
The Rendering of Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor - noch
http://www.elopezr.com/the-rendering-of-middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor/
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corysama
If you like this, you'll like the many graphics studies of
[http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/](http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/)
and you might appreciate
[https://www.reddit.com/r/videogamescience/](https://www.reddit.com/r/videogamescience/)

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kbenson
> The game itself was a great surprise, and the fact that it was a spin-off
> within the storyline of the Lord of the Rings universe was quite unusual and
> it’s something I enjoyed.

Hopefully it becomes less unusual. Works (whether they be literature or media)
with well developed plots tend to make poor video games when they attempt to
translate that plot. I suspect it's a combination of the type of movie that
generally garners video game conversions (action-y) and the type of games
those most often lead to (also action-y) being hard to deliver a plot like
that.

A spinoff with a mostly new plot that can be tailored to what a video game can
do best will generally result in a superior experience, IMO.

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Terr_
It's just unfortunate that the plot/timing/details aren't consistent with the
books.

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psyc
I’m a graphics engine developer and I almost always play AAA games with an eye
towards analyzing the rendering engine. SoM might be the first game that was
so much fun to play, that I never even noticed the rendering. After reading
this write up I’m going to have to play it again.

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andybak
> An interesting example here is Talion’s cape, which is sent to the GPU as a
> point cloud

Wow. Interesting. I'm assuming it's not "just" a point cloud. My experience
with 3D scanning and photogrammatry seems to indicate that mesh construction
of an arbitrary point cloud is not the kind of thing you would try doing in
real time (try "overnight").

So unless there's some magic here then at the very least the point ordering
allows a huge short cut to be taken. Or is it more than that? i.e. there's a
healthy chunk of metadata about the desired topology?

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arithma
Why aren't game graphics developers not the most well paid engineers? This
stuff is magically awesome!

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santaclaus
Because ads and/or iPhones make waaaaaay more money

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looki
I'm interested what this deep G buffer for the order-independent transparency
would entail.

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santaclaus
I love these types of breakdowns! It would be really cool to see breakdowns in
other portions of a game engine, too: physics, character animation, managing
the massive assets, lots of potential goodies.

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christofosho
Wow. This is a lot to take in! Thank you for this, it gives me a gateway into
things I can research to expand my knowledge on the subject of graphics.

