The next generation is really not too far away, and with recent demonstrations of both Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4, it seems like the new age is already here. Both the consoles have been receiving a lot of details in the previous months, and now there’s even more.
Recently, Gamingbolt spoke to Interactive Data Visualization's (IDV, which developed SpeedTree) Director of Business Development, Kevin Meredith, who discussed the next generation consoles and how the included RAM in both the consoles will help generate realistic gameplay features.
“Any improvement in console hardware can result in better real-time rendering, but every SpeedTree customer makes their own decision about how to best utilize SpeedTree in their unique game. In general, though, the kinds of vegetation effects enabled by improved hardware include more photo-real, higher-poly trees, more convincing LOD transitions, better wind and lighting and, occasionally, dynamic destruction and other physics effects.” Meredith stated.
Meredith also utilized the opportunity to talk about the potential of Cloud computing within next gen consoles and PC for SpeedTree: “Out of the box, SpeedTree doesn’t have anything that will directly take advantage of cloud computing. This isn’t to say that SpeedTree clients can’t marry the two in their integration. Streaming procedural forest population for very large worlds comes to mind.”
When questioned as to what IDV implements “to differentiate between foliage seen in sequels for the same franchise,” Meredith stated: “Our favorite example is the first Witcher game, by CD Projekt, which came out in 2007 and made outstanding use of SpeedTree version 4, with lots of dark and foreboding forests of procedural trees. But for Witcher 2, CD Projekt got to use SpeedTree v5, a major rewrite of the software that enabled hand-drawing of trees and individual branch placement and editing."
“As you’ll see if you play Witcher 2, they made great use of the new features, for example with branches carefully placed so that the monsters could actually climb down them convincingly to attack the hero,” he added.
For those who are not aware about SpeedTree, alongside its use in current generation titles, the IDV-based virtual foliage suite has also been used to generate CG effects for films like "Life of Pi," "Avatar," "Iron Man 3," and more.
