Welcome to the fourth and final partof our exclusive inquisition with Infinity Ward's Rob Bowling

At midnight tonight Modern Warfare finally hits shelves. NowGamer had the final chance to gather in-depth recon straight from Infinity Ward's ouspoken mouthpiece, Rob Bowling. Here is the fourth and final part...

NowGamer: There’s a hell of a lot going on there. How is the tech coping?

Rob Bowling: Well, the tech is extremely important because it allows you to do things with the gameplay that matter. If you’re talking about the engine, you should explain what’s new in the engine, but make sure you get across exactly why it’s important. Most people aren’t programmers. So texture streaming for example is a new thing in the engine, and why it’s important is because it allows us to do these much bigger worlds, which results in being able to choose your own gameplay from a much more open path and then introduce the dynamic AI to make use of the new open world. Texture streaming also allows us to fit more detail in the vicinity of the player so you can have all those dynamic things that respond to your fire. So that tech… all tech… affects the gameplay.

NG: So using your own engine has made all of this computer magic possible?

RB: We’ve built the technology up from the ground and we know it inside out and that really just allows us that fast iteration time. We can quickly swap things in and out which would normally take another developer a long time because we know everything. We know how the engine works. We can get the most out of it without having to rely on anybody else. It just allows us to do much more and plus, we have the freedom to realise our limitations and address them. So we realised in Call Of Duty 4 that in order to do this, we need this and we can just add it into the engine with very little fuss and just build up from that.

NG: But what happens if new stuff slows the frame rate? Call Of Duty games by Infinity Ward never seem to stutter.

RB: It’s because we have a quality bar where we refuse to put anything in the game that’s below that. Any feature we add to the game or to the engine has to keep things at sixty frames per second. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t go in. That’s the bottom line.

NG: So how does that work in terms of resource trade-offs? A more detailed hat drops the framerate, but not if you take a branch or two off that tree, for example. How are those things decided upon?

RB: We actually get together and have a team discussion where we decide how each little facet effect’s the player. We might see a guy clip through a wall and we have to ask; is it more important that no one clips throughout the entire game, or is it more important to focus on whether or not this other feature works properly? It’s about putting things in order of priority from the stuff that has the most impact on the actual game to the least. Polish is very important, so you never want to leave anything in the game that breaks the immersion, you never want anything in the game that takes the player out, and you can obviously never put anything in the game that makes you feel like you’re not in control.

NG: You mentioned a quality bar, does that apply to audio too?

… continued