NeoCore Games, the developers behind the upcoming Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor Martyr have a great experience in developing games for PC. In a recent interview with the development team at NeoCore, GamingBolt asked their thoughts on DirectX12 and how it will speed up and enhance game visuals on PC and Xbox One.
“Direct X 12 is not something that allows you to play around with new shiny effects during the development. It’s more of a big, structural development that gives the programmers a lot more opportunity by providing them easier access directly to the GPU,” Producer, Zoltán Pozsonyi explained to GamingBolt. “This means that they’ll have a lot more wiggle room for performance optimization and making the code run faster; if you’re able to squeeze out higher performance out of the GPU, that can be translated into framerate or more beautiful content in the game. DX12 supports asynchtonous compute shaders, which for example allows you to use more and better quality special effects and post process stuff, a lot faster (screen space ambient occlusion, screen space reflection, better quality shadow mapping, transculency, tone mapping).”
Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor Martyr will be heading to the PS4 and Xbox One alongside PC and Mac when it launches next year. What kind of challenges did the development team faced while developing for consoles and what prompted the decision to go beyond the PC for this release?
“Consoles have always been on our radar, as you might have heard The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing trilogy is also coming to Xbox One and PlayStation 4,” Lead Narrative Designer, Viktor Juhász states. “The new console generation’s architecture is very similar to the PCs and the machines are also powerful enough, so our biggest challenge is to make the controls feel just as intuitive with controllers, as it is with a keyboard and mouse setup.
In both the PC and console versions we wanted to find the balance between being faithful to the lore and to the requirements of a great ARPG. We had to overcome some serious technological challenges when we decided to revamp the engine. We still have a long way to go, like the creation of the persistent open world.”
Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor Martyr will be out in 2016 for the PS4, Xbox One and PC. Stay tuned for our full interview in the coming days.