Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods Interview
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PC Games: What changes to the code and art did you have do make?
Abdool: Gothic 3 was a great game, but it had the potentially to be much more. Unfortunately it had technical issues which hindered its performance. Several patches were released to help fix its various problems, but many of these lie deep within the foundations of the game. We spent a lot of time making improvements to the engine code trying to squeeze as much performance as we could. We have also done some work on the character creation process. We extended the artificial intelligence system to take into account more variables. This gave us more control over how we want characters to behave.
The visual quality of Gothic 3 was very good for its time, but we want to give fans the opportunity to experience Gothic with modern day graphics. This extended to both art and code changes, the two go hand in hand. Our graphic programmer worked on improving and extending all of the existing effect in the game, along with some new additions. The game now features 64bit High Dynamic Range Lighting (HDR) with bloom, Volumetric Fog, Heat Haze, specular lighting with fresnel approximation, global rim lighting, parameterized rim lighting and sub surface scattering for realistic skin rendering. We have also added fallback shaders for our effect so even on low end machine you should see a graphical improvements. We also implement an improved character creation system on the back end to take advantage of the new technologies we added. We ran all of the existing characters through this process and all of the new ones.
