Indie development studio The Astronauts has written a lengthy blog on their official website about their upcoming “weird” horror fantasy title, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, talking about the type of technology and methods they’ve used to achieve a level of visual photorealism that has till now never been seen in a video game before- or so they claim.
“In The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you’ll see some of the most realistic environment pieces ever created for a video game,” the developers revealed. “Assets are no longer simplistic approximations of reality – they are reality.”
“With photogrammetry, we no longer create worlds while isolated from the world, surrounded by walls and screens,” the blog continues. “We get up, go out there and shot photos, lots of photos. And then some. Afterwards, a specialized software — we are using Photoscan from Agisoft — looks at these photos, and stares at them until it can finally match every discernible detail from one photo to same exact feature in other photos taken from different angles.
“This results in a cloud of points in 3d space, representing real world object. From there, the software connects the dots to create a 3d model, and projects pixels from photographs to create a texture.”
You can read more about photogammetry and about the techniques used by the studio in the making of the game. In the meantime, you can tell us what you think of what you’ve seen of the game so far via your comments!