A green lego brick, yesterday.
We have a big tub of LEGO in the office which we break out for brainstorms. Playing with it relaxes everyone into a creative state of mind, and maybe helps us to tap into our inner child, who knows a lot of wild and crazy ideas that our outer adult might otherwise stifle.
We’ve built some pretty cool towers in the office, and I’ve toured a LEGO recreation of the world in Windsor. But one of the most amazing LEGO constructions I’ve seen has been the reinvention of the brand. Today, it’s associated with a range of hit computer games, including LEGO Universe, a massively multiplayer online game. Designing it presented some unique creative challenges, not least because the audience of children (eight years old and above) typically use hand-me-down computers which aren’t as high spec as today’s modern gaming hardware. The computers running the game could be up to five years old, which is pretty creaky given the game’s aesthetic demands, or might be low-cost netbooks.
Erik Urdang, technical director at the game’s developer NetDevil, said that while most people think it must be easy to render a universe made up of blocks, it’s actually pretty hard. “They have to look like real LEGO bricks,” he said. “Shaders have to be precise; the bricks have to look like ABS plastic with the right kind of polish on them. Additionally, the bricks have little cylinders on top, and those have to look round. In order to get them to look right we need a fairly high-count polygon model.”
Players can create structures in the game which persist there, which complicates the rendering process. The player’s freedom means that there are infinite paths through the game, which is why technical testing is essential. NetDevil’s tool of choice is Intel Graphics Performance Analyzers (GPA).
Urdang said: “ [Intel] GPA metrics showed one of the smoke effects in the game was using 14.2 percent of the scene budget. We disabled just a small amount of smoke and got back a14-percent increase in frames per second. In another case, we found 21.9 percent of drawing time was being consumed by the way we were handling terrain and rendering a couple of wall pieces. Once identified, issues like these are relatively simple to optimize. [Intel] GPA has been a huge help for us, finding things like that quickly. It reduces iteration time dramatically. If you’re just poking around, randomly testing things, it takes forever because you can’t optimize what you can’t measure.”
Find out more about how the LEGO Universe is built by reading the full story here (PDF).
You can download Graphics Performance Analyzers for free here, and learn more about Graphics Performance Analyzers 4.0 in our interview with Leigh Davies from shortly after its launch.
Filed under: Game development Tagged: | game development, Graphics Performance Analyzers
