Saturday, December 17, 2005

[game] Oblivion

I've been watching Oblivion videos. As a big fan of Daggerfall and Morrowind, I was already impatient to play this game but now .... I just can't wait!

The rendering looks great, with tons of parallax mapping, bumps, and very detailed textures. I was also quite impressed by the forest, which appears to be generated procedurally. It reminded me of the work of Thomas DiGiacomo on forest rendering, even though I don't know if Oblivion uses a similar approach.

Most of the game dungeons and environments are handcrafted (apart from the procedural forests), and I can't help thinking that synthesis methods could help the artists a great deal here. That has always been one of my researcher's dreams: automatic generation of huge realistic environment, but still driven by artist created content. I hope we'll be there one day: Imagine the games these guys at Bethesda could do with such tools!!

Anyway, that's going to be an amazing game!

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