GDC 2025 Session Viewer
Entities and Bricks: The Building Blocks of 'Hitman'
Kasper Fauerby (Technical Director, IO Interactive)
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Core Pass - Get your pass now!
Track: Programming
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: Intermediate
In the Glacier engine, almost everything is an entity! Since its inception during Hitman: Absolution's development, the entity system has evolved significantly, becoming integral to four successful AAA productions. The Brick sub-system has enabled hundreds of content updates for the Hitman trilogy, keeping the game alive for a decade with new modes, missions, and elusive targets. In this talk, Kasper Fauerby, Technical Director at IO Interactive, will explore the entity system's features and provide technical insights into its core aspects, such as memory layout, type system, and streaming. He will demonstrate how a robust entity system and a studio-wide focus on its utilization have allowed IO Interactive to implement advanced features efficiently, despite a small development team. This includes high-level visual scripting in Hitman games and the new "CoreLogic" visual scripting language used in all current projects.
Takeaway
Attendees will learn how the Glacier entity system has been designed to be both lightweight and powerful, and gain insights into the many ways it is used throughout all our tech and game productions at IO Interactive. They will also discover how we utilize our Brick system to create content that is highly reusable and easily maintainable. They will hopefully leave inspired to experiment with some of the more unconventional ideas in their own game engines.
Intended Audience
This talk is for tools and engine programmers with an interest in entity systems and how they can efficiently be implemented and used for level structure and setups. It's also for programmers with an interest in visual scripting or other graph-based setups.
