Bioshock - Yet More Water @ IGN Blog

A second Bioshock feature is focusing on water with an update to the official blog at IGN hosting an interview with Irrational's Stephan Alexander, FX Artist – and Jesse Johnson, Graphics Programmer, on the subject:

How much of the DX10 technology will you be using for water effects?

JJ: All the water effects in the game were developed to work on both DX9 and DX10 technology. Where applicable DX10 is used to accelerate the performance of some of the effects, and this may allow more detailed water in some areas.

What did you do to get the water effects this realistic? Have you got your own water lab at Irrational Games, where you played with water? Did you go outside and watch spots with a lot of water?

JJ: A lot of the programming comes down to just doing the right research. Many of the algorithms we use in video games today, as well as in real-time rendering in general, have already been around in non-real-time forms for quite a while. So one of the biggest challenges we face is finding the algorithms that are suitable to real time rendering and then adapting them to our needs, adapting them to modern graphics hardware, and making them run at 30+ fps.

Of course, there are a lot of times when research just comes up completely dry, especially working with next-gen hardware. Whenever this happens, Stephen and I will think through the problem, drawing on real life examples when necessary, then sit down together and draft up a sort of a baseline approach we are going to try and take to solve it. If the approach works, Stephen will take the technology and try to push it to its limits. As he encounters technological restrictions, I’ll go back and address them with additional code. If the approach doesn’t work altogether, then it’s back to the drawing board.