Witcher 3 - New Screenshots & Videos

Dual Shockers has a new article for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with new screenshots, and two videos that show off The World & Advanced Occlusion Tech.

At the Games Developers Conference CD Projekt RED Engine Programmer Przemysław Czatrowski held a panel titled “Solving Visibility and Streaming in the The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with Umbra 3” explaining how the developer used the Umbra 3 middleware to help building the world, and its advanced ambient occlusion culling technology to render only the objects that are actually visible on the screen, massively reducing the load on the video card.

The presentation slides are now available, and Umbra Software published a recording of the presentation.

Here’s how the occlusion process works:

1. The world is split in tiles, and for each tile a “tome” data package is built, including the occlusion data. The engine determines which tomes are needed to be shown depending on the camera position and direction.
2. If the newly determined set of tomes differs from the previous set, an asynchronous compitation process starts, creating a new tome collection, that is sent to the renderer to replace the one previously rendered.
3. Tomes that are not used anymore are removed from the stream to free up memory.