Q&A With Magicka Developer, Arrowhead Game Studios
Tom's Hardware talks with Arrowhead Game Studios' Patrik Lasota and Anton Stenmark about its new PC game Magicka and the recently-released Vietnam-based DLC, DirectX, Intel's place in the GPU market, and the studio's use of deferred shading.
Magicka's Use Of Deferred Shading
Personally, I didn't experience any issues with the game. In fact, the only setback I suffered was that Magicka refused to run on my laptop using Intel's integrated GPU (which was recently sold off in favor of something more capable). Frustrated, I headed into the forums to discover numerous other players having various issues, other than what I was experiencing.
It took a little digging to find out that Magicka doesn't support integrated GPUs, and won't play on an Intel graphics engine at all. That didn't seem to make sense, given that the laptop could run StarCraft II and Torchlight. But a commenter correctly pointed out that larger developers have the time and money to extend testing to a larger variety of hardware. Small studios like Arrowhead don't have that luxury. Given that many mainstream laptops feature Intel integrated graphics already, it would seem that the exclusion would lock out a large chunk of potential customers.
There was also mention that Magicka uses Shader Model 3.0 (part of DirectX 9.0c), which can play havoc with older, mainstream integrated graphics. Many forum members weren't too pleased that the game wouldn't run on their laptops, despite the Diablo-like isometric viewpoint. But according to Anton Stenmark, lead programmer for Arrowhead Studios, the team actually chose to use deferred shading instead. This technique is currently being used in other games, including Battlefield 3, Crysis 2, both Dead Space games, and StarCraft II.
"We decided to use deferred shading as our primary rendering method after discussing the spells and effects we would use in Magicka," Stenmark says. "Deferred shading allows us to dynamically add and remove any number of light sources at any time. Deferred shading is theoretically possible to implement using Shader Model 2.0, but most cards that don’t support SM 3.0 would have horrid performance using this method."
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Ragnar-Kon Great game, that is for sure. Arguably the best $10 I've spent in my life.Reply
Also a great article, particularly regarding DirectX/OpenGL and APIs. I remember reading an article a while back talking about removing the API and coding on the hardware directly. Having done some DirectX/OpenGL work myself, the first thing that came to mind for me was "wooah, thats gonna take forever." Glad someone else on this planet agrees with me. Just not feasible for smaller studios.
Although he does seem to be a fan of DirectX, which I am not. Not only do I think OpenGL is easier to code with, using OpenGL could easily open up a whole new market for games, especially with the ever-increasing Mac popularity (not to mention make our Linux friends happy). -
jrnyfan This is one of my top 5 games I currently play, it's worth ~$20 but the fact that it is ~$10 makes it amazing. I haven't had this much fun in multiplayer since Goldeneye64...Reply -
cknobman I just picked up Torchlight off of Steam and am currently having a blast. Magicka looks very appealing, especially for $10, but reading reviews it seems as though the game is very very buggy and unpolished. As the game was released 4 months ago can anyone comment on the state of the game now? Have any of the bugs been fixed or is it something you just have to live with?Reply -
Bought this game on Steam a couple of weeks ago. It's fun, but be aware that multiplayer may not be on the standard that you're used to. It's very much P2P hosting, which comes with its usual problems of having the right ports open/forwarded. The hosting machine has the save file, so if the person who's been hosting isn't available, the rest of you will have to start anew. Dedicated server software is something that would be pretty desirable here.Reply
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teaser cknobmanI just picked up Torchlight off of Steam and am currently having a blast. Magicka looks very appealing, especially for $10, but reading reviews it seems as though the game is very very buggy and unpolished. As the game was released 4 months ago can anyone comment on the state of the game now? Have any of the bugs been fixed or is it something you just have to live with?So far ....21 updates since january,the game is in a much better state then it was on release day........Reply -
sirmorluk Best $10 I have ever spent. My 6 year old spends hours on it and has completed it a couple of times along with the Nam challenge. Me? Well I suck at it.Reply -
Camikazi sirmorlukBest $10 I have ever spent. My 6 year old spends hours on it and has completed it a couple of times along with the Nam challenge. Me? Well I suck at it.QRSAER as weapon enchantment or as AE spell is very helpful :) and FQFQAAS for a beam :)Reply