October 12th, 2010
Epic has announced that the TriOviz 3D system has been integrated into Unreal Engine 3, allowing all of its licensees the ability to add stereoscopic 3D modes to their games with only a minimal amount of extra development time.
TriOviz's technology is based on the concept of 2D plus depth, where individual viewpoints for each eye are separated out from a base 2D image based on the internal depth map used by the game engine in rendering the scene. The advantages of this style of 3D, also employed in a fashion in the forthcoming Crysis 2, is that the overhead for generating 3D is extremely small, meaning that developers effectively get a stereoscopic game mode with virtually no impact on gaming performance.
"It's not a panacea," Darkworks' Grady Hannah told Joystiq. "It integrates like a shader in the engine, but your artists still have to do work on it."
"If you want to make a game that's really fun and compelling in 3D, you have to think about 3D. Where the camera is all the time, how big a 3D effect you want. Like any other graphical feature you put in a game, you have to think about how you want to approach it," added Epic's Mark Rein.
Unreal Engine currently works with 3D Vision on PC, but in the Joystiq interview Rein hints that developers can port over 3D development work from there into the TriOviz system for consoles. The only downside to the announcement revealed thus far is that while the 3D implementation is built into UE3, it remains an additional licensing cost over and above the baseline UE3.
'TriOviz 3D joins Unreal Engine 3' Screenshot 1
'TriOviz 3D joins Unreal Engine 3' Screenshot 2
Batman Arkham Asylum's Game of the Year edition gave us our first look at TriOviz. Now the tech's been improved and works not just with paper glasses, but also with the new wave of 3DTVs.
TriOviz has already been trialled in the Game of the Year edition of Batman: Arkham Asylum (detailed in-depth in a previous Digital Foundry article but the technology appears to have moved on somewhat from that first outing. TriOviz isn't just a paper glasses solution any more, but is fully compatible with proper 3DTVs while retaining its anaglyph-style support for conventional displays.
