Here’s the action-packed new trailer for the upcoming Star Wars 1313 game from LucasArts (courtesy of IGN). It raises the level of VFX (with the help of the new Mari 1.5) and offers a very immersive experience.

The new, more adult-themed Star Wars 1313 offers a more compelling cinematic convergence, thanks to the first-time collaboration between LucasArts, ILM, Lucasfilm Animation and Skywalker Sound. We explore the underworld level 1313 of Coruscant, the Imperial capital, of which there are more than 5,000 levels. “LucasArts wanted to see how far they could push it so they have a lot of characters and exposition and they came to us at ILM and we did this hybrid team to see how far we could push the envelope,” explains ILM visual effects supervisor Kim Libreri. “For the last months, we’ve been working on performance capture —- taking ILM’s new techniques for facial capture and facial animation, plugging into their game engine, working with their engineers at LEC [LucasArts Entertainment Co.] to upgrade rendering algorithms so that we could light and composure shots that we’re familiar with in the visual effects world. The big difference being that this is 30 frames per second in real time. So I think the result is a very modern take on the video game.”

Libreri says there was a little compromise in the techniques that they use at ILM because of such quick turnaround times in gaming. But thanks to NVIDIA, their technology on the project, you can get a lot out of the GPU. In fact, they’ve been doing wonders together on the Plume GPU program for fire and smoke. “We have a lot of in-built knowledge at ILM as to how to make something look good with the kind of techniques that are built into a modern GPU, and we were able to introduce global illumination and ray tracing of the last half decade.”