The Chinese Room studio has released a fresh video day of the vampire action developers Vampire: The Masquarade – Bloodlines 2, in which the technical director Nick is Glory and his deputy Andrea Sansio shared the experience of working with the Unreal Engine 5 engine.
With the release of UE5, the situation has changed dramatically by providing games developers with a number of innovative technologies and tools. Among them, Sansio distinguishes primarily Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps and Lumen. These technologies played a key role in creating a realistic and gloomy world, which perfectly corresponds to the artistic direction of the game in the neo-nuar style.
An important milestone in our development was the transition from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5, ”said Sansio. – It was a great risk, because usually you record the version of your engine in advance. The changes affected each part of the game, and all our scenes, lighting and resources had to convert. All developers’ teams spoke brilliantly with us to make sure that new tools are exactly what we need to make the game look amazing and work smoothly.
Lumen is a new real -time global lighting technology, which brings the level of realism to gaming lighting by tracing rays that simulates the path of light and its interaction with surfaces and materials. He can imitate indirect (reflected) lighting and reflection. Lumen allows you to change the color, position and intensity of many light sources that can change dynamically. Therefore, to find the best way to include these new light sources, programmers spent a lot of time working with artists.
Virtual shadow cards made a fundamental change in how we process shadows in Unreal Engine 5. Separating the resolution of shadows from the screen resolution, this technology provides incredibly clear shadows with minimal performance costs. The implementation of virtual maps of the shadows demanded that the team rethinking the methods of discarding shadows and rendering, but the result was a noticeable improvement in visual quality.
According to Sansio, Nanite marks a seismic shift in constructing the geometry of locations in games. Instead of relying on traditional systems of detail (LOD), Nanite virtualizes geometry, allowing detailed resources and performance. With the help of nanite, all nets that use the same material are placed in the so -called “basket” and processed in the same call of the rendering, which significantly reduces their number. This reduces the difficulty of creating resources, but also opens doors for photorealistic media, which were previously unattainable.