Y2K , new millennia


The new millennia introduced two important video consoles: Sega Dreamcast and Sony PlayStation 2. The former was released with a game based on water scenes: Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future, released in 2000. The video game repeatedly moves between from below the ocean to the surface, bringing water to life by creating marvelous fog, caustics, and textures. In this period, new games appeared with revolutionary methods to render liquid.

The PlayStation 2 features two key components that allowed developers to maximize its aims. The first was an Emotion Engine, which pairs two vector processing units, VU0 and VU1. This system is complex and offers the possibility for the water to simulate a reaction to external elements. The formal representation of this phenomenon is represented with reflective ripple deformations. The second principal component is the Graphic Synthesizer (GS), which handles the rasterizing of an input stream of primitives. The PlayStation 2’s Graphics Synthesizer supports points (dots), triangles, strips, fans, lines and poly-line and decals (sprites). It has a dedicated 4MB of DRAM for storing frame buffers, Z-buffer and textures, making the Graphic Synthesizer fast at setting up polygons and filling rate operations.

In 2001, Snowblind Studios developed Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, an action role-playing video game that is a technical masterpiece. It features a 60-frame-per-second rate and an extraordinarily complex geometry setup. It pushes the image quality of the PlayStation 2 to its maximum capabilities. Thanks to the Vector Units, the PlayStation 2 was suited to smooth rippling of water surfaces, and Dark Alliance displayed it consistently. In the video game, every object interacts with other surfaces, creating ripples while moving through the water, creating dramatic effects that are processed mainly by the dedicated graphics processors.

In 2001, Nintendo introduced the GameCube, and Microsoft the Xbox, opening new horizons in video consoles. While the Xbox was a personal computer turned game console, and its most notable innovation was the programmable shaders, the Nintendo Game Cube is considered the best-engineered console of all time. While searching for a chip that was low cost to manufacture and able to fit in a tiny enclosure, Nintendo contracted IBM to produce the CPUs for the GameCube based on their PowerPC 750CXe processor, codenamed as Gekko. Even though the Gekko was a very powerful chip, it was chosen by Nintendo due to its manufacturing cost and the capability to fit in the small case. Its floating point pipeline is seven stages long, which is the most essential characteristic of gaming performance.

Recalling the launch of Nintendo 64, the release of Game Cube was accompanied by Wave Race: Blue Storm, a sequel of the Jetski game from 1996. The game featured a full scene reflection developed by taking advance of an embedded frame buffer trick. The input image of what is rendered in 3D is in the principal frame buffer and is sent to the external frame buffer. The reflections are made by flipping the input image from the first buffer without the need of extra geometry. Wave Race is a pioneer in its use of an intermedia buffer and manipulation of content to render its scenes.

Another video game deserving of a closer look because of its techniques for representing water is Super Mario Sunshine, developed by Nintendo for the GameCube. The main element to discuss is the creative use of MIP maps to create the illusion of sparkling water. The design is started by using a pair of textures that scroll one over another creating an illusion. The textures are precomputed to reduce pixel reads on the GPU while reducing texture aliasing in a scene. The application is based on the distance from the camera; thus smaller textures are used at a greater range. What is displayed is essentially a series of increasingly small textures based on a single based texture.

Super Mario Sunshine uses different textures for the different MIP map layers rather than using a miniaturized version of a base texture. When the camera is on a closer point in the water, the textures have no pixels, so the water appears completely transparent. By using this trick, the water textures are prevented from colliding with the camera and allow the player to see below the surface quickly. Water refractions can be found above and below the surface of the water. The video game features full scene reflections as well as another fascinating trick that involves the embedded frame buffer.

The Microsoft Xbox launched at around the same time that the Game Cube. Containing an NVIDIA GeForce 3, it introduced programmable shaders to the realm of console development. This technical capability expanded the possibilities for artists and engineers to create effects.

A shader is, essentially, a small program that can run on a GPU. The algorithm might manipulate a 3D scene in the rendering pipeline before it has drawn the inputs. The model or texture can be modified by the shader program to construct the desired look. The ability to perform this operation is useful for water simulations.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is an open-world action role-playing video game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and released for Microsoft Windows and Xbox in 2002. In this video game, compared with others, the water takes on a more realistic appearance; for instance, there is ripple shader around the character. Although the reflections are not accurate, the result is attractive.

In 2004, Crytek developed the Original Far Cry, which would lead to the Cry Engine. The game uses a Freneau effect noticeable in the reflectivity of the water that is based on the distance from the camera. Near the player, it appears more transparent, while water in the distance appears more mirror-like. In the same year, Valve Corporation released a sequel from Half-Life, offering a tremendous visual representation of water, featuring remarkable reflections, refractions, and Freneau effect. Half-Life 2 uses planar refractions, creating a reflection matrix from the plane where the camera position is defined. This geometry can be used as a source input to render and overlay the textured objects near the clipping plane. The elements below the clipping plane are made into a texture that is applied to the surface of the water, resulting in what is called a Reflection Map. Half-Life 2 features an improved physics simulation, compared with other video games. Objects on the scene show properties of buoyancy, interacting with the bodies of water.

The last example of video game representing water is Hydrophobia, a survival-adventure video game developed by Blade Interactive and published by Dark Energy Digital for Microsoft Windows, the PlayStation 3 and by Microsoft Studios for Xbox Live Arcade. The video game used an internal hydro engine where the fluid dynamics are simulated using a combination of geometry and surface effects. What differentiates it from other video games is how it behaves, mimicking the behavior of real liquid. The water can fill a room or drain it, depending on what is happening around the player. Beyond the simulation, it presents beautiful refraction effects that are more dynamic than in past games.