White Gold

FPS with a Twist

The year is 2010. The place: a small Caribbean island where a new street drug is leaving young people dead at every turn. As the government tries to quash an uprising, powerful drug cartels and criminal gangs are at war with each other and with the population. The main hero, a retired military veteran who drinks too much, is entrusted with uncovering the darkest secrets, investigating disappearances, and staying alive.

The work we have done optimizing White Gold* for multicore processors let us achieve over 30 frames per second at high quality settings. Extending our threading model in future titles will let us deliver even more detailed worlds at those frame rates.

— Sergey Zabaryansky
Lead Architect / Engineer, Deep Shadows

Our developers have a passion for extending the narrative possibilities of our games, recombining genres and bringing new ideas to life. Intel tools and expertise help them devote their energy to creativity and gameplay while still pushing up technical quality in areas like frame rate and smoothness.

— Sergey Zabaryansky
Lead Architect / Engineer, Deep Shadows

A core aspect of Deep Shadows’ strategy to enhance the user experience is to provide freedom of action, including broad exploration and activities that range from battle and space piracy to diplomacy and wandering. Richness in this approach demands enormous compute capabilities, and they take seriously their responsibility to maintain peak performance. The company’s developers created robust multi-threading to achieve their goals, and because they had access to Intel Software Partner Program resources, they had the foundations for success before they even began.

Using program resources and the Intel® Threading Building Blocks library, the team built code to execute multiple tasks such as skeletal animation and collision processing in parallel. Low-level rendering is done on a separate thread, helping each of two cores stay at 90 to 100 percent utilization most of the time, and game assets are loaded and processed in the background. The company reports overall increases from 20-23 frames per second before optimization to as much as 35-40 afterward, for smoother, more enjoyable gameplay.

Genre: First-person shooter, Role playing game

Player: Single

Release Date: October 24, 2008

Rating: RP Rating Pending