AquaNox Preview

The commotion GeForce3 created in the past couple of months elevated even further with Massive Development's new submarine action-game, AquaNox. This game initially appeared as a tech demo, which displayed the potentials of Nvidia's latest piece of hardware. The power of the GeForce3 was used as a tool to bring a new unique lighting technique that will add a great dose of realism to the watery worlds of AquaNox. In addition to being the core of the Xbox technology, GeForce3 also has an enormous variety of features, some of which will surely change the PC games forever (Isn't it always like that - Ed).

We'll put AquaNox aside for a while and talk a little bit about the amazing capability of the GeForce3. Unless you've been locked in some God-forsaken shack in the middle of nowhere, this powerful chip thingy from Nvidia was furthermore utilized for the development of the latest Doom game from id Software. Recently the presentation at MacWorld conducted by John Carmack (lead designer on the new Doom game and founder of id Software) offered a quick, but sumptuous, look upon the new engine powered by the GeForce3. This system runs on both DirectX 8 and OpenGL graphic modes (however, the Doom demonstration was presented in OpenGL). In a nutshell, it shows some stunning possibilities of this chip and if we consider it the nucleus for every future PC (or Xbox) game, then surely some great times are ahead of us.

AquaNox will be one of the earliest game titles to display such powerful graphic features. Using one of many abilities of the GeForce3, AquaNox will make you feel you've actually descended deep underwater with environmental effects such as the highly detailed ocean floor, next to photo realistic materials, radiosity lighting, reflections, rt-shadows, multicolored, volumetric fog effects etc. For such a complex environment it was to be expected that the game would also have an advanced physics engine. Using up-to-date technology, the so-called Krass engine was designed to ensure easy use for the game developers of AquaNox. What's more, it has a pretty advanced math system, vector engine system, and most importantly real-time physics system - featuring physical basic components (spring, damper, joint...), optimized "equations of motion" integration methods, particle system dynamics (mass points), full rigid body dynamics, full flexible body dynamics (bones, combined coordinate systems), etc. etc.

Well, I don't want you to think I've named all of these characteristics for nothing, so I suppose it's also imperative to draw your attention to the results the Krass engine generates. For a start, the visual features of AquaNox represent a combination of huge caverns, several hundreds of underwater objects with an impressively detailed seabed, all situated in an environment that spreads over eight thousand square kilometers. More precisely, the Krass engine steps in, by allowing some of the objects to possess over five thousand polygons. It all sounds pretty gripping, but, unfortunately, we must wait a few more months people (hang in there, start scrimping and saving).