The tech can be adapted for mud and sand and can even become persistent

Mar 31, 2014 08:40 GMT  ·  By

Batman: Arkham Origins is an action adventure video game released by Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment at the end of last year, mainly dealing with Batman's coming of age story and revealing that all his problems stem from the fact that he doesn't kill his opponents.

Maybe he likes the back and forth relationship with the villains that afford him a sense of purpose and identity, but as the events in Injustice: Gods Among Us show, allowing bad people to do bad things for an extended amount of time can put a severe dent in Superman's mood, driving him to eradicate all criminal elements in human society, and we certainly wouldn't want that, since he's considered the bad guy in that game. Wait, what?

Anyway, apart from a younger Batman learning the ropes and getting used to his new role as Gotham City's protector, the game also features some interesting technology that's also featured on the game's box art, in the form of persistent and deformable snow, adding another layer of realism to the gritty gameplay.

The game was developed by Games Montreal, and during this year's Game Developers Conference, the studio's Lead Rendering Programmer, Colin Barre-Brisebois, held a panel detailing the technology and how it might be implemented in future developments.

The primary motivation is to enhance the game world and give it a more dynamic feel, with the iconic visuals of deformable snow, the implementation of organic deformation from walking, falling, sliding and fighting, with the minimum possible memory usage and performance cost for open world games.

He revealed that the same tech his team used for Batman: Akham Origins can be implemented for other soft and deformable materials, such as sand and mud, and that there is also the possibility for heightmaps (the data that determines and stores the deformation) to be saved and reloaded, making all tracks and shapes permanent within the game world.

This would allow in theory a much greater gameplay complexity, introducing features such as being able to track dynamic or procedural enemy movements through the environment and having to cover your own tracks in order to avoid being hunted down yourself, as well as many other interesting mechanics, such as dropping down and making snow angels.

The technology is already being implemented in various other games, such as MXGP The Official Motocross Videogame, which demoed its track soil deformation feature in February.

If you want to learn more about the feature, you can check out the GDC slide-show covering deformable snow rendering in Batman: Arkham Origins.