00:10I'm John Carlo Feltrin, Audio Director at Precursor Games, and I'm Sean Thompson, Technical Director at Precursor Games.
00:17And today we're going to present you a walkthrough of Shadow of the Eternals, and give you a behind-the
00:24-scenes look at how we utilize the CryEngine 3 on a technical level,
00:29and achieve what you see and hear in the demo.
00:32Hope you enjoy it.
00:35So here we are inside the CryEngine 3 Editor, and this is the software in which we create the world
00:43of the game.
00:44Right, so what we're going to look at here is we're going to look at some visual aspects.
00:49Geo talked about some audio.
00:50We can see, you know, there's lots of little markers in the game,
00:56and so you can tell that this is the editor that we're playing in.
01:00And we're still able to interact, even though we have a fairly large area, you know, visible.
01:05One of the things we really like about CryEngine is it is highly optimized.
01:11You're also seeing the amazing weather system going on in this engine, which is built in directly into CryEngine 3.
01:19You're seeing the thunderstorm, which is really adding to the atmosphere of this level.
01:26From an audio standpoint, I am attaching what are called sound actors to each time a lightning hits,
01:34and it's drawing from a sound bank, a randomized container of thunder sounds,
01:40inside an audio middleware tool called FMOD.
01:44And what FMOD does is sort of bridge the gap between sound designer and the audio programmer.
01:50And speaking of the tools that we're using, one of the big things with CryEngine was it is mostly a
01:56self-staining package.
01:57There's really not a lot of middleware.
01:59FMOD and Scaleform are the only two extras that are supported, and they do a very specific job.
02:06So we really, really like that.
02:09We have a bunch of different things we can show here.
02:13One thing that CryEngine does really well is our physics.
02:15We can kind of look here, and we can see our tapestries.
02:19Right?
02:19There's a slight sway to them.
02:21We've got some physics in them right now.
02:25Our chandeliers as well.
02:27You can see there's some swinging.
02:28And these are, this was mainly us playing with some of their systems, evaluating them,
02:34getting a feel for how they can work to add those little subtleties to the level that other big things.
02:40And this is something that the team over at CryTech does better than anyone, is really the visuals.
02:47This whole level is dynamically lit.
02:50There's no baking going on whatsoever.
02:52So when we look at some of the lights around here, right?
02:55You know, we've got lights coming off the torches.
02:57They're flickering.
02:59All right.
02:59So we're able to animate the lights.
03:01That's a really nice feature.
03:02One of the things that, if we look on the ground, we see the stained glass coming through on the
03:09windows.
03:09Yeah.
03:10So one of the things that we had to add to the CryEngine is a new third-person camera system.
03:17Because that's something that's going to be very specific to our game and the way we do things.
03:21Out of the box, you know, we had a basic orbit camera.
03:25And while that's great, it's good for player control.
03:29With Shadow of the Eternals, we want a variety of environments.
03:34So a couple of the design goals that we had were always keep the player in control.
03:39So you can see as he walks up the stairs or transitions that the camera control changes.
03:44But the player is still able to look around.
03:47Now, for an area like the staircase, where it's such a narrow environment,
03:52we didn't want to give the player an orbit camera because you run into all sorts of issues with collisions
03:59with the walls
04:00and not being able to see.
04:02Whereas we want the player to be presented with the exact view that they need
04:07while still maintaining some control of what they want to look at.
04:10Here we're back into our free orbiting camera.
04:14And there is no cut.
04:16In cases where we need to cut, we will.
04:19But we're trying to keep it as seamless as possible.
04:22Keep player control, but at the same time,
04:25use the camera to influence both the mood of the game
04:31and to tell the player visual clues.
04:37Yeah, you'll notice as we were going upstairs into the study
04:40that the monk chanting music track became more muffled and muted.
04:46So when you're at the top of the cathedral,
04:48you don't really hear it as much as you did as when you were in the apps.
04:52And that is, I don't expect everybody to really notice that thing,
04:56but subconsciously it really adds to the immersion, that interactivity with audio.
05:01And that is done with FMOD, and possibilities with FMOD are endless.
05:06What it does, it allows the sound designer to set parameters for the game engine to read.
05:13And these parameters can be anything, such as the state that the player is in,
05:17or how many enemies are in the room during an action sequence.
05:22And, you know, a lot of people might think that as a sound designer,
05:26we were moving faders to mix the game.
05:30But no, what's really happening is the game engine is reading those parameters
05:34and essentially mixing itself.
05:37Because the game is going to be different every time you play it.
05:40It has to be on the fly, adapting to what the player is doing.
05:44And FMOD really allows, is very intuitive in doing that.
05:48With the visuals, you know, we are able to, out of the box,
05:52just drop assets in and start applying materials and shaders
05:57and have them already fully optimized
05:59with the great suite of options that exist in CryEngine's Material Editor.
06:05But at the same time, when we do want a very particular effect,
06:09we are able to extend that.
06:10A good example of this is the windows in the study.
06:14If we go over and have a look at the windows,
06:16you can see this is a custom shader written by us,
06:19put into the CryEngine.
06:21We've got some motion on the trees in the background.
06:24We've got water droplets.
06:26And we've got some slight reflection in there.
06:29All these things we were able to combine
06:30and basically just build on what CryEngine already had.
06:35Yeah, you'll notice when you go to the windows too
06:37that you can hear the rain getting louder,
06:39the spatter on the windows.
06:40And that's another result of FMOD's interactive audio system.
06:45What you do is you draw volumes near these windows.
06:48And then as you get closer to them,
06:50the radius tells the engine to how loud to play the rainfall.
06:58One of the things that CryEngine really gives us and is a big advantage is
07:03this runs from DirectX 9 all the way up through DirectX 11.
07:09So we feel that we're prepared for either the current generation or the next generation.
07:14A lot of the features that we've shown are implemented in DirectX 11
07:19and are using techniques that will be commonplace on the Xbox One,
07:25on the PS4, and already commonplace on a lot of the PCs.
07:29So, you know, we feel very good from that standpoint
07:33that we're going to be able to support a very wide range of configurations,
07:37whether they be consoles, whether they be PCs,
07:41and make gamers happy with the performance and the look of the game they play,
07:48no matter what platform they're playing on.
07:51So one thing that Kevin Gordon brought up in his talk,
07:54but we want to go into a little bit deeper,
07:57is we have tessellation and displacement.
07:59So if we look at the walls here,
08:01you can see that the bricks are popping out,
08:04and, you know, it's got a really nice effect.
08:07If we go into wireframe mode, right,
08:09you can see that the walls are done with two different mechanisms.
08:14One's highly tessellated.
08:16So we've turned on tessellation
08:17and allowed the displacement to actually move the bricks around.
08:20The other one is a technique that the guys over at Crytek have come up with,
08:27which is called parallax occlusion mapping,
08:30which gives that same effect,
08:32but the nice thing is we don't lose the original silhouette.
08:37So we can see displacement going on,
08:39but we won't get the cracks in the geometry.
08:42So we're able to pick and choose
08:45which of these techniques is most appropriate
08:49for the geometry involved,
08:52and both of them perform very well.
08:56We've done a lot of tests with both,
08:57and we're really happy with the results.
09:01Well, thanks, everybody, for listening.
09:02We hope you enjoyed it,
09:03and we look forward to showing you more in the future.
09:05All right, and if you have any questions,
09:08email us or ask us on the forums.
09:11Thank you.
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