PANOGAMES NEXT GEN SCREENSHOTS The founder Johnny Vaccaro uncovers the genesis of the project and showcases some of the best gaming screen shots ever realized. by MT
We had a nice and interesting talk with Johnny Vaccaro, the founder of Panogames.com. Started in December 2005, attracting thousands of visitors every day, Panogames has become the leading online source for 3D panoramic screenshots of video games titles.Johnny, please tell to our readers more about your personal and professional background. I studied architecture at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), and earned my degrees in 1997. During my studies I was very passionate about 3D virtual reality. Since then I had started, with a couple of friends, to render some scenes and to code VRML spaces. It was 1991. What I considered fascinating, was the possibility to conceive a room space and to take a walkthrough thanks to our Silicon farm. It was amazing. Apart from this, I was working a lot with some prehistoric versions of CAD software: Microstation, Archicad and Strata 3D.How, when and why did you come up with the idea to shoot panoramas inside video games? Well...nice question. In 1999 I tried my first shot inside Unreal (version 1), the game by Epicgames, ported to Macintosh by Macsoft. During that time I was designing some multiplayer maps and, in order to post some screenshots to the Unreal community, I did the first panoramic view. I did not close the picture into a QTVR format, because I wanted to give to the players the chance to sense how big my environment map was. Actually, it was a 2D picture. The idea to make panoramics inside game levels sprung up when I first saw HalfLife 2. It was amazing to see such a realistic water and so beautifully designed environments. I ran the game with full graphics specs and I was watching the game at its "full power". A friend of mine did not have a great rig so told him to give me 30 minutes, in order to let him inside what I was seeing on my PC. It was my second panoshot. As soon as he saw the first one, he asked me for 15 more...What "virtual" equipment and tools do you use to capture the images required to create next generation high quality screenshots (interactive fullscreen panoramas)? It depends on the 3D realtime rendering engine. There are games where I can just change some .ini settings like Camera X, Y and Z axis, or FOV. In other realtime engine I can just disable some display features like HUDs or Clippings in order to shoot.What software do you use to stitch and retouch the images ? All of Panogames panoramic screenshots are created with REALVIZ Stitcher unlimited. The equirectanguar images are photo-retouched in Photoshop CS.How did panogames.com start? Panogames started the first of December 2005. The first released game panoramic's screenshots were from...can you guess?...HalfLife 2. I then posted in some forums the news, saying that I had done some cool panos showing the great features that Source engine can display. We consequently had a huge traffic on our servers, and thereon I told myself that I could have prepared a second game.
How were the feedbacks received by the gaming industry and the panogames.com audience? After the release of the second article, with panoramic screenshots taken into GTR racing game, we received the first call from the gaming biz. The publisher asked me to do some screenshots for the upcoming titles, to be used for press release's purposes. They were really impressed about how we could display games. You have to know that nowadays, games titles have a production time of several years. Before releasing the game, publishers create buzz and murmurs around the title either to get first impressions, or - of course - to start selling the game. And the publisher has two possibilities to present a new game: a demo version or still screenshots to the gaming press. Considered that preparing a demo is highly expensive, the industry usually delivers screenshots and the gamers decide to buy the game from these. Hence, the better the screenshot, the more you sell....now, could you imagine screenshots where you put an addicted gamer directly into the middle of the action? This is panogames secret...
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Can you tell us about some success stories of projects you realized for Panogames? Which are the bases on which you decide to shot a certain publication? Well, we do screen shots for publishers before game is released. So the players' pool sees for the first time the game through our work. When we did STALKER, for THQ publisher, it was the first time in six years that players were seeing a picture. From the beginning we were choosing titles by their technological aspects. This means that we used to shot the best ones out there, with the up to date display tech available. All the games we have, are ranked in the top 20 charts.
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Can you tell us which are the major companies that panogames.com helped, by promoting their new game titles? Our references? Atari, THQ, 10Tacle, Focus Interactive, Koch Media, Blizzard, Ascaron...We were even contacted by Sony Entertainment America, but I cannot tell you more about that yet!
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How did the existence of panogames.com affect the gaming industry publications? are there already followers of this technique? I saw some gamers trying to do on their own some panoramic screen shots and post them to community forums. The standards of quality, by the way, are still low. To shot in a regular way - in fact - you have to understand what is going on in any rendering engine, from First Person Shooters, to RTS, MMORP, adventure or racing games. Gaming industry is cutting costs, buying middleware software, as for example rendering engine. You have to understand the rendering machine, in order to "panogamally shot".
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Which are your plans for the future of Panogames.com? I would like to extend first our coverage. What we do now are screenshots from PC titles. But it would be gorgeous to use the same technique to cover console games, from Xbox to PS3 and - naturally - Wii. We will see what the future holds...
We had a nice and interesting talk with Johnny Vaccaro, the founder of 
