Video games: Building a world of ‘Modern Warfare’
BURBANK, Calif. — The bones of the game were laid with drones and cameras, phone calls and questions, requirements and innovations. Rather than a fanciful brainstorm followed by code and keystrokes, as many would assume of a video game’s creation process, the latest title in the ever-expanding “Call of Duty” pantheon formed around research and revelations, groundwork for a multi-million-dollar development process representative of the modern, multi-billion-dollar gaming industry.
It’s a process that required a marriage of technological innovation and well-sourced storytelling, with the goal to produce the most realistic portrayal possible of modern armed conflict by a video game. It will culminate Oct. 25 with the release of “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare,” a title developed by Infinity Ward studio that figures to be one of the top-selling games – if not the top-selling game – of 2019. And its content has already been authenticated by two men who know well the game’s subject matter.
The green-tinted footage plays on the Infinity Ward theater screen as lethal silhouettes sporting night vision creep through a house. Threats are assessed and eliminated, the silence broken by the crackle of comms and the rattle of gunfire.
Mitch Hall and Steve Sanders, both retired U.S. Navy SEALs, watch a scene that looks as if it were captured by a body camera during one of their past deployments. In the back of the theater, Infinity Ward Studio Narrative Director Taylor Kurosaki and Jacob Minkoff, “Modern Warfare’s” campaign gameplay director, listen along with several others while Hall narrates the action. He explains the mechanics of the soldiers’ movements and the rationale of their lethal decision-making as the on-screen sequence reaches its climax. Special operatives from the British SAS storm the attic of a terrorist-occupied town home and spot a woman standing in the center of the room.
“No weapon, that’s the first thing,” Hall says of what his training has taught him to see. “That’s the first math problem you have. She seems, at least for the moment, compliant. And so that compliance gives us some time to do some more math and figure out if she’s going to remain compliant.”
She does not and falls to a burst of suppressed gunfire after diving for a detonator.
“I keep saying ‘the math,’” Hall continues, reminding the audience in the theater of what the soldiers in the game had encountered in the house before this scene, with nearly every person in the house proving hostile. “All those floors, you keep doing the math. She had a chance to do the right thing. Then she made the bad choice.”
If the bones of “Modern Warfare” were first set three years earlier, the action on the screen is the game’s body brought to life. It illustrates the tension of the game’s script with the tactics demonstrated by real-world soldiers, a blend the game’s creators hope brings a level of believability no “Call of Duty” game has reached before now.
Infinity Ward began to infuse more reality into its creation by quite literally putting more reality into the game. Behind a nondescript door and inside a white-walled room of approximately 100 square feet in the bowels of Infinity Ward’s Burbank, Calif., studio sits a kind of teleportation device.
A cage of steel surrounds a small white platform, its exterior draped with cables to cameras and flash-bulbs. Any item placed on that platform – anything from a used cigar to a fullgrown man – can be transported into the game with the push of a button.
“It’s just a big ball of light,” Barry Sloane says of his recollection of the rig. Sloane, the actor who plays the hero role of SAS soldier Captain Price, was just one of the thousands of objects teleported into the pixels of “Modern Warfare.”
The process is known as photogrammetry, a craft through which the Infinity Ward team captured high-resolution photos of an object from every angle, stitching them together to generate a three-dimensional digital replica they can then alter and manipulate using their software. The end result is a photo-realistic digital item far more lifelike than any computer-generated object.
Not only is the result more realistic, but the process is more efficient than the common practice of building a digital asset via computer generation. With photogrammetry, what used to take six weeks to create can now be scanned and refined in one, according to Infinity Ward Studio Art Director Joel Emslie. Over the past three years, everything from old tires to demolished cars to a tank have been scanned into “Modern Warfare.”
To help create a more realistic environment for “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare,” the developers at Infinity Ward employed photogrammetry, the process of creating a digital asset using high-resolution photographs of real-world objects. For video games, in-game objects are most commonly created by developers via computer generation, building each item from its basic shape and then working down to tiny details - a time-consuming process.
Photogrammetry instead records all of that information – size, shape and details – through a series of photos taken from every angle, producing a highly detailed digital re-creation in a significantly shorter time.
First, the object is photographed from all possible angles. Infinity Ward’s rig consists of 200 cameras all connected to shoot simultaneously, allowing them to capture all the data they need in under a second.
Those photographs are then stitched together to create a three-dimensional digital version of the object.
That digital object contains millions of tiny polygons to give the object its shape, and while it results in a super-detailed asset, it also requires a lot of processing power for a computer or console to display it for the user. So, a little more work is required to scale down the detail.
“If you were to just build a character from scratch in software it could take six weeks to do all that work, and a lot of that time is to work on the little nuances, the subtleties, the paint chips and things. That’s what really takes time,” Emslie says. But with photogrammetry, the photography captures the details for you.
“Building a costume for real and just going out and hiking in it ... or rub some old teabags on it to make it look old, that’s incredibly easier to do in the physical world rather than doing it digitally, where you’re using software to simulate all that wear and tear,” Emslie says.
The process also has a side benefit in terms of creativity, Emslie says. Putting hands on real-world objects and costumes brings the creators deeper into the game’s universe. Emslie compares the vibe to the early work of Industrial Light and Magic, the shop that brought the world of “Star Wars” to life in the late 1970s and early 1980s and helped revolutionize Hollywood special effects.
The prop procurement process can sometimes lead to some awkward situations, however.
There was one time when Emslie’s team drew a curious glance at the checkout counter of a local hardware store when they purchased items to replicate an improvised bomb. (“I’m probably on so many watch lists,” says Madison Cromwell, a producer at Infinity Ward.) There was also the time they grabbed a used mattress they’d spotted on the side of the road, only to be advised against bringing it inside the studio for fear of bed bugs. They scanned it in a back lot instead.
“We turn into kind of mad scientists with this stuff,” Emslie says.
Their experiments however have provided a life-like, super-detailed setting in which the plot of “Modern Warfare” plays out. But it also brought an additional challenge to the creative process. The computational power required for such sleek graphics from the photogrammetry, along with demands relating to scaling and rendering while maintaining a smooth game-playing experience, made it clear the game would require a stronger framework.
Work began on “Modern Warfare’s” new game engine five years ago and will continue even after its release. During that process, Activision opened an engine technology-focused studio in Krakow, Poland, to handle the task. Rendering high-def graphics at high speeds (the goal is 60 frames per second) requires a big technological lift. To that end, Infinity Ward’s developers needed new tools for the job.
“Once the studio decided to make ‘Modern Warfare,’ our engineering teams sat down with the art and design departments to discuss the vision for the game. Immediately, it became clear that it would have been impossible with the previous technology to build a game with this ambition,” says Michael Drobot, Infinity Ward’s principal rendering engineer.
Drobot’s team tinkered and tweaked and ultimately innovated. Now the engine can handle both a massive battle on a wide-open field and a claustrophobic, close-quarters encounter. In the latter, the engine permits players to angle their weapons independently of the direction the character’s body is facing so they can make better use of available cover while firing, a real-life tactic used by special forces when breaching a room.
“‘Modern Warfare’s’ engine can allow our designers to scale the theater of action from tiny backyard alleys, all the way to city-scale maps, while providing the same level of features, quality and immersion,” Drobot says.
Also of note was the way the team incorporated combat using night vision. Previous titles have simply tinted the screen green to simulate the effect. For “Modern Warfare,” Drobot’s team fully rendered the infrared spectrum.