New 1up Preview: Splinter Cell Chaos Theory!

**XboxGamers** · 12-04-2004

Damn! I can't wait for this one!

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Perhaps the most scrutinized aspect of any game is its visuals, so naturally the creation of the graphics engine provided difficulty for the team as well. Because of the ambitions behind the project, a group including Lepage spent roughly eight months from March to November of 2003 working just on the technology, before a lot of the game production got underway. "When you look at the previous engine...in terms of classic lighting, I would say it was pretty much one of the best," he says. "But that's not good enough today, because people are doing per pixel lighting now.

They are starting to have shaders, normal mapping -- so it was really time to put that behind and make sure we were able to come in on something that was really above what's on the market...Splinter Cell 1 was pretty good, but look at a wall [in that game]. It looks like some kind of paper or something, but it doesn't really look that great. We don't get the feeling that the lighting from [the other side of the room] is lighting every brick.

Some of the key techniques used by the team are ways to make objects that don't appear the same when under different circumstances. If it's raining, the ground will change colors and then water will start to build up. If the ground is dirty and a janitor comes along with a mop, the dirt will go away. These effects are courtesy of the team's Material Transition System and a technique called Procedural Texturing.

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