Treyarch defends Call Of Duty Engine

"It runs at 60 and it's gorgeous," says game design director David Vondehaar

Treyarch game design director David Vondehaar has defended the 7 year old Call Of Duty engine it inherited from Infinity Ward, which it's currently using a version of for Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2.

"Anybody who comes at the engine needs to remember it's the 60 frames they love in the first place," Vondehaar told OXM.

"And we can make it beautiful - that's through years and years of working with the engine, improving upon it and improving the pipeline and improving our approach, our lighting rendering."

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2 uses the IW Engine, first used for Call Of Duty 2 in 2005. It was a modified version of id Tech 3. It has since been used for the Call Of Duty series and the Bond title Quantum of Solace, with new features and improvements added with each release.

"People like to talk about the engine, but the truth of the matter is that this isn't like something that was invented six years ago. At this point that engine doesn't resemble anything like any engine - we've ripped out the UI system, the rendering and the lighting are all new, the core gameplay systems are all new."

"To me, it's like I never really understood. It runs at 60 and it's gorgeous. What exactly is there to be upset about with the engine?"

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2 is due for release this year using the IW 3.0 engine.

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Latest comments (7)

Hugo Dubs Interactive Designer 7 years ago

They may like their engine but CoDs clearly have dirty graphics. Nothing new in the HUD, textures, and other visual aspects of the game. It's ugly... I was hoping they would do something about it on Black Ops 2.

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Greg Knight Freelance Developer 7 years ago

Trigger's broom.

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Pier Castonguay Programmer 7 years ago

Treyarch just don't have a programmer team to do it and don't plan to hire one. Infinity Ward improved the engine a lot with every iterations and that's what made the success of Call of Duty. Treyarch are just ruining it (biggest complaint is that every last CoD games look-alike). Sure it runs at 60fps (in fact 300fps), but a newer one would also runs at 60fps so that's not an excuse at all. I looks great compared to other games, but not "gorgeous" as it could with newest techs.

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Supul Jayawardane Freelance Writer/Software Engineer 7 years ago

With the kind of particle effects and explosions needed for a game like COD, moving to a better engine would severely hamper performance on a current gen console. I think they are waiting till the next console cycle to update their engines proper. We might not see that also since the BLOPS2 PC version seems to have some uncharacteristically PC only graphics features. So they might be prepping the engine for the next gen by investing on the PC version. Usually the PC version is given step mother treatment by both IW and Treyarch. So the change of heart might be to prepare for the next gen consoles that might show in time for the next COD released after BLOPS 2.

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Andrew Goodchild Studying development, Train2Game7 years ago

I've never got into CoD, but at the end of the day, the thing of utmost import is if the fans are still enjoying it. If fans of the multiplayer perceive it as an improvement, and fans of the single player find the campaign interesting, that should be the most important thing.
On a side note, apparently Stephen King is using the same alphabet he has been using for well over 30 years. Scandelous.

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Craig Page El Presidente, Awesome Enterprises7 years ago

I don't love 60 frames per second, it doesn't look any better than 30 frames per second. I would be happier if they increased their engine's native resolution on consoles from the current 1280x704, which isn't even 720p.

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Laurens Bruins Jaywalker, Jaywalkers Interactive7 years ago

@Craig: It doesn't look better, but it certainly plays and feels better! As a gamer who's more concerned about the experience than pretty graphics; I love 60FPS! :)

(note: I'm not saying pretty graphics do not enhance the experience. Not every game needs 60FPS. Uncharted is perfectly fine on 30FPS and it's brilliant graphics certainly enhance the experience more than 60FPS would.)

@Tom: I haven't played much of the latest COD's, but was quite addicted to COD4 (Modern Warfare 1) on 360. That certainly runs at a rocksolid 50+FPS: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/call-of-duty-4-engine-analysis

For fast paced shooters and racegames, 60FPS makes, at least to me, a noticable difference.

Edited 2 times. Last edit by Laurens Bruins on 11th October 2012 2:58pm

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