The other interesting video I wanted to talk about real quick is Peter’s Camera Hack demonstrations.
The most recent one up on our channel is from our Silent Hill 4 Let’s Play, and I think it’s really interesting what it shows, in terms of…how they do things to put the game together.
So, here’s the video:
One of the first things in the bedroom window, where it shows how…looking outside the window works, so there’s a little box outside the window with a low resolution view, so when you click the window to actually look at it, what you’re looking at is something else, that’s rendered elsewhere, it isn’t part of the main room level/model. The same is true for the front door.
We then look through all of the pictures which is the more interesting part, the reflections on the pictures aren’t done with some fancy programmed reflective surface, there is actually just another version of the room on the other side of the picture, blurred and low resolution to look like the reflection. These extra rooms are also just the complete room, rather than specifically what the game developers were sure you’d need to see in the picture frame. These box rooms also change in colour along with the day night cycle that happens throughout the game.
Each of the rooms in the apartment exists separately, so we have the door loading thing.
We also got to see the dismembered/dis-embodied head right at the end there, and how it simply pops in and pops out when it’s in and out of view of the player (usually).
I think the room reflections part is the most interesting part, essentially. Especially compared to the previous Camera Hack video for Silent Hill 2, which I’ll add here:
In this video you can see that the whole room’s and character models are reproduced whenever there is a mirror, in actually quite high resolution. So in rooms with mirrors, there are actually two rendered rooms, and two rendered characters that you are controlling at the same time to get a really high quality mirror effect.
As an aside you can see the how to/how it was done video for the Cam Hack here.