That means longer draw distances, better shadow effects and mightier textures. Certain parts of the game had to be re-written, as Lionhead praise their coders.
”Because our artists originally authored their assets at such a high quality, removing the limits that the Xbox 360 imposed upon us immediately made the game look better,” said lead engine coder Don Williamson in an interview with BeefJack.
”The main benefit to a PC release is to be able to see the world of Albion realised at such a high resolution,” added senior designer Mike West.
“We have some mighty PCs in the office and along with the fantastic 3D mode, Fable has never looked more beautiful which the artists love.” The embargo for PC Fable III reviews lifts today at 5.00pm BST so be sure to check back later for ours.
Certain processes had to be rewritten because the PC just couldn’t handle how the Xbox 360 worked. ”For example, the PC version had to somehow keep up with the tens of thousands of occlusion queries the Xbox 360 engine could do every frame,” said Williamson.
”Our histogram evaluation had to be moved from the CPU to the GPU to prevent stalls, some video cards can’t sample the depth buffer as a texture making depth-of-field and crepuscular rays difficult, we were employing lots of tricks to occupy space on the 360 that couldn’t be done on the PC, we had to counter lots of inefficiencies introduced with the higher level of abstraction in D3D on the PC…”
“The list goes on, but the engine guys did a great job bringing it all under control.” There are no motivations at Lionhead Studios to bring Fable II to PC, leaving it as the only one in the series without desktop endorsement.
