For the last eight months we’ve been working on a new graphics technology that will represent a fundamental advance over any visualisation engine currently in development. For the uninitiated, here’s a quick and simple explanation of what a graphics engine does (apologies to those of you who already know). Depending on the level of detail you want, each model in a scene will be made from anything between a few dozen polygons to a few thousand. A tree for example would probably be constructed with a hundred polys because it’s relatively unimportant. A character in a PlayStation game on the other hand might be made up of 450 polys. Every time the view in a game changes, the computer has to draw each of these polygons. The more polygons there are to draw, the slower the redrawing process is. This is called the frame rate. So when your computer chugs like a dog when running Q3 Test, it’s because it’s trying to draw too many polygons per frame. In order to keep the game going at a reasonable speed developers have had to limit the amount of detail in their games. We’re about to change this forever.

Ceri, our new artist started a couple of weeks ago. On his first morning I took him through our game. At the end of it, I asked him "how do you fancy working with an infinite polygon engine?" He almost fell off his chair. Next I showed him a tree, which was made of a million and a half polygons. The detail is incredible, right down to the moss growing in the cracks in the bark. I had to help him to his desk. For a games artist, this is a dream come true. Before now, programmers have always told artists "you can only have 200 polygons to make that car with." Now we’re saying to them "give us more polygons, as many as you can handle." This has caused problems though – the professional art package we use on monster PCs simply can’t handle some of the larger models we’re making.

How will technology like this affect gameplay? Simply put, it allows designers to create a world more believable than any that’s ever been made before. Photorealism isn’t just a fantasy any more, it’s a stone’s throw away from becoming reality. There is no limit to the detail we can place in our game. There are no restraints on how objects are modelled. Players might see a forest in which there are a countless high-poly trees stretching to the horizon. This can only make a game more believable. A game that’s more believable is more likely to draw you in, making it more enjoyable. Developers are on the verge of creating games that are the equal of films in terms of their atmosphere. How can this fail to improve the gaming experience?