A few days ago, during the Paris Games Week convention, I had the chance to speak with CJ Kershner (Senior Narrative Designer at Dambuster Studios) about Homefront: The Revolution, the upcoming open world FPS published by Deep Silver.
We had a long chat, and I also got the chance to ask him about the current frame rate/resolution that the studio is targeting for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the game. Apparently, they're shooting for 1080P@30 on both consoles, while there shouldn't be any lock for the PC version.
As far as I know, it will be FullHD. We're targeting 30FPS on consoles, and on PC it's whatever hardware you've got that you can throw at it. We're obviously constantly optimizing the engine and again, like I said, trying to make the most out of the hardware; those numbers shift depending where we are in development, but our final target is 30 on consoles.
He also confirmed that Homefront: The Revolution will use Physically Based Rendering and they are using the latest tech available for CryEngine to make it look as good as possible, with little touches such as water puddles drying when the sun comes out.
We do have Physically Based Rendering. Some of the more technical aspects I'm not totally up to date, but we're constantly adding new things to CryEngine 3 and optimizing it to really get the most of all the hardware that we got available.
One of the smaller touches that has absolutely no gameplay value is that, when it rains, there are puddles that form in the street and then when the sun comes out those puddles slowly dry up. It's hard to encourage players to just stand there and watch water evaporating, but it's one of those little touches that we've added that really makes the city feel very vibrant and dynamic and alive. We've also got a lot of other interesting things going on with our rendering, with our particle system; the goal is that every time a player enters an area, whether it's day, whether it's night, whether it's raining or it's foggy or clear, you get a very interesting and visually arresting scene as your playground.
You can now read the full interview on Homefront: The Revolution here, with many more interesting details on gameplay, story and the city of Philadelphia.
