Prospector (2006)

The Prospector demo showcases the powerful graphics features of the Instinct Engine Runtime. It was created using the editing tools provided in Instinct Engine Studio.

The demo also functions as an internal development test-bed, as it demonstrates a complex outdoor environment with next-gen data requirements (12,000 polygon main character with unique texture coverage in the scene via 2048px maps). The scene uses a large volume of data, including geometry, textures, materials, animations, particle systems and sounds.

The initial version of the Prospector demo created for GDC ’06 used a brute force approach and suffered from relatively poor performance, primarily due to a very high number of draw calls being issued per frame. After intensive work to improve our rendering and scene management systems, we have been able to achieve a performance increase on PC and consoles of roughly 1000%. We introduced a hierarchical batching system in conjunction with a deferred rendering approach which helped to achieve a significant reduction in draw calls. The current version uses more graphics “eye-candy” features than the original, such as post-processing effects, while still retaining high frame rates.