The german Magazin PC Games Hardware published an interview with Carsten Edenfeld, Oliver Höller and Kurt Pelzer from Piranha Bytes in the edition of 06/2004. With friendly permission of the PC Games' hardware editorial staff we are allowed to publish a large part (75 %) of the interview. Questions concerning the 64-bit technology and SSE/SSE2 whose answers didn't reveal something relevant for the Gothic series have been left out.

Carsten:

That's right. The engine used in Gothic 1/2/Add-on is a complete proprietary development and remittance work respectively. Only a few, smaller additional modules like the Miles-Sound-System have been licensed. The technology used for Gothic 3 has little relation to the previous one indeed. The new engine is a mixture of various licensed modules and SDK's as well as self developed software. To generate an own physics engine that exceeds basic features would be too extensive.

Oliver:

Yes, we licensed this system in order to be able to realize the animations for Gothic 3 which are complex compared with those from Gothic 1/2/Add-on.

Oliver:

This system provides all modern features you could expect of an external animation system. Two of these features are for example Hardware-Skinning and Normalmap-Support. Generally the resource requirements depend on the size of the animation data. However, we don't expect heavy burdens in reference to performance and resources.

Carsten:

Of course, Gothic is a very AI-intensive game. Just consider the complex social systems as well as the natural behavior of all the individual NPC's. Nevertheless, the CPU-performance which is required for the AI is not that problematic. As the AI system used by us shows an adequate performance eventual bottlenecks could rather be found in other areas of the game.

Carsten:

The methods used in the basis-renderer are out of date for the high number of polygons and the concentration of objects applied nowadays and they limitate the achieveable performance. Dynamic vertex buffers for example are produced in each frame in order to render the polygons sorted for materials.

Oliver:

Gothic 3 will certainly benefit from Hyper-Threading because especially the new engine and the new rendering technology will make use of Multi-Threading.

Kurt:

We have been in contact with Intel for some time now but concrete collaboration hasn't started yet. It's likely that close cooperation will begin in the course of the actual development (Gothic 3) but it still stays open to which extent this will happen.

Kurt:

As is generally known Gothic 1/2/Add-on build up on DirectX 7.0. There will be a big jump to the version 9.0b which is currently the basis for our development. Soon the change to version 9.0c will be applied. If there is another update until the release of Gothic 3 we may consider it as well.

Kurt:

We will use pixel shaders to a large extent in Gothic 3. Depending on the display quality choosen and the hardware available this will be versions 1.1 to 1.4, 2.0 and 3.0. The main field of application for pixel shaders are complex lighting calculations as well as image-postprocessing for subsequent modifications of the visible scenes (e.g.: Glow, Blur, Fog and similar effects).

Kurt:

At the moment we don't use shaders of version 2.x. If it's worthwhile to support this spezial profile like version 1.4 separately that remains to be seen.

Kurt:

Depending on the hardware available and the desired display quality different technology levels will be activated. The lowest fallback-mode will require DirectX-8.0 features, for example Vertex Shader of version 1.1 per Hardware-Processing. So we will support all CPU generations down to the Geforce3-/Radeon-8500-class.

Kurt:

We are in close contact with both companies. This includes especially support by e-mail and telephone as well as on-site visits.