At the E3 2009 in Los Angeles Splash Damage announced their new action game Brink. The information that has been revealed up to now is quite interesting and the first screenshots make gamers hungry for more. Now PC Games Hardware had a chance to interview Splash Damage's Technical Director, Arnout van Meer, who had already had this position during the development of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. As usual our questions focused on the technical aspects of the game and the engine which it is based on. Currently a more exact release date than Spring 2010 is not available, but the available Brink footage is worth-seeing.
PCGH: Did you develop your own engine for BRINK or did you license a technology? What were the reasons for developing your own technology/using middleware? What are the advantages when utilizing your own technology/a commercial product? Arnout: BRINK's technology started out as the version of id Tech 4 developed by us for Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars. We've since upgraded major parts of the technology and it now runs on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 from the same codebase and tries to share as many assets as possible between those platforms. As part of this process, the renderer has been revamped to be friendlier for consoles and modern graphics cards. Multi-threading is also more important, both for the asymmetric architecture of the PS3 as well as for the more symmetrical PC and Xbox 360. We are parallelising more and more areas of our code to try and utilise all the available hardware resources.
Aside from the core technology, an entirely new toolset with tighter integration into the engine was written to aid development. It contains heavily updated versions of tools people might be familiar with, such as our level editor EditWorld, as well as entirely new animation and scripting functionality.
There are many benefits on staying with already familiar technology. Being able to start on day one without re-training people is a big plus. The engine has also proven itself by being used in several shipped games, with the added bonus of us knowing exactly what its strengths and weaknesses are. Read on..............
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