The screenshots also reveal one of the villainous denizens of the world, the redcap

Apr 24, 2014 16:45 GMT  ·  By

Lionhead Studios, the developer of Fable Legends, has revealed a bunch of their tricks and techniques they employed to make the Xbox One-exclusive role-playing game look as good as it does.

The blog post generally covers a range of Unreal Engine 4 features, including mostly lighting and other areas that pertain to development, but the studio has also released a couple of new screenshots, which are a tad easier to digest when gauging their programming prowess as regards the visuals.

The screenshots are meant in part to showcase the upcoming role-playing game's beautiful and detailed graphics, and in part to underline the Xbox One's graphics power.

The images highlight the use of the new engine tools that deal with dynamic lighting, which the team decided to use from day one to make the game more striking.

"Dynamic direct lighting has been around in games for a number of years, but dynamic indirect lighting (i.e bounce lighting or global illumination) – light bouncing off objects in the scene onto other objects - is a much harder problem to solve, so generally it either isn't computed dynamically, or a very simple representation is used (e.g. a single hemispherical light for the sky)," the blog post informs.

One of the new features of Unreal Engine 4 is the efficient support of a large number of lights and physically-based materials. This makes dynamic indirect lightning much more approachable, and the graphics programmers implemented a more modern adaptation of a technology devised by Crytek, which really shines on modern GPU, such as the one in the Xbox One.

The post even treats us to some programmer art, showing the progress of different lighting techniques on a variety of surfaces and shapes.

For those who don't care about all the technical mumbo-jumbo, Lionhead has also revealed another of the in-game monsters that players will encounter during their adventures, the redcaps, a not-very-friendly ensemble prone to acts of extreme violence and villainy.

"From the halberd-armed foot soldier and catapult-toting skullchucks, to their will-using shamans, redcaps are a common sight in Rosewood and represent a real danger to the unwary traveller. Indeed fear of Redcaps is so rife, that it's been known for travellers to meet a misfortunate end simply by wandering into a nervous village wearing the same coloured headgear," the helpful developer notes inform.

Fable Legends could be one of the games featured at the upcoming E3 2014 conference on Microsoft's panel, as Phil Spencer has recently assured the gaming world that the company's presentation will focus on games instead of trying to push various things nobody wants down our throats.

Fable Legends Screenshots (4 Images)

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