Shark 3D Engine Interview

Shark 3D Engine - Exclusive Interview

This week, we focus on the Shark 3D engine, which is a multi-versatile development platform for realtime 3d applications such as console and computer games, broadcasting applications, and many others. Dreamfall: The longest Journey, by Funcom and Dreamcatcher Interactive, is the latest adventure game to hit the market using Spinor's Shark 3D engine. Tim Storck, Folker Schamel, and some members from the Spinor development team helped VGCore in answering our questions about the Shark 3D engine. Check it out below.

XboxCore: Shark 3D is amazingly versatile: Broadcasting, special event demonstrations, and gaming--to name a few. Was it originally designed to fit so many different multimedia purposes?

Spinor: Shark 3D was designed from the beginning to be open and flexible, but originally only with high-end games in mind.

We were then approached by companies outside the gaming industry. The first company using Shark 3D in the non-games area was a broadcasting company that reached limitations with classical broadcasting software. The company has been looking explicitly for game engine technology. After having looked at the various middleware products from the game area, they decided for Shark 3D, last but not least, because of the open architecture. So, historically it was somewhat of a coincidence.

Today, non-games applications have grown to an important area for Spinor. Our experience is that the different areas of applications are very fruitful to each other: Non-game areas get benefits from the innovations that already benefit the gaming area. Moreover, different areas of applications help to keep the software architecture open and modular, which is also very useful for the gaming industry.

XboxCore: Is Spinor considering branching Shark 3D out into the realm of movies?

Spinor:Yes, we regard this to be a very interesting area and we are looking forward to explore the growing opportunities there.

Just recently, we had the chance to look at a customer's short movie featuring real actors inside a computer generated version of the Dome of Aachen in Germany, rendered in real-time by Shark 3D. The quality was quite good and some people were puzzled to hear the scene wasn't real.

XboxCore: From the documentation, it appears as if the Shark 3D was designed for developers of varying skills. Is it a tool that caters toward the experienced, or those who are just starting off in the industry?

Spinor: In the games area, the experienced teams will surely get the most out of Shark 3D. There are many functionalities and features the experienced user will find useful and the unexperienced user probably will only use when advancing to a more experienced level.

On the other hand, Shark 3D provides a lot of user interfaces and scripting functionalities, which can be easily used. For example, in the areas of broadcasting and simulation, several projects based on Shark 3D were implemented purely on scripting level. Furthermore, Shark 3D also offers several easy-to-use C++ interfaces.

XboxCore: In some games, there was the common experience with a graphical glitch consisting of floating shadows. The Shark 3D features the real-time area lights that give developers some great lighting tools to work with. Does this mean that developers no longer have to worry about the floating shadow glitches because it's all handled in the Shark 3D?

Spinor: Yes.

We experimented with several soft-shadowing techniques. The current area lights represent a good symbiosis of quality and performance. They are not mathematically precise, because a mathematically precise approach would not be fast enough for high-performance games. Instead, they use some nice cheats we found after some research. In fact, in several situations they are even faster than classical, simpler soft shadows. So we are very happy with them.

However, it is important to note that in principle there does not exist the single right technique for every situation. Because of this, we designed the Shark 3D in such a way that it is open for different advanced lighting and shadowing techniques. This is not only useful for our customers, but also for ourselves; to be able to easily experiment with various techniques without having to re-write the rendering kernel all the time.

XboxCore: Self-shadowing is almost a common standard for this generation of gaming. Are there any other shadow effects we can expect to see in the near-future of game engine development?

Spinor: Soft shadowing techniques are already becoming more common in games, though still of the relatively simple kind. This area seems to be far from being fully exploited.

We think that in the near future high-performance and good-looking full-scene soft lighting in dynamic environments is important. Dynamic environments are getting ever more important due to increasingly sophisticated usage of physics. The area lights in Shark 3D are part of the answer to this trend.

XboxCore: Bump and normal mapping is currently being used on a number of Xbox games. With the Shark 3D supporting <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_mapping”>parallax</a> mapping, is this a mapping feature the normal Xbox hardware can run?

Spinor: Yes, without problems. The Shark 3D based "Dreamfall" on Xbox uses parallax mapping. Shark 3D supports parallax mapping out of the box.

XboxCore: Following up on that question, will the Shark 3D be supporting displacement mapping any time soon?

Spinor: We are experimenting with this, and Shark 3D has been supporting, for example, texture access in the vertex programs for some time now. But currently we do not provide displacement mapping in Shark 3D out of the box.

The main problem is that the current subdivision techniques supported by the hardware are too restrictive (e.g. regarding edge handling and good subdivision of surfaces that have no intrinsic curvature). Some time ago we had a powerful smart software based tesselator, but of course this is too slow for today's consoles and PC.

We will continue experimenting with such things, but the hardware will probably have to provide better support for this, for example smart geometry shaders.

XboxCore: With the shader animation feature, does this change the amount of processing or hardware capabilities a system needs to run this in a realtime environment, as opposed to just using custom shader options?

Spinor: It does not need additional hardware capabilities, except for some slightly longer vertex and pixel programs, and the processing power overhead is negligible.

This feature is primarily related to the architecture of the shader system. The design allows it to support both static and dynamic parameters, and allows that dynamic parameters can come from different sources. For example, the animation may also be controlled by a script, where, of course, the script is not activated for every frame.

XboxCore: PVS (potentially visible sets) makes a lot of sense. For those who don't know, this method conserves on processing power by only processing what is potentially visible during runtime. Was this one of the main reasons Dreamfall, for the Xbox, was able to scale through certain scenes and sets with such highly detailed objects without slowdown?

Spinor: Yes, definitely.

It should be added, however, that Shark 3D is not a BSP - or PVS-based engine. PVS is just a separate module you can use if you want. The engine architecture itself is fundamentally different from, for example, the BSP-based engines.

XboxCore: Even with the Xbox 360's power and massive hardware functionality, is PVS still something that plays a large performance role in rendering environments and sets for the Xbox 360?

Spinor: For every large scene you need visibility management. Otherwise you waste performance for non-visible parts, which you could use for better quality of the visible parts. We think this argument will be practically independent from the specific hardware performance for the foreseeable future.

We also implemented real-time hardware visibility culling based on asynchronous occlusion queries. Within the European GameTools Project, currently a university is also doing a different implementation of hardware based visibility algorithms for Shark 3D. Our experience with occlusion query based techniques is that while it gives you a performance advantage in simple scenes, in complex scenes often the extra cost outdoes the win. PVS involves slightly more setup by the designer, but typically it is more robust at runtime regarding the frame rate. So we think that in practice, PVS is the right choice for many situations.

XboxCore: With the collision and friction sound feature, does it make it easier for developers to simply attach a sound to a collision event without having to separately work on each event exclusively?

Spinor: Yes, definitely.

Physics has the advantage that it works self-contained, and this should also include the sound caused by physics.

XboxCore: Has the Spinor team considered adding support for the Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation 3?

Spinor: Yes, we do, but it's not available yet.

Article By: VGcore Staff