The Witcher (game)

The Witcher is a computer role-playing game in development for the PC by CD Projekt. Based on the book series of the same name by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, the game utilizes BioWare's proprietary Aurora Engine and is currently slated for release in 2007.

The Witcher follows the story of Geralt, a man who becomes a "witcher" — a travelling monster hunter for hire gifted with unnatural powers. Taking place in a medieval world, the game implements detailed visuals. The natural light during various phases of the day is realistically altered, and the day and night transitions serve to enrich the game's ambience. The weather can dynamically change from a light drizzle to a dark, stormy downpour accompanied by thunder and lightning.

Game Engine
The Witcher is powered by a new version of the BioWare Aurora Engine, modified for a single-player experience. A number of changes have been introduced to the original BioWare Aurora Engine, and some of them are described below.

World visualization
One of the most important of which is modification to the world-visualization method. In BioWare's Aurora Engine, the world is designed exactly as it was envisioned rather than utilizing a tile-based system. Because of this, the visuals are claimed to be unique and rich in detail. All the environments are created in 3ds Max and then exported into the game engine.
 * Light maps
 * The CD Projekt's version of the engine supports lightmaps, generated in 3ds Max. Shadows generated this way are claimed to look more realistic and are better performance-wise.


 * Texture paint
 * This is a special tool that enables to paint the environment using custom textures, with purpose of saving the time and promising more natural look than ordinary mapping.


 * Skybox and water effects
 * New realistic skybox and water effects were added to the engine.

Rendering
All the in game and tool set rendering is done using DirectX9, and the engine now supports many different shaders (water effect, bump mapping, environment mapping, etc). Additionally the whole rendering system has been unified and a new light manager was added.

Other changes
Other important changes include the following: motion-captured animation, physics effects, new mechanics and combat system. There are also many other modifications, like introduction of portals, additional graphical effects (glows, advanced dynamic shadows, blurs)