Retribution: Nuevo shooter para PC y X360

PCs and Xbox Next seeking Retribution
New PC and Xbox Next shooter will feature open-ended gameplay, hiring and training of NPCs.

U-235 Studios is dishing out some Retribution. The independent developer announced it is working on a new shooter for PCs and the next incarnation of the Xbox. No release date has yet been announced for the game.

Retribution can be played from either a first-person or third-person perspective and features advanced physics (courtesy of Artificial Studio's Reality game engine), photo-realistic backdrops, and a deep script. As a boy, the game's hero is witness to the murder of his mother and father, a criminal investigations officer for the Navy. After a troubled youth, the protagonist emerges from juvenile hall with revenge on his mind.

Retribution's open-ended gameplay allows gamers to journey to locales, such as a marine training camp, a drug lord's hideout, and a Miami port, alone or with a team of NPCs. Team members can be hired with money attained from completing mercenary missions and trained through experience on the battlefield. The game will also feature vehicular hijacking, hostage-taking, and advanced artificial intelligence. Multiplayer modes will include deathmatch, team deathmatch, and cooperative play.

GameSpot will have more information on Retribution as details come to light.

Screen shots

We have posted our first publically released screen shots. These screen shots are real time in-game screen shots and are not artificially rendered in any way. This is one of the beach areas in our game. Note that Retribution will include a large variation over 12 locations in design and style. Unlike a lot of modern games, each storyline mission area will be very different, some examples include: beach hideout, marine corps camp, drug lords compound, navy base, miami port area.

Modeling detail

As in a real life scenario our models include a massive amount of detail. A good example of this, is if you look closely at the jetty and the supply tent, the planks all have minor differences to produce a realistic variation.

Light blooms

The use of HDR technology allows for realistic light blooms, in our screen shots we've used a technique that produces an effect similar to if you were looking at a light at night through a light mist or fog, or on a damp night (the star bloom). This will be employed in suitable locations and weather conditions in the game.

Also note the HDR effects of light blooming into the cave. This is a realistic and dynamic effect. Once we introduce tone mapping and dynamic luminance these effects will not only be dynamic, but the lighting will adjust in a similar manner to your eyes when going from a dark to light area or vice versa, or in fact looking at the sun, then looking away.

Specular highlights

You'll notice our use of specular highlights on every object on our map. This is particularly noticeable in the cave with the pirate. The walls there make great use of specular highlights to give a realistic look to lighting created by the fire on the cave wall. The pirate looks a little 'waxy' in this picture, however, this is because we are adding a post process film grain over the top of our final product which will reduce this to give a truly film like look to our scenes.

Particle effects

In the picture with the cave you'll notice the haze created by the fire (look at the barrels behind the fire, as well as the fire itself). This particle effect system produces fantastic looking effects such as heat hazes, mist, fire, fog, smoke etc. These are all dynamic and change in a realistic manner.

Subsurface scattering

Subsurface scattering is a technique whereby light actually filters through objects. This is best utilised in things like plants, whereby the sun actually filters through the leaves and produces a dynamically changing colour on the leaves depending on the strength of the sun at a given time of day. The screen shot with the lush palm trees overlooking the cave is done at about 1pm when the sun is at it's strongest. This produces are very bright effect, you will notice however the realistic shadows on the palm leaves and trunks and down into the cave.

Parallax mapping and displacement mapping

If you look at the sunset screen shot, you'll notice the stone wall at the waters edge. This is done using parallax mapping, which means the depth is provided by a height map, instead of modelling every stone. Our implementations however do contains quite a lot of modelling detail as well as the parallax map to produce a wall that truly looks like it has depth. We will also be implementing displacement mapping which has an even better effect, however, this will most likely be a toggle on/off option in the final release as displacement mapping is far more intensive.

Day/night cycles

Retribution will include realistic day/night cycles as demonstrated in the photos below, you can see the effects a sunset (sunset shot from on jetty), night (various night shots), midday (palm trees overlooking cave) and morning (shot of the arch with the ruins on the right hand side).

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