Originally Posted by
Prof
I think, this is better than what the Google translator would do.
English is not my native language so please forgive me for mistakes, I might have made.
According to the Creative Assembly, Rome 2 shall surpass its predecessors in size and visual greatness. As the technical leader Charli Dell and the leading graphics programmer Richard Gardner tell us, the english experts for strategy continue relying completely on modern PC-technology.
When the Creative Assembly announces a new Total War, strategists can not only expect new gameplay features, but also improvements in the presentation, historical battles, especially the graphics, physics, map size and number of combatants. To satisfy the high expectations of the fans, the developers are combining, for the first time in the series, land- and sea battles and introduces a Unit Cam for the observation of the battles on the ground. The selfmade cutting-edge engine uses the potential of the platform PC consequently, including DX11 and multicore support. The programmers Richard Gardner and Charlie Dell explain to us the technical changes necessary for the new features of Rome 2.
Total War Rome 2: New Features, new technology
To realize the combination of the massive battles on land and sea, Charlie Dell and his engine-programmers had to find an entirely new solution. Before the development of Rome 2 started, according to leading technician Charlie Dell, there was an own system for land and naval battles, including an own set of code for each. Those are being combined with eachother now, so we can work with one code-basis for the battle engine. This allows, Dell continues, to add beach landings to the battle scenarios. For the Unit Cam, another new feature of Rome 2, it was not necessary to rewrite the renderer according to Graphics-programmer Richard Gardner. Still they wanted to encourage the strategists to use the Unit Cam. This is why his Team is working even harder to make the closeups from the battle, especially the animations, optical sophisticated and more credible than in Shogun2, reports Gardner.
Total War Rome 2: Much work for the graphics chip
One area that makes the performance of the Graphics Card an important factor is the quality of the animations. Creative Assembly emphasizes these especially and according to Richard Gardner the same system calculated by the GPU and based on Vertex Texture Fetch that has already been used in Fall of the Samurai will be used again, where all Key-Frames of the animation are saved in a dynamic texture. Still they have added the support for cinematic meshed, where 4 bones can influence one single vertex. Furthermore the developers promise additional DX11 features. Richard Gardner only said that there would be improvements in the field of DX10 Texture Arrays and that DX11 Compute Shaders will be used to improve and expedite the HDR-rendering and the FFT Ocean rendering and that DX11 tesselation will be used to improve the geometry, for example for the depiction of water and the terrain.
Total War Rome 2: Multicore optimization and scalability
Of course, we asked the two developers for a statement about our observation that the Total War-engine does not use four cores consequently. Charlie Dell answered that the technology behind Rome 2 would actually depend on the GPU most of the time. Yet we try, Dell says, to distribute the CPU-performance available because of this on the cores not working on full capacity. The developer praises (perhaps not the best word) the sclability of the Engine. It is their aim to make the game as pleasing to a gamer with a high-end machine as it would be to a gamer with a low-end PC.
Here they focus mostly on LOD-techniques.
Exclusive info from technical director Charlie Dell and senior graphics programmer Richard Gardner
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