The-Witcher.de Interview with Daniel Sadowski

The community and the staff of The-Witcher.de are curious to get answers from engine programmer Daniel Sadowski to the following questions:

The-Witcher.de: Daniel, please tell us something about your task in the team of CD Projekt Red. What are your responsibilities in the Witcher project?

Daniel Sadowski: During the development of the Witcher I was responsible for the implementation and maintenance of the game's two final incarnations of the user interface. However, during the development of the Enhanced Edition I was also working on implementing changes to the game's rendering engine, such as the character differentiation system, thanks to which many of the secondary NPCs won't all look exactly the same.

The-Witcher.de: You said on several occasions you revamped about 80 percent of the engine. Wouldn't it have been more convenient and cheaper to develope completely your own engine? An engine which verifies all your requirements?

Daniel Sadowski: Many many years ago, before I even thought about working in game development industry and at CD Projekt RED studio, the plans were made to create a game based on the world and characters of Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher saga. A small team was gathered and initially the decision was to create the engine in-house. However, as time went by, the CEOs decided to look for technological alternatives and eventually came to the conclusion that acquiring a licence for a well-known and
complete engine would be a better choice and would greatly enhance the development process. In retrospect it's hard to say if developing out own engine would be a better choice – for many people this project was a first project of such scale and complexity when it comes to games, so perhaps it was good that we could start out with an existing technology and simply modify it to suit our needs. I think we saved a lot of development time by starting out with Aurora – we could jump straight into the development process.

The-Witcher.de: You all decided to use the Bioware Auroa engine for the developement of The Witcher. What were advantages of the Bioware engine towards other engines?

Daniel Sadowski: The main advantage was that at the time, Aurora engine was the only complete engine built with RPGs in mind. Obviously there were other engine's such as Unreal for example, however again the fact that Aurora was an RPG engine worked towards its advantage. If we decided to acquire a different engine we would first need to heavily modify it to even make it possible for an RPG to run on it. With Aurora we could begin creating content right away, while working on modifying and
improving its gameplay and rendering elements.

The-Witcher.de: Did you come up to the limits with the Aurora engine regarding The Witcher? Or do you think there is much more possible?

Daniel Sadowski: I believe there is always room for improvement. So yes, as far as Aurora is concerned, given enough time and resources some improvement could be made. However, you need to remember that the engine was created years ago and right now it's a very old-gen engine compared to the standards set by the new productions. Obviously, changes could be made for the engine to reach the quality and efficiency of the new ones, but given the amount of changes that would have to be made to it, we would pretty much eventually end up with a greatly rewritten engine. Again.

The-Witcher.de: For the Enhanced Edition you announced a significant improvement for performance (up to 80 percent). How do you attempt to achieve these improvements? And what do you intend to do in particular for the distressed Vista gamers?

Daniel Sadowski: We are working very hard to ensure that the Enhanced Edition is both stable and efficient. Optimizations are made to ensure the loading times are faster than in the original edition and we're working to track down any problems with memory and resource management to ensure the game is stable on both XP and Vista. Right now, there are no strictly Vista-related problems and crashes – many of them were actually eliminated by system updates.

The-Witcher.de: There is much talk about converting The Witcher to a XBox360 version. Irrespective of the dev team's decision, what do you think are the most difficulties to port The Witcher to this platform?

Daniel Sadowski: The biggest problem would be converting all of the content to a console version, especially since the game was built with strictly PCs in mind. All of the gameplay and quest systems would have to be rewritten from scratch and all of the user interfaces and controls would need to be redesigned to fit the specifications (and in some cases limitations) set by the console controllers. Pretty much the
whole game would have to be remade from scratch, and that would probably be the biggest problem with a theoretical conversion.

The-Witcher.de: And in conclusion… what kind of car do you have?

Daniel Sadowski: Well... Before I started working at CD Projekt RED I didn't really feel the need to have a car, as getting from home to academy and back in a bus wasn't a big deal for me – especially if equipped with something good to read or listen to. But right now, as I'm striving to wrap up my master's degree studies (just one semester to go!) it becomes a bit problematic to get from one place to another in time. So as far as having a car – I'm working towards finally getting one. :)

The-Witcher.de: Thank you very much for the interview.
Daniel Sadowski: My pleasure. :)