James? Is that you?

October 30, 2009

Like I implied last week, there are a lot of people who work on games that you just never hear from. Mark Simmons has referred several times in interviews to James Sharman, and his leet programming skills. But what’s the real story behind rumors of cool snow and shadow technology? I felt we owed it to you, the gamers, to find out who this James Sharman is. Who better to tell us than the source?

Hi, I’m James Sharman, I’m the Technical Lead Programmer on Shattered Memories working for Climax Studios Ltd. I’m responsible for most of the custom rendering and effects code you’ll see in Shattered Memories.

With my focus on technology, the Silent hill Franchise has always been associated with the cutting edge on whatever platform it has come to. More than anything else the lighting and fog effects on the previous titles had stood out, so I have to admit to feeling a little nervous when I was first given the job of programming the flashlight and fog effects for Origins.

From a programming perspective a project like Shattered Memories involves the creative team locking themselves away and coming up with cool design ideas that leave the coders scratching their heads about how to deliver them. So before Mark assigns me any more bugs I’ll try and tell you about a few of the things that our long days and weekends will bring you.

The Nintendo Wii gave us a bit more room to maneuver with the lighting engine than we had on Origins, as well as enabling some nice self shadowing on the characters I was able to add a separate mechanic for casting shadows from semi transparent objects. If you’ve been reading the various interviews you’ll know one of the uses this has been put to is allowing individual snow flakes to cast shadows, but more significantly it gives us a better means to cast shadows from hair and other objects that make heavy use of transparency. There is one particular cut-scene where you see a very nice shadow of Harry’s glasses onto his face which I was particularly pleased with.

Once of the biggest and most challenging changes we made to the technology we carried over from Origins was adding streaming. In Shattered Memories the entire world is streamed so you see thru doors rather than teleporting from one room to the next when you touch the door handle. Of course the enemies can follow you as well, in Origins getting to the door made you safe with the nasties safely locked on the other side, now there is no safety. Just about every piece of our core technology had to be changed in some way to make this possible.

One of the more interesting decisions that came out of the design process was the icy setting. After Origins it was a bit of a change working out how to get our code doing some nice snow, ice and real-time transition effects, you’ve probably seen videos of the first transition effect but they don’t do it justice until you see it happening around you as you control your character. The effect code always ends up as a bit of back and forth with the content team as I try and work our the right techniques to let them achieve what they want. With some of the effects like the normal-mapped refractive ice the special effects artists really took to and used far more than I initially expected, if you look closely in the first cut scene with Dr K you can even see it used on the ice cubes he drops into his glass.

I’ve felt privileged to work on this title with a really great team; we’re all hoping you like what we’ve done.

-James

source: SHSM Blog – James? Is that you? | 10/30/2009