Jade Empire Interview
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Q: What can you tell us about Jade Empire's graphics engine?
A: Jade Empire uses an entirely new graphics engine and a new sound engine, both designed to take advantage of the unique power and capabilities of the Xbox console. BioWare gained a great deal of experience in developing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for the Xbox, and everything we learned about working on the console has gone into the Jade Empire engine.
All animations in game are fully motion captured a first for BioWare. We explored motion capture carefully before jumping into it, and we're very happy with the results. We spent a lot of time gathering reference from movies and real-world sources, and brought in martial artists from as far away as mainland China to perform our styles.
The graphics engine has more than twice the number of render paths that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic had, and cool new features like physics-based cloth, rim lighting, and an entirely new skeleton built to accommodate motion captured animation. The sound engine is designed to produce the most cinematic experience possible, and puts incredible control in the hands of our audio engineers.
The distinctive setting, the detailed combat system as well as the lush area and character graphics (roughly two to three times the number of polys per character compared with Knights), the animation system (Jade Empire's animation is fully motion captured, a first for BioWare) and the storyline rich, deep and non-linear, and full of replayable options in the BioWare tradition will really set Jade Empire apart.
