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Killzone 3 will be hitting shelves February 22nd, and is expected to usher in stereoscopic gaming in a big way.  The developers have spent countless hours tweaking various game aspects to make the stereoscopic experiences one of the best available, and found themselves answering several odd questions about elements typically forgotten, like crosshairs.

When playing a shooting game, cross hairs often appear on the screen to help the player aim and shoot enemies. But these cross hairs aren’t supposed to be an actual physical object a game character could touch or run into. Ter Heide said the “Killzone 3″ team has had to spend time figuring out at what depth to place those cross hairs within the 3-D world and how to make them move across the varying levels of the world’s ever-changing environment in a way that isn’t jarring to the player.

The same goes for other elements of the “heads up display” – a set of menus and items that gamers often see on the screen that give them important bits of information about things like ammunition levels, directions and the state of the character’s health. Ter Heide said they’ve had to figure out where these various informational devices should “live” in the game.

via Technolog – ‘Killzone 3′ makers run into unexpected challenges going 3-D.

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Jan-Bart van Beek is Art Director at Guerrilla, the video game company responsible for the Killzone series popular on the Playstation.  In an interview with CGSociety, he gets into the details of how they built the characters for the new KILLZONE2 and the difficulties in modeling for real-time systems.

An average character will go through ten feedback and review cycles. After the model is signed off, the character artists at Guerrilla often spend an additional week tuning the character, textures and shaders before it’s truly done. One of the reasons for this additional week of polishing is that our game engine has its own unique look.

We use Maya’s Hypershader system for editing and tuning our shader, since that system works well and most Maya artists are already familiar with it. Of course, it’s been vastly expanded upon with additional nodes, creating shader effects that Maya doesn’t normally support. The lighting in Killzone is based on Image-Based Lighting, a technique also used in movie special effects. The only way to properly evaluate the way the shader interacts with the lighting is to see it in the game engine itself.

CGSociety – KILLZONE 2.

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