Activisions Next Gen Engine

Activision has released screenshots & a demo of the latest game engine they are working on that has the tech community saying “is it real?”. The screenshots looks so realistic, it’s hard to believe that they are computer generated graphics.

The rendering was presented by Jorge Jimenez of the video game company Activision Blizzard during the 2013 Game Developers Conference on Wednesday. I no expert, but it seems we’ve crossed some kind of threshold in animation, where what’s real and animated is close to impossible to tell apart.

The trick for these gaming developers is not only to create photorealistic animated characters, but to ensure that such animations can play in real time on video cards and computers that ordinary people actually own. And that’s what Activision has done, using standard bone animation, facial scanning, performance capture and lots of intricate artwork to make skin look real.

Jimenez wrote in his blog about how this type of animation has made tremendous progress. “We believe this technology will bring current-generation characters into next-generation life.” Like baseball great Babe Ruth pointing at the center-field fence, before his presentation Jimenez declared this animation would be rendered live, and “we will show it running on our two-year-old laptop.”

It’s hard to believe that this kind of quality can be rendered live on current gen consoles; PC’s yes, the GPU & CPU power that we now possess is definitely able to run and render such graphics live, but current gen and even next gen (if the leaked specs don’t change on the PS3) will struggle processing these graphics.

This gives me hope for the new Call of Duty game. Frankly the heavily modified iD Tech 3 (same used in Quake 3 & COD 2) engine is looking very dated.

Watch the live demo from the 2013 GDC below:

Those crows feet just take the cake. What do you think of the engine? Could this be the future of gaming? Comment below.

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