I've gotten a bit lazy lately. :) Must be spring. Sorry for the long break.

So, today we'll be dissecting a product from the Japanese console world that is about to arrive on PC. The game is Lost Planet: Extreme Condition. Naturally, I don't have the full version, but there is a publicly available demo. I first saw the game on Xbox 360, and it impressed me from a technological standpoint. When I finally decided to overcome my laziness and reverse-engineer something, the demo had already been available for quite some time, so I picked it.

Sorry for the long break. Let's continue digging through engines and games. :) As promised, the second Relic game under examination is the RTS Company Of Heroes. Product page: http://www.companyofheroesgame.com/ Without a doubt, it's an excellent game, but what interested me most was how different its renderer was from DoW 40K. The answer: radically different.

I don't think anyone would argue with the fact that Relic is an excellent company. Homeworld, Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War, and Company of Heroes are games that I enjoy very much. I decided to reverse-engineer Relic's latest titles, and started with W40K: DoW – Dark Crusade.

Today's patient is the Gothic 3 renderer. Problems started right from the beginning. Gothic absolutely refuses to run under PixWin. Some statically linked DLL fails during initialization. I tried debugging it, but unfortunately I don't have enough skill to solve the problem. :) That leaves NVPerfHUD. The developers forgot to remove its support from the code, so no forcing tricks were necessary. However, PerfHUD doesn't export all resources (Gothic crashes frequently), and finding the draw call you're interested in isn't particularly easy.

So there won't be many screenshots today.

An Ode to Bad Engineering, or Why NFS Carbon Runs So Poorly.

Buying a new graphics card always brings new expectations: beautiful effects in games, higher FPS, and general happiness for its owner. Unfortunately, these days a new graphics card (or CPU, or memory upgrade) often serves only to compensate for poor engineering. This is especially disappointing when world-famous developers and publishers allow themselves such technical incompetence at our expense.

Some time ago I reverse-engineered PainKiller's renderer, but only very superficially. Since my mini-investigation of FlatOut's renderer unexpectedly received very positive feedback, I decided to take a serious look at this undoubtedly excellent game. So why PainKiller? The reasons are similar to those that motivated me to investigate FlatOut. Although the game is already somewhat old, I still really like the image it produces. Considering its excellent rendering performance, the renderer deserves every bit of praise.

I decided to reverse-engineer FlatOut 2's renderer. The reason is simple: games that both look great and run fast are not that common. The findings below may be useful to anyone building their own racing game :)