Latest SSX snowboarding game gets a little help with realism from NASA

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The SSX snowboarding series is well known for its over-the-top courses, but the latest installment to the series is proving that the truth is more extreme than fiction.

In the latest SSX game, released February 28, game designers got a leg-up from NASA in designing courses that look and perform more like the real mountains of Planet Earth. According to a story on Ars Technica, the team used ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) topography data to give them a boost in creating realistic level designs, basing the games nine major mountain ranges on their real-life counterparts.

The Ars story says the team was struggling to create mountains in the game, until they realized that much of the world's natural geography would prove for a far more enjoyable snowboarding experience.

"We were doing a lot of research of real-life mountains and the mountains themselves we were generating just didn't have any of the kind of personality and unique features of some of the craziest mountains we were seeing that actually exist in the world," Todd Batty, EA Sports producer and creative director, told Ars.

The ASTER data was easily converted into a starting point for the level designs and was then tweaked to include details the ASTER data didn't pick up, like trees and rocks. The designers also made sure that each course had the jumps and grinds that fans of SSX have come to expect from the series.

To maximize the extreme topography of the mountain ranges featured in the game, each range has a "deadly descent," what Joystiq likens to a "boss battle" in their review. These are the most difficult drops in the game, forcing players to rely heavily on a particular style or feature of gameplay in order to succeed. In the Joystiq review, writer Ben Gilbert doesn't have much nice to say about them, but hey, if you're basing it on real mountains, that's the lay of the land, right?

The design team says that the biggest draw for these levels is how natural the world feels when compared to the mountains created purely through programming.

"Nature, over thousands of years, does some incredible, crazy things to terrain," said Batty in the Ars story. "If we were doing it by hand we'd be trying to experiment and recreate stuff that, in nature, is found all over the place."

(Image from www.ea.com/ssx)