Wolfenstein: Rebuilt from the Ground Up for Today's Hardware

By Garret Romaine

B.J. is back. William Joseph “B.J.” Blazkowicz was the gung-ho hero who single-handedly conquered Castle Wolfenstein and the man who really won World War II. One of the longest lived and best-loved franchises in gaming history, Wolfenstein* is reborn, rebuilt from the ground up using state of the art development tools and ready for today’s advanced computer hardware.

First introduced by John Carmack and his friends as a shareware legend in 1992 and later voted into the gaming Hall of Fame, Wolfenstein 3D* single-handedly started the first-person shooter (FPS) category of computer games and was the predecessor to such venerable heroes of today as Gordon Freeman from Half Life* and Master Chief from Halo*. Now, 17 years after the groundbreaking original Wolfenstein 3D was first released, comes Wolfenstein—an all-new game from one of the most recognized names in computer gaming.

All-new dimensions with a nod to the past

Wolfenstein takes place this time not in a cramped castle prison but in an expansive, intense city environment. Within this sinister world players enjoy a rich story line as our hero B.J. confronts his enemies with devastating weapons and mysterious new powers. Wolfenstein’s developers have brought to life a distinctive alternate history for the WWII universe, with supernatural Nazis wielding strange new weapons and inhabiting an alternate dimension known as the Veil. Strange creatures inhabit this occult world in which space and time are distorted and special effects and story twists abound.

Despite these updates, Wolfenstein remains true to its roots. Eric Biessman, creative director at Raven Software, said that the Raven team never planned to simply crank out a rehash; they approached their project carefully. “I’m a huge fan of Wolfenstein 3D and Return to Castle Wolfenstein*,” he explained. “We asked ourselves, ‘How can we honor the history of the original Wolfenstein 3D and yet still move forward?’ We still have treasures in the game. Now there’s a whole new economy system. And we’ve taken enemies from the previous games and modernized them. We kept telling ourselves, ‘Here’s the grandfather of all shooters, we can’t mess it up.’ We all came to this with a lot of love and respect for those early games, determined to honor what they were. We think we did that.”

The trick was to create advanced new capabilities in the game, while maintaining recognizable ties to the past titles that everyone loved. Wolfenstein 3D was a controlled game, with set linear levels. Return to Castle Wolfenstein felt more open, and more amenable to multi-player battles. For 2009, developers gave B.J. the opportunity to use new weapons and move the gameplay ahead, while keeping the multi-player hooks. It is, and it isn’t, your father’s Wolfenstein.

Biessman serves as the Wolfenstein project lead. He believes Wolfenstein fills a niche that no other game fills. “You get the classic id first-person shooter, that quick-twitch arcade experience, plus you get that unique take on WWII, moving from the ordinary to the extraordinary to the supernatural. You’re not just fighting the Nazis; you’re going deep into their lair and pulling up the worst parts of the Third Reich right by the roots. You’re saving the world, period.”

Visual impact in a dynamic way

Raven developers used a variety of advanced tools and techniques to put a unique stamp on the new Wolfenstein. One of their goals was to showcase more interesting lighting that interacted with the environment. They saw the new Wolfenstein landscape as a dynamic world, requiring intense calculations for light interactions and physics. The addition of the Veil, with its strange occult influences and other-worldly effects, put additional pressure on the game’s look and feel. The Raven team ultimately decided on a deferred shading renderer.

Deferred shading allows for scenes with hundreds of dynamic lights, with almost no CPU impact. Previously Raven used a forward shading technique that consumed a lot of processing performance while calculating what lights were interacting with what geometries. With deferred shading, Raven can scale up the geometry and the lights independently of each other, without that processing overhead. What this means to the end-user is that they will experience a scene that has more complicated geometries, and more lights and shadows—all dynamic so that the cost of moving these relative to each other is small. This in turn allowed Raven to fill scenes with lots of breakables and numerous movable objects. The soft stencil shadows allowed them to render the highest quality shadowing and self-shadowing available, without the artifacts that can detract from a scene’s appeal, distracting the person playing the game.

Dwight Luetscher, Raven’s technical lead, explained how they use deferred shading. “We render the unlit scene into textures: including the normals, the diffuse color, and the specular, then we use these textures to draw in light interactions into the frame buffer almost like it was post-process. We draw lots of lights in the scene but only pay the fragment shader cost for the pixels that actually need the interaction. This allows us to have big, open, city scenes where the artists can have sunlight or moonlight, window lights, bounce lights, fill lights, and effect lights—all dynamic—and with very little CPU cost.”

Luetscher added, “One of the benefits of deferred shading in a dynamically lit scene is that procedural geometry does not have to concern itself with light interaction. We can create all kinds of complicated geometries that we generate at runtime, and can independently light these without a concern for CPU overhead. We were going for rooms with hundreds of dynamically breakable objects under hundreds of lights, something we just couldn’t afford to do with forward shading.” However, Luetscher explained that there was a significant trade-off. “One down side to deferred shading is that anti-aliasing is a real challenge.”

Raven put a priority on aesthetics and decided that soft stencil shadows gave the best look for character self-shadowing. In Wolfenstein the stencil shadows are used not just for characters but for all the buildings and objects in the world. This effect gives every object a very clean and precise soft shadow from each key light. The result is a dynamically lit scene, with all the shadows calculated on the fly.

The team used their new lighting and shading features to bring the game’s new occult ties to life with a signature addition: the Veil. Players can step into the Veil, see their enemies better, and get a dimensional speed burst, along with other strange powers. There is some heavy post-processing going on, with thousands of particles flying through the air. The particle systems dress things up, then a detailed texturing makes the alternate dimension look decayed and cracked. There is no mistaking when inside the Veil that you are inside a very unique environment.

Breaking with the past, carefully

Biessman said that upgrading to new tools was a recurring theme as they developed the game. “We had to replace pieces of the older technology to meet the requirements of modern standards. It was like starting from scratch, but not quite. We used new techniques and have all these advanced features found in all modern engines. But at the heart, it’s still that game you played long ago. That was tricky, that balance.”

Still, Luetscher believes players will quickly note the changes and approve. “Our effects system is very advanced. We are lofting geometry along spline curves. We use a particle system based on GPU particles. We can push large numbers of particles, for effects like a precipitation system. There are games that have done lots of light, but not dynamic light that interacts properly with the rest of the dynamic objects in the rest of the world. In our case, we’re painting the world with hundreds of lights, and they’re interacting with each dynamic object. The devil’s in the details, because it’s hard to get it all to be as efficient as it needs to be. There’s been a lot of optimization done, mostly on the GPU side.”

Havok's Physics - Making things act real

Wolfenstein* is a great example of a game in development taking advantage of new tools to give players an entirely new experience that remains true to the original title. Raven engineers said they didn’t plan on incorporating multi-threading when they first scoped out the project. But once they started pushing the buttons on the Havok Physics* engine, they grasped the opportunities immediately.

Raven’s Dwight Luetscher, technical lead for the project, explained that heavy physics calculations led them to the Havok tool. “We initially encountered a lot of demand for physics in this project,” he said. “We wanted it to be very full; we wanted good things to happen as you interact within the world. We chose to use Havok Physics because of the multi-threading capabilities, first and foremost. We know that’s the future. We’ve definitely taken advantage of that with Wolfenstein.”

Raven’s creative director Eric Biessman agreed. “Havok Physics actually opened a lot of new doors for us. It allowed us to populate an entire world with physical objects, breakable and susceptible to damage. We can have grenades go off and show a stack of crates blowing up. We’ve been able to do a lot more than in the past. We even use Havok Physics for the vehicles driven by AI characters in the game.”

Threading efficiency is key

Rebuilding the game for 2009 meant dividing the processing chores into multiple threads, to take advantage of the number of cores a particular user’s system employs. Raven reports that Wolfenstein is running with six software threads, and is built to efficiently take advantage of multiple hardware cores. Here’s the thread breakdown:

• F-mod mixer thread
• Havok* thread
• Havok thread
• A streaming management thread
• Save thread
• Game engine-main thread

The more cores a PC user brings to bear on Wolfenstein, the better the performance. Luetscher explained why: “We found we had a lot of streaming work and a lot of physics work consuming the CPU. We felt that processing power could be put to better use by concentrating on gameplay, AI code, and rendering. We had to write a whole new asset loading path to make streaming happen asynchronously and with very little interaction by the main thread. For physics, we turned to Havok Physics*, to provide the threading support for the simulation. We also had to significantly modify the game code to handle running the physics simulation asynchronously. The biggest restriction we faced was making these changes to an existing technology that other game programmers were actively using and coding to.”

Streaming gets a big assist from efficient threading. The net effect is decreased load times, a key for platform-based games. As Biessman explains, “We’re constantly streaming characters, textures, models, audio, everything. We stream all the content we can. The result is that we have a lot more content per level, if you want to call it a level. Because of the streaming architecture, there are more objects that you can actually see and interact with. So the world really comes alive, as a visual thing.”

Luetscher explained that the benefits of multi-core are dramatic in the new game. “The cost of physics used to be our dominant cost, and now it’s for free. Imagine that. While the renderer is doing its job, we don’t feel the computational pain of the physics at all. We use physics pretty heavily in this game, and it comes free to the end-user on a multi-core, multi-threaded CPU such as the Intel® Core™ i7 processor. Low-cost physics took a little getting used to,” he admitted.

The game still runs on high-end single-core machines, however. Testing teams have sorted out all the combinations and verified that single-core users won’t be short-changed on the exciting gameplay, while users of multi-core systems will see the difference with better effects and physics simulation as the core count increases.

Taking the time to do it right

Gamers of course want to know when the new title will arrive, but that’s still a bit down the road. Wolfenstein will ship “when it’s done”, according to id Software’s CEO, Todd Hollenshead. “The focus of every id title is high quality first and foremost. We’re not shooting for a back-to-school date, or end-of-the-year holidays, or any particular time. It’s done when it’s done. We’re approaching the end stages, but we’re not there yet.”

As expected, the new game will support a strong community element. Hollenshead said that was another key feature carried over from the old game to the new. “From a strategy perspective, it’s more fun to play as a team rather than just against each other,” said Hollenshead. “Return to Castle Wolfenstein had an amazing multi-player experience that still ranks among the most popular online games being played today. We’re bringing back the multi-player mayhem and building on it with things like the cool new Veil powers to thwart your online foes.”

Activision’s Nikki Lewis, brand manager for the Wolfenstein franchise, told Visual Adrenaline that the whole development team is constantly peppered for information about beta testing, early demos, trailers, and the like. There have been lots of questions and lots of media requests. “When I talk to people, the first thing I hear is, ‘Oh, I remember Wolfenstein 3D, yeah, tell me about it. Does it still have . . . ’ I assure them that it does have all the good stuff. But it has more. We talk about the Veil and all the things you can do in the new game. We’ve been able to explore interesting areas and weapons, along with exciting combat. It’s a brand new experience within this historical universe. Even if you didn’t have the history, you’re going to find a lot of things to like in here. It will create a new standard. It’s Wolfenstein.”

About the Author

Garret Romaine is a long-time journalist and technical writer hailing from Portland, Oregon. He was a beta tester for Epic MegaGames in the 1990s, working on titles such as Unreal*, One Must Fall 2097*, and Jazz Jackrabbit II*. Garret wrote numerous game reviews and features for Computer Bits magazine, and has contributed to ESCMAG.com, reviewing RT S games such as Dune II* and Command & Conquer*.

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