Interview: Just Cause Directors - Christofer Sundberg and Linus Blomberg - Page 3

The fact the game has almost no loading whatsoever when playing almost dropped my jaw! How big is the play area in Just Cause, and what techniques did you use to make those maps so detailed, yet have no "Now Loading" screens?

Linus: The playable world is 1024 square kilometres, some of which is water. We haven’t calculated the area of the actual landmass above water, but I would estimate it's about half that area. The technique is based on procedural algorithms combined with streaming. So, basically, loading is done in the background all the time, in parallel with procedural algorithms refining the data to the desired detail. That gives us great flexibility to decide a suitable detail level for a specific platform without needing to create new content. 

Andy: You must be some sort of magician to fit this game onto an original Xbox, let alone a PS2! How on earth did you manage to get a game that looks this gorgeous and has this much scope to run on a six year old system? Were parts of the game cut for the consoles with less horsepower?

Linus: Yes it's pure magic (smiles). Obviously we had to cut down on texture and mesh resolutions, but the size of the world and all the missions are the same. Actually the game was originally designed for Xbox, so there was both a scale down to PS2, but also a scale up to PC and Xbox 360.

Andy: And speaking about the Xbox 360, why is the 360 version so much more expensive than all the other versions (There is a £20 difference)? Do Xbox 360 owners get extra features that the others don’t, or does this price purely reflect the increased development costs for next-generation systems?

Christofer: We can’t really affect the pricing of the game as this is all in the hands of the publisher. I am really proud of the Xbox version (as well as the PS2 version) as they are really pushing the hardware to its limits. The Xbox 360 version includes some new graphical features such as more hi-res characters and environments, dynamic dirt-maps on vehicles, motion-blur and HDR (and since we’ve received e- mails from people asking, Microsoft did not bribe us to exclude HDR from the PC version). It also includes the Achievements feature.

Article Author: Andrew Ogier

Andrew Ogier lives on a little rock in the middle of nowhere. Ever since the tender age of three-years-old, he has been addicted to video games, and has owned every major system created, along with a 10,000 strong video game collection spanning …

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