Killzone: Shadow Fall is probably one of the biggest PS4 exclusive titles to have arrived for the new console, and while we wonder how the dev team managed to pull off such impressive game mechanics for the game, a closer look has been offered on the tech involved with the game.
Eurogamer was offered a chance to visit Guerilla Games’ Amsterdam studio just before the launch of Killzone: Shadow Fall where it was revealed that the next generation “isn't just about better graphics and sound,” but also about “the opportunities this new level of power offers to developers.”
"On this project we've tried to move away from lots of work being done by the sound programmer and to a direction where if sound engineers have an idea for how a certain system is supposed to work they should be able to get something like that up and running by themselves," said Shadow Fall's Senior Tech Programmer Andreas Varga.
"Previously sound engineers were the guys who make these wave files, and the sound programmer would put them in the game and make them all work and connect everything together. Now we're moving to a point where everything is state-driven. We can do all of these things in a tool and the actual sound programming now happens at a lower level."
“Everywhere in the game you have materials - walls, rocks, different things - that for geometry purposes are tagged with what material they are," says lead sound designer, Lewis James. "Now in the real world, when you fire a gun, the sound is just a byproduct of what what's happening inside the gun. That's the only part of the actual event that games tend to care about normally - the sound of the shot.”
"But there's all sorts of things happening - a pressure wave that comes out of the gun interacts with the surfaces it touches when it has sufficient force. So that's what we do. It's a system called MADDER - Material Dependent Early Reflections. We bounce the shockwaves of the gun off every surface in the game, all the time. That defines the sound. The point is that there should be no illusion that it's reverb - because it isn't. It's real-time reflections based on geometry," James added.
Killzone: Shadow Fall was released on November 15 as a launch title for the PlayStation 4 in North America. It arrives in the U.K and Europe later this week.
