lighting and atmospheric effects, such as volumetric lighting and dynamic soft shadows are also able to take advantage of the pre-processed volumetric data during the deferred step, allowing them to update with the lighting. For ambient occlusion, we are using a combination of pre-calculated data and a screen-space approach we're calling Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion. GTAO is generally calculated in an accumulative manner, but PC also has the option to do the full calculation every frame for added quality.

PC Games Hardware: Quite obviously to the educated eye, you are using physically based shading. Could you elaborate how the change from conventional materials enhances the visual fidelity and how it works in combination with modern lighting techniques?

Treyarch: At Treyarch, we have benefitted from moving to physically based shading early, starting from the first Black Ops game. What this means is our artists have already had the opportunity to familiarize themselves and become proficient with the techniques used in authoring physically based assets. Even more important, we've learned when and where it's acceptable to deliberately break from physical accuracy for artistic effect, without disrupting the realistic appearance of the scene. The new deferred renderer and more power available in modern hardware means the artists are able to work with fewer constraints and have far more flexibility than in previous games. The result is immediately noticeable dramatic lighting and composition.

PC Games Hardware: The textures you are using in Black Ops 3 seem to have a higher resolution than in previous games. Regarding the fact that Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare already used a lot of graphics memory, we assume you have optimized streaming?

Treyarch: The streaming system in Black Ops 3 has been expanded from textures to encompass model geometry and lighting data as well. In addition to allowing these assets to improve, it frees memory overall allowing for texture detail to increase in kind. This combined with the fact that our in-house development was fully focused on modern PCs and consoles with similar architecture, without needing to account for the older generation of consoles, allowed texture detail to go way beyond what it would have otherwise been.

PC Games Hardware: Current trailers and screenshots suggest some pretty detailed assets. Did you increase the polygon-count, maybe dynamically via tessellation?

Treyarch: The power of modern hardware naturally allows for higher quality assets with denser triangle meshes. But we found that we were able to take the best advantage of this power by hand-authoring additional detail rather than relying on dynamic approaches. Again our streaming system comes into play, assuring that the appropriate level of detail is streamed in for the best performance at a distance and the best quality up close.

PC Games Hardware: In Black Ops 3 a lot of particle effects and destruction can be seen. Are you using some form of middleware to render these effects or are you using in-engine-techniques?

Treyarch: For Black Ops 3 we have extensively reworked our in-house effects system from the ground up. Everything from the authoring process to the rendering in game was reconsidered for this project. Our effects pipeline is now much more powerful and streamlined than in previous Black Ops entries, allowing our artists to achieve new levels of quality. In game we use compute shaders to rasterize our particles for improved pixel fill-rate and we make extensive use of our Order Independent Transparency system to allow effects that are much more complex and natural looking than they ever could have been in the old engine. In addition, each particle is individually lit using the same lighting environment that the rest of the geometry makes use of, resulting in correct, physically lit effects that blend perfectly into the scene.

In terms of destruction, we created a brand new animation system for Black Ops 3. The system is fully GPU-based, meaning it can efficiently scale from simple animated tarps or flags to complicated character faces and even to buildings exploding with thousands of moving parts. We can now represent animations at higher quality and on a larger scale than ever before.

PC Games Hardware: Character-rendering also looks more advanced, so does their hair. Could you give us any details?

Treyarch: We have put significant effort into improving hair, eyes, and skin for this project. Character and hair rendering takes advantage of sub-surface scattering, screen-space ray-traced shadows for fine details, and detail normal maps that represent micro-geometry for extreme close ups. Details such as ambient and specular occlusion are baked into the textures and work in combination with the screen space effects. The shader used on eyes is very advanced, taking advantage of these technologies as well as internal light refraction and caustics.

PC Games Hardware: We liked Advanced Warfare's enhanced audio system. Will there also be improvements in that regard in Black Ops 3?

Treyarch: The environmental audio system in Call of Duty: Black Ops III has been completely revamped to give additional depth to the larger and more detailed environments. A completely new reflection and reverberation simulator gives a more cohesive and realistic feel to the soundscape. Using a brand new advanced dynamic beat-matching music system, the game can seamlessly transition between any in-game music depending on gameplay and player actions. Major improvements to gun playback timing give guns a more powerful feel.

PC Games Hardware: Being a PC-magazine, our readers would certainly be interested in pc-exclusive effects, graphical improvements and what types of anti-aliasing they will be able to expect. Can you already tell us about any pc-specific features of Call of Duty: Black Ops 3? Does BO3 feature gameworks effects from Nvidia?
For PC, we put extra effort into performance across the full spectrum of machines, from top-end rigs to entry level PCs.
Treyarch: For anti-aliasing we're using a new implementation we're calling "Filmic SMAA T2x." This sub-pixel morphological anti-aliasing uses corrected, jittered samples over multiple frames in combination with accurate motion vectors rendered per object to produce the best anti-aliasing possible. In order to scale to various hardware configurations we also offer the option of disabling the temporal reliance on previous frames, which is necessary for multi-GPU machines, such as SLI and Crossfire, but still allows them to use SMAA. Anti-aliasing can also be scaled down to FXAA or turned completely off on low-end hardware.

For PC, we put extra effort into performance across the full spectrum of machines, from top-end rigs to entry level PCs. The game will run great in 4K resolutions on top-end hardware, and can be tweaked to have higher resolution shadows and better transparency to match. The game can also be adjusted to run comfortably on older cards like the GeForce 470 or Radeon 6970.

In addition we've tweaked our field of view settings, which can go up to 120 degrees in a 16:9 aspect ratio. In previous Call of Duty games FOV has been displayed relative to a 4:3 aspect ratio, leading to some confusion. Now it is much clearer and allows the range we believe PC gamers desire.

PC Games Hardware: Will Black Ops 3 take advantage of the upcoming low-level-APIs like Direct X 12 or Vulkan?

Treyarch: Black Ops 3 is currently a Direct X 11 game on PC, but our engineers are of course following these advancements and new APIs. We currently have nothing to confirm, but future improvements are always a possibility.

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Call of Duty Black Ops 3 für PC: Exklusives Technik-Interview mit Treyarch Call of Duty Black Ops 3 ist seit 6.11. verfügbar und konnte optisch beeindrucken, wenn auch nicht auf einem Niveau der Frostbite Engine 3, die in Star Wars Battlefront verwendet wird. Umso interessanter sind - auch in Anbetracht der technischen Schwierigkeiten auf dem PC - die Aussagen von Entwickler Treyarch, den PC Games Hardware schon zum Release interviewen konnte.

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