GRID, DIRT2, Operation Flash Point DR (Codemasters Software Ltd.)
For Codemasters Software limited I acted as Group Lead artist for multiple projects running concurrently. When I joined I started on Operation Flash Point “Dragon Rising” and GRID. There were two other artists there at the time.
GRID already had established tools which worked quite well and my roll here was adding features to the system to enhance the runtime effects. I started by pre-visualising some ideas for smoke, but the real innovations were achieved by iteration and overcoming problems as they arose. We used a low resolution buffer to achieve the full screen smoke. The clever bit was the addition rate of emission graphs tied into wheel slip, spin and angle. This enable the system to spawn particles when traction was lost and control the amount of emission based on speed.
One of the hardest problems for the team was the instant replay feature, which meant that effects had to rewind and forward-wind with no visible glitches. The same pipeline was used for Dirt2. We tried out cube maps for rolling dust which looked pretty good, but they were quite expensive and too dense for the multiple vehicle racing.
GRID
Dirt 2
Operation Flash Point -DR was quite a challenge. There was no pipeline for the Particles and the code team were quite in experienced. We made a few mistakes early on which meant that updates we a real pain to get in. 2-3 Days’ worth of code integration meant that it was quite costly in man hours. We opted for designing a standalone editor which could create effects like a separate software package. These files could then be called by the game. There were pluses and minuses of this option. We could iterate when the game code was broken, but as mentioned before, new features and features meant that the tool code had to be re-done many times.
The cube maps we used in the game added a nice sense of fluid movement and three dimensional lighting, but I think the code was wrong on how they were drawn in the world with some parallax camera issue. I’m not sure I would do this again if I had the choice of animated textures or Cube maps. You could create the a similar effect with an animated smoke texture with a nice lighting solution.
A lot of the effects also had to be optimised quite heavily towards the end of the project. The most expensive effect was 7 milliseconds at its peak. The others averaged at about 3 milliseconds of CPU time.
OFP-DR
