Unreleased Game – Drift 2015

Drift was an internal prototype from around 2010 on Xbox 360 and PS3. It was a fun stunt based vehicle game and later led to the commercial development of Hot Wheels Worlds Best Driver. In 2014/15 though, I used this code-base as a test-bed for updating the Octane engine for DirectX 11 (all previous released titles on PC were DX9) and PS4/Xbox One. (PS4 used GNMX on top of GNM). The art team used it as a test-bed for creating PBR textures and materials using packages such as Substance Designer and Quixel Suite.

Of course, in the days of Unreal and Unity providing PBR there’s nothing particularly technically advanced here, but doing everything from first principles as it were is quite satisfying. I took some screenshots at the time which look quite nice. I also re-used some ‘last gen’ effects such as crepuscular rays and per pixel velocity blur, but with the more powerful hardware was able to ramp up the number of samples per pixel so they look so much nicer!