A Dive into Next-Gen Game Development
Developer Diary #5
My name is Andrea Sancio, and I am the Associate Technical Director working on Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 at The Chinese Room. Together with Nick Slaven, our Studio Technical Director, it has been my honour to lead our talented team on the technical side of the game.
I'm going to share with you now a behind-the-scenes look at what our team has been doing on the game, and when you play it, we hope that you will all love it as much as we do.
In the ever-evolving world of video game development, staying at the cutting edge is a continuous pursuit. With the release of Unreal Engine 5, the landscape has shifted dramatically, presenting game developers with an array of groundbreaking technologies and tools. I wanted to delve into our experiences and challenges with some of the experimental technologies that have come to define UE5: Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps and Lumen. These technologies play a pivotal role in creating a realistic and dark world that aligns perfectly with the neo-noir art direction of our game.
An important milestone in our development was the upgrade from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5. It was a big risk because normally you lock in the version of your development engine early. The changes touched every part of the game, and all our scenes, lighting and assets had to be converted. All the dev teams communicated with us brilliantly to make sure the new tools were exactly what we needed to make the game look amazing and run smoothly.
Lumen is a new real-time global illumination tech. It brings a level of realism to game lighting with raytracing to simulate the path of light and how it interacts with surfaces and materials. It can simulate indirect (bounce) lighting and reflections. However, integrating Lumen into our games was no small feat. Ensuring consistent and smooth performance was the key to achieving the atmospheric lighting required for our world. Working with dynamic lighting and shadow has always been a challenge. In performance terms it was expensive, placing lights is an art and overlapping lights exponentially increase complexity and the costs of rendering the scene because a lot of calculation must be done for each pixel hit by each light. Normally, the solution is to "pre-bake" lights. All the shadows were saved to the level before release, and you couldn't change them. This provided great quality results for a cheap cost, but the lights and shadows were... well... faked. You would then have to include other tricks like light probes to show that on objects moving inside that space.
Lumen lets us change the colour, position, and intensity of lots of lights that can change dynamically. So to figure out the best way to include these new lights, we spent a lot of time working with our artists. It works by storing all the surfaces hit by light in a memory cache. This cache is at a lower resolution than the output. This means it's way faster to calculate the effects of lighting. Then, Lumen uses Temporal Upsampling which makes the lower resolution larger without losing quality and detail. None of this can work without Nanite, Cached Virtual Shadows and Temporal Super Resolution so we adapted all those technologies too!
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