CGSociety :: Game Production Focus
24 August 2009, by Paul Hellard

Mixing together many genres and elements of spy fantasy, the Pandemic developers and producers of The Saboteur had both beauty and evil in their sights. They gathered finely tuned landscapes, filled it with the Light and Dark of peace and the war. Occupation and the resistance. Then threw in the luck of the Irish.

Christopher Hunt joined Pandemic when it was a mere slip of a game company in 2001. He worked on the artist team on 'Full Spectrum Warrior One', 'Star Wars Battlefront', 'Clone Wars', 'Tripleplay Baseball' and a number of other projects that were in action back when Pandemic was just trying to get off the ground.

He started off working with many smaller companies, some of which didn't survive the 'Great Extinction' of the late 90s. Hunt has a background of TV work in graphics but also worked in an outsourcing company doing modeling on 'Gauntlet' and 'Need for Speed 2'.

'The Saboteur' game is set in Paris. War time Paris. The crew sat down and researched pretty much everything you could possibly find out about the city of Paris. All the way through from the original inhabitants of Paris in around 4,000 BC to the Middle Ages, all the way into the Modern Era. Back when they finally set out the main architectural layout of the city. That's kind of extensive. "From the limestone quarries all the way up through to the rich 1920s, I was looking for anything I could get my hands on," explains Hunt.

Of course, the best way to study Paris is to actually go, to Paris. In 2006 a small group of Pandemic artists went over and lived there for a while. "We took tons of video, thousands of pictures, and I grabbed as much reference about the history of architecture as I could," Hunts tells me. "Saw lots of people, grabbed heaps of books, walked for miles and miles. We spent all up about a year and a half researching and working out how we were going to lay this story out and how we were going to build the city. It was actually quite a serious undertaking. We developed a heap of new tools so when we had the city laid out, we could be true to the real city."

Hunt was adamant that they weren't going to lay out the city as a grid system just cos that was easiest. "We set out this huge map pointing out where we wanted to go, where the game was to be played out. We then figured out a snapping system on the street corners so that we could include the beautiful eight-way intersections or five-way intersections."

To Hunt, these were integral to the Parisian city presence. "Looking toward each crossway, verging streets could be at 15 or 35 degree angles and you could see down the adjoining streets and it could still look natural 'ingame,'" explains Hunt. "We had to have these angles set so the buildings could be designed, based on that." These kinds of street structures are a signature of European cities, are all over the real Paris and it gives the player a true sense of history when walking around the game.

Render
While the accuracy of the surroundings to war-time Paris was the goal, a 15 degree turn makes a difference to the rendering speed. As you drive along, a player will see all the way down the block of an adjoining street, just as they pass. Christopher Hunt had to keep in mind how much geometry could be rendered in the time on screen. It makes a huge difference on the time it takes to get to your next objective. "It posed a lot of questions initially, but we were able to answer even more questions by the time we worked it out how we were going to stay at 30fps and generate this large number of structures like we did," he happily explains.