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Irrational Games boss Ken Levine has detailed some of the work his team had to do to get BioShock Infinite running inside the Unreal Engine 3, including writing much of the lighting model.
“It’s a piece of middleware, but a very useful piece of middleware,” Levine told Nowgamer. “I think if you just rely on what it gives you, you’re not going to come up with a compelling experience, because people will have seen that experience before. You really have to make it your own.”
It seems making the team’s vision for BioShock Infinite come to life wasn’t an easy process.
Levine says Unreal Engine 3 has “given us a lot of things in terms of workflow. But when you look at it in terms of AI; it gives you nothing. This also applies to our rendering model, and we also had to completely write much of the lighting model”.
“The ability to make a floating city in the engine alone is not realistic at all, in that the Unreal technology is not designed to have all the geometry moving in that way. It’s just not done like that. So our guy Richard Jobling really spearheaded that process of coming up with some very cool stuff to make it possible.
“The tech just does not want to do that. It doesn’t want to do dynamic lighting. So how do we make it work and let it happen? At the end of the day, it ups the challenge for us.”
BioShock Infinite wowed everyone at E3, and you can see what all the fuss was about by watching the recently released video presentation below.
