Zombie Studios speaks with AMD on DirectX® 11 and the benefits it’ll lend to the Blacklight Retribution experience when it’s released.

Zombie Studios Speaks With AMD On DirectX® 11

July 6th, 2011
David Doel
Blacklight Retribution, Gaming

As the success of Microsoft DirectX® 11 continues, so does the support for the technology and its features. With recent DirectX 11 games like DiRT 3, Total War: Shogun II, and Dragon Age II; DirectX 11 is entering an entirely new realm of software – free-to-play gaming. With their PC-exclusive free-to-play game, Blacklight Retribution, Zombie Studios and Perfect World are bringing DirectX 11 technology to a new market, showing that you don’t need to be a retail release to push the barrier on visual fidelity. We asked Zombie Studios to chat about their experience working with DirectX 11 and how it’ll benefit the Blacklight Retribution gameplay when it’s released.

Why did Zombie Studios decide to develop for DirectX 11?

When we got the DirectX 11 drop from Epic and saw what they could do with it at the Game Developer Conference, we knew that we had to move in that direction. What was on the table was just too compelling to not use. Especially when you consider that the features that DirectX 11 offers are tools that most developers, who are targeting the consoles, don’t have at their disposal. As a free-to-play PC game, we decided we wanted to really exploit all the tools we had at our disposal, elevate the visuals of free-to-play games specifically and games in general, and as artists we wanted to show off our art is the best possible light. Not to mention it is always a ton of fun to play with new technologies. Either way, we saw what Epic did and we knew we could leverage “Uncle Epic” as I’m calling this great team and make something equally amazing.

What are some of the advantages of DirectX 11?

DirectX 11 offers numerous advantages, most obvious of which is raising the visual fidelity of the game. The best thing that it offers, from my perspective, is the “real time scene-based reflections”. Visually, this adds so much to the game. No longer are you stuck with cube maps reflecting some generic clouds. Rather, it’s dynamic, moves with you, and reflects the actual scene in the level. It is really amazing when you see it in a game. And once you have seen it, everything else looks so much duller. Other benefits that we have been able to really take advantage of include the dynamic mesh tessellation based on normal maps. This is a pretty awesome feature because we can add actual geometry (and therefore see the lighting actually reflect that geometry) whereas before there was just a normal map.

Normal maps also tend to break down at distance, because after all it is just a flat surface. But with the tessellation, it really stands up and looks amazing. And, it comes at practically no cost as it is all handled on the graphics card. Other toys and fun features of DirectX 11 include the Bokeh depth of field which is a fancy post process which is pretty awesome. We just added full screen anti-aliasing based on “morphological anti-aliasing” (MLAA). I can’t tell you how it works, technically, but I can tell you that it makes the game look even better. Beyond that we are still exploring new features and also utilizing all the latest shader instructions, light rays, dynamic lighting effects and more. Needless to say, the game is looking awesome!

Any disadvantages?

As for disadvantages, as it is with any new technology, there are learning curves and possible pipeline adjustments that need to be made. But in this case, those have been minor. The addition of a few additional textures for things like height maps and reflection images has been minor and easily addressed. The biggest disadvantage is that we have some guys on the team who still use DirectX 9 capable graphic cards and they are always complaining that they want a DirectX 11 capable graphics card for all the nifty effects! (I am looking at my producer! What do they need good computers for?!)

What has DirectX 11 allowed you to do, which would have been otherwise impossible?

Everything that I discussed above would have been impossible without DirectX 11. Yeah you could fake something and maybe try and do it on the software side, but the sheer complexity and math involved would kill our game and frame rates. The sheer number of polygons alone that are rendered when you are using tessellation would have been impossible, but since it’s all done in hardware, there is little to no cost. Not to mention the reflections, Bokeh and everything else.

What can players look forward to in Blacklight Retribution with DirectX 11?

The art bar is just so much higher. We are blowing Blacklight Tango Down out of the water visually, and since we are focusing on DirectX 11 and the PC market we are able to just elevate it that much more. Players should expect a more realistic looking and visually impressive and immersive game. To us, DirectX 11 allows us to do that and raise the quality and experience even higher.

We’d like to thank Zombie Studios for their time. By bringing DirectX 11 to Blacklight Retribution they are pushing the idea of what it means to be free-to-play, while utilizing a proven technology for the betterment of the game.

David Doel is on the AMD Gaming Marketing team. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.