The new lighting model is definitely the largest step ahead. First, it produces much more realistic looks, can brighten as well as darken the environment and produces better defined shadows. It also renders much faster - Rendering a Max Payne 1 level took up to 24 hours with a distributed render farm of 20+ PCs. The new global illumination lighting, with a much more detailed level and higher light map resolution renders in ~1.5 hours with 10 PCs.
We’ve also added support for new materials such as mirrors, cube mapping, optimized the rendering, optimized the skinning etc. So the changes are certainly extensive.
Gameplay-wise, what are the most important changes from the original game?
For a Max Payne game, the most important mechanic is of course Bullet Time, and we think it has evolved quite nicely from the original. It certainly wasn’t easy to figure out what would work well and getting BT2.0 to its current form was a fairly iterative process.
Perhaps the second most important change would be physics - ragdolls add a lot to the feedback the player gets, and generic interactivity with physical objects just looks and feels “right”.
We’ve also improved storytelling with motion captured cinematics, even used stuntmen to perform some of the moves.
How are the wobbly-screen sequences that occur in various parts of the game achieved in terms of graphics technology?
It uses render targets and is basically a standard delay-frame motion blur. The wobble is an image warp effect that’s rendered with a dense grid and vertices are distorted procedurally.
The shadows in Max Payne 2 look nice, with its soft edges. How is this achieved technology-wise?
It’s a render-to-texture shadow with a pixel shader blur. The shadow is blurred and faded depending on the distance from the shadow caster. Additionally, the shadow direction and sharpness is calculated by sampling the environment. Shadow casting direction is determined by the primary light direction and sharpness by the light ambience of the environment.
The textures in Max Payne 2 also look good, with very crisp detail and looking almost photo-realistic. They don't look like they're high resolution textures... so what and how are they achieved?
The textures are fairly high resolution, with something like 128 texels per meter used as a rough guideline according to our level designers. This of course depends on the case; it doesn’t make sense to use this kind of accuracy with objects the player can’t get near to.
All textures are based on digital photography - whether from New York or Finland, with a few pictures taken from San Jose and San Antonio (GDC and Siggraph trips respectively). Basically, whenever there was an opportunity to take a texture shot, the guys did. For example we photographed storm clouds right out of our office window.
But a very large part of the looks is the global illumination lighting system. That breaks up annoying things like texture tiling and brings with it a gritty, realistic feel to the lighting and looks of the game. The radiosity / global illumination lighting is in my opinion one major thing that makes the Max Payne 2 games look unique.
