Saber Engine Introduction Saber Interactive is a world leader in gaming technology. The company maintains a large R&D team with proven theoretical and practical knowledge in both offline and game rendering. The company also has a large team of technically savvy artists that know how to use the technology effectively. The company is constantly investing in development of technologies and is always improving the core game system, the Saber3D Engine. The Saber3D Engine is a proven game technology solution that has powered the release of multiple titles across various platforms. The Saber3D Engine ("Saber3D") is a cross-platform gaming solution that runs on the PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation3. Saber3D is one of the first truly next-generation engines which fully exploits the hardware capabilities of high-end platforms with features such as native support of multithreading and multiple cores, the most advanced realtime shaders that can execute on a GPU, DVD streaming, high resolution surround audio codecs, and a host of other high-end features. Saber3D's advanced feature set combined with a rich and robust toolset provides a rock-solid framework for the company's designers and artists, allowing them to focus solely on creating incredible gameplay experiences. Saber maintains a dedicated Engine and Tools Team which constantly expands upon the current engine and toolset, adding features and improving the pipelines to keep our technology at the cutting edge of game development and boosting the productivity of various team members. Rendering Engine Saber3D's rendering engine offers artists the ability to handle both indoor and outdoor scenes, and boasts a broad feature set including a fully flexible material system which supports among other features, the following: * Multiple anisotropic lighting and reflection/refraction models * Normal mapped per-pixel environments and character lighting * Dynamic shadow maps * Cross-texture seamless normal map blending * Detail normal maps * Advanced parallax mapping with shadows * Full-screen and object motion blur * Depth of field * Advanced HDR * GPU-optimized projected shadows * Anti-aliasing * Advanced fluid simulation * Dynamic reflections * Cube maps * Multi-source real-time dynamic lighting * Mirror rendering * Runtime texture streaming * Per-pixel-lit fast soft particle system with no clipping. This runs at a minimum of four times faster than other implementations and allows for intense amounts of concurrent smoke, steam, fire, sand, debris, dust - all in a single frame of gameplay. The particles can be physics-controlled, including collisions. * A revolutionary scorchmark system, supporting parallax- and normal-mapped scorchmarks with additional support of detail normal maps. At any given moment the engine can render thousands upon thousands of incredibly varied persistent scorchmarks without any performance hit. The term "fully persistent" means that they don't fade away. * Advanced atmospheric effects which includes physically correct sky, distance, multi-volume volumetric fog, clouds and sun rays * Weather effects including rain and snow simulation * A vegetation subsystem of the rendering engine which supports a wide range of features used to recreate realistic outdoor environments that can be rendered at solid frame rates. Trees with animated leaves and branches that respond to game interactions (shooting and collision) plus wind-swept animated grass and undergrowth that are all highly optimized from performance and memory standpoints and work well in conjunction with the ShadowMap System. This allows the user to see shadows from individual grass blades. While the engine takes full advantage of all the latest and greatest hardware it also remains scalable, achieving great performance on lower-end graphics gear. The engine is supported with regular R&D and upgrades to the pipeline. This ensures that the code is always on the cutting edge of game development technologies. Physics Saber3D's physics system utilizes Havok and sports full support of multiple rigid bodies, ragdolls, vehicle physics and floating physics. The physics code executes on dedicated thread(s) where possible, allowing the engine to handle large quantities of physics-controlled bodies flying across the screen. As hardware improves, more advanced physics features will be supported such as soft bodies, particle physics and fluid simulation. Animation System Saber3D features a sophisticated animation system which gives animators full control over real-time mocap animation integration, animation blending, procedural animation effects (such as hand or foot placement onto environment objects or terrain). The system interfaces closely with the physics engine, allowing for real-time transitions from canned animation and ragdoll-controlled motions and back. The system is greatly optimized and supports various LOD algorithms to help support a very high number of characters on screen. AI Engine Saber3D's comprehensive AI system allows for full control over AI units, including script-based and reactionary AI with additional functionality extending to co-op based multiplayer play. Both individual and squad-based AI can be controlled using SSL (Saber's Scripting Language), allowing for easy creation of in-game cut-scenes and events and giving the designers full control of actions of individual units, when necessary. A comprehensive AI debugging module allows for real-time analysis of opponent behaviors, decision-making and path planning which can be done by level designers without programmer assistance. A real-time AI-centric performance-analysis tool allows to fine tune the gameplay from a performance perspective. Game Integration Engine Saber's Game Integration Engine provides a robust framework that allows for quick implementation of various game entities not supported by the lower-level code. The engine offers a lot of hooks which can expose the functionality of individual objects via SSL - the engine's scripting language and allows game designers to customize objects as they see fit. A robust system of classes implements a lot of generic game-logic code supporting entities such as doors, weapons, projectiles, items and special effects, allowing for easy extension of their functionality depending on a particular game's needs. Tools Saber3D boasts a rich toolset which allows the designers, artists and scripters to fully utilize its power. One top component is a tool suite dedicated to analyzing performance of projects in development. Saber's production pipelines are centered around Maya, which serves as a backbone of the production process. This enables the team to leverage all the hard work that went into design of Maya'a tools and GUI and focus on the tools that we need to supplement pre-existing production pipelines. It also makes it easier to bring new hires into the team as they are already familiar with this well-known and robust package. Some of the most important links in the tool-chain are as follows: * A number of plug-ins facilitating modeling, texturing, animation, special effects creation and scripting processes. This allows the team to do the majority of game asset work directly in major modeling packages, eliminating the need to develop and maintain a dedicated level editor tool. * A plug-in that exports directly from the modeling package into the engine, and thus the game. * A tool suite supporting Saber's proprietary texture format, including native integration with image editing and previewing software. The tool is also coupled with Saber's Shader Designer tool which allows more technically-savvy artists to write custom shaders, to tweak them while viewing the results in real-time, and to analyze the performance of the newly-created shaders. * An advanced script editor tool providing state of the art quality level script editing, including auto-complete, syntax-highlighting and detect-errors-as-you-type features seen in professional editors like Microsoft Visual Studio. Currently we are augmenting this tool with a PropertySheet-style editor which will simplify scripting even more, and reduce the amount of errors tremendously. * Profiling, memory analysis and performance measurement tools that allow the designers to look under the hood on the fly (in real time) and see where they are using precious CPU or GPU cycles without the aid of a programmer. An offline performance analysis component is available as well. Finally complete level playthroughs can be recorded and analyzed by performance analysis engineers, thereby allowing detection and elimination of particular performance issues which may be area-specific. * Distributed build system that allows for daily data/code/shader builds for all three SKUs, all languages, and all versions. Saber Scripting Language (SSL) The Saber Scripting Language is an intuitive, easy-to-use game-authoring tool supported by a robust editor. SSL puts the power in the hands of the designers and artists, freeing the programmers to focus on other aspects of product and engine development. SSL is a Visual Basic-style event-based language that exposes the inner workings of the game engine directly to the designers. Due to its very flexible architecture, whenever new objects are programmed into the game they are in-engine, onscreen and in-game for the designers instantly. A comprehensive set of logging, debugging and error reporting tools allow any user to nail down problems quickly and efficiently. Multiplayer Saber3D was designed from the ground up with a natively-supported multiplayer component. A proprietary combined client-server and peer-to-peer architecture allows for optimal bandwidth-handling and lag reduction. A significant number of networking layer optimizations and algorithms and a solid dead-reckoning solution are implemented to support ever-changing real-life networking conditions. The engine is capable of scaling the network traffic depending on those conditions and then quickly recovering should the conditions improve. Solid matchmaking, lobby support, user-controlled and scriptable rule sets, voice-over-IP, stats collection and reporting are among the important components of the engine. The multiplayer engine comes with an online and offline network traffic analysis tool which allows quickly identifying and fixing bandwidth bottlenecks. Currently Saber is working on a new iteration of the engine, switching to a server-less peer-to-peer architecture which will support server migration, more transparent matchmaking, and even lower uplink requirements for playing the game, among other things. Music and Sound Saber3D's audio engine is built on top of an FMOD EX solution and supports PC as well as native Xbox 360 and Playstation3 sound and music features, taking the next-generation experience to the next level. Sound features include high resolution surround audio codecs, 2D and 3D sounds, reverb (EAX) technologies, CD and DVD streaming capabilities, compression technologies, SPU optimization on Playstation3, and beyond. These and additional sound feature-set tools help create cinematic-quality game soundscapes. Both the sound and music systems are controllable through scripts, allowing for dynamic music and sound changes to fit the style of the gameplay at hand. Summary The Saber3D Engine is one of the most sophisticated pieces of gaming code on the market today. Its feature set compares favorably to the market leader and its purpose as a customized solution enables Saber to constantly refine and improve the technology to suit Saber's needs for any given project. Saber's extensive R&D team will continue keep the Saber3D Engine the cutting-edge of real-time graphics and to push the envelope in new and exciting ways. Professional soldiers Break in Ambush The Roof Fight Charge!!! © 2009 Saber Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.