The future’s uncertain on the fate of Milo and Kate, the Kinect tech demo that wowed pretty much everyone at E3 in 2009. We don’t really know if we’ll ever see it realised as a game, and it seems nobody at Microsoft or Lionhead seems to know either. What we do know is that the engine that was to power the game is pretty incredible looking.
Ben Sugden, lead programmer at Lionhead Studios flaunted the technology at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference, saying their aim was to “render a world seen through the eyes of a young boy,” and by Jove, it looks like they succeeded.
“We decided the world needed to have a hand sculpted feel but have the softness and subtlety of realistic lighting,” Sugden explained.”We really wanted to try to make the world to appear be a coherent, single whole, like one huge painting or sculpture.”
“One thing in particular that we wanted to try to avoid were hard polygon edges when objects are obviously placed onto of other objects, or when two objects are intersecting rather than nestling together naturally,” Sugden explains. “These obvious sharp edges give a very unnatural interface between two surfaces, and break the illusion of the world being real…”
The accompanying video shows the softness of the generated world Milo would be a part of. It’s not perfect; there’s still obvious geometry to behold, but it does look pretty incredible.
Source : Kotaku
Last Updated: March 22, 2011
