Bildmaterial aus Alien Isolation (14) Quelle: SEGA PC Games Hardware Technical Q&A: Alien - Isolation

PCGH #1) With the engine of the Total War series, especially the latest iteration for Rome 2: Total War you have a very powerful as well as modern technical base including a DX11-Render Engine available. Do you reuse the Engine for Alien: Isolation?

- a) If this is the case, what are the necessary modifications to tailor the technology to the requirement of a shooter game instead of a strategy title? Do you have to reprogram engine parts from scratch or could all your goals be reached by alter parts of the code?

- b) Did you buy a license for an engine like UE4 or Cry Engine 3, why do you decide against an in house solution and why is a technology like this so suitable for Alien: Isolation?

Creative Assembly: We created our own, bespoke engine for Alien: Isolation. What this allowed us to do was focus on making the game deliver what it needed to at a time when next-gen was a relative unknown. We knew the quality bar we wanted to achieve, the gameplay features and visual fidelity and set about building an engine which could deliver the focus in those areas.

PCGH # 2) Do you share the opinion that in comparison to the next gen consoles the PC is still the most powerful platform as far as your games visuals and other technical aspects are concerned? If so where does the PC still shine, in other words what are the technologies in your Engine where the PC performs best? Additionally what are the visual features that you like to point out and what is the technology behind them, for example tessellation?

PCGH # 3) Can you list the visual differences between the PC Version and the one for the next gen consoles? Will this mainly concern Shadow Resolution, AA and Multi Monitoring or are there even render technologies that can only be applied in the PC version of Alien: because of the PC's superior (GPU-) performance?

Creative Assembly: (2 and 3) Different platforms afford different advantages. Modern PCs with high-spec graphics cards cannot be beaten for shear raw power. What this translates into are higher resolutions and frame rates, which are always good. Also we can afford to scale assets (geometric, textural, animation, etc.) to take advantage of the extra fidelity. With higher resolution and more raw power available tessellation can occur earlier. Shadow algorithms can also be more realistic. Many full screen effects can be refined due to the available power, for example ambient occlusion, anti-aliasing techniques, motion blur and depth of field and high resolution multi-monitor support can only be achieved by utilizing the GPU power available on the modern PC platform. We're also looking at support for 4k resolution for the best fidelity possible.

PCGH #4) With the release of Xbox One and PS4 that base on an AMD eight core CPUs developers of Cross Platform games are in a way forced to optimize the code for multithreading. Have you as a consequence of this optimized the code of Alien: Isolation heavily for multicore CPUs too? If so, up to how many CPU core could be used efficiently by your base technology? Can you confirm "the more cores are available the better the performance" What are the engine's main features that profit from multicore CPUs the most? How does the general thread structure of your game look like?

Creative Assembly: Our engine scales very well with multiple cores. Certainly I can confirm that more cores will increase the performance, if you don't get limited by GPU performance! We have a generalized job system with priorities and dependencies. All of our code uses this. This means, for instance, that if an AI routine can run simultaneously alongside a rendering routine then it 'just will' if the opportunity arises.

PCGH # 5) Will your game offer support for AMDs Mantel-API? If you have decided to utilize the AMD API what are the main advantages from a developers point view? How difficult and time consuming has it been to integrate such fundamentally different technology into a renderer? How much performance gain can we expect by applying this technology? Can you already give precise results?

Creative Assembly: We are considering Mantle at the moment. It looks really interesting.

PCGH # 6) Will you utilize Nvidia's PhysX Engine or have you integrated you own solution/Havok/ODE, etc.? If PhysX is applied will you even support GPU accelerated physics including the APEX modules? If physic is calculated by CPU only what different features will this be? Do your physics modules even profit from multithreading?

Creative Assembly: We don't use PhysX but our physics solution is highly multi-threaded. Many of the 'scalable' GPU style physics behaviors are also do-able as particle effects which use the G buffer to compute physical interactions with the world.

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