In response to the “Horizon: Forbidden West” expansion expansion “Horizon: Burning Shores” (Burning Shores), which is expected to be launched on April 19, Guerrilla Games, a subsidiary of Sony Interactive Entertainment, explained the effects of atmospheric phenomena added in the expansion, etc. Landscape design ideas.
Guerrilla Games said that when constructing the world of “Horizon: The Scorching Coast of the Western Regions”, they hope to bring a more realistic sense of life, so they add richer atmospheric phenomena to the sky landscape in the game scene to present a more realistic vision feel.
Andrew Schneider, Chief Special Effects Artist of Guerrilla Games, said that the open world presents developers with many challenges, including how to make players feel that they are in a more real-world scene. Rendering takes a longer time, and it also takes up a lot of computing performance, so that the screen playback rate during the game interactive operation experience will be reduced.
However, with the improvement of hardware technology, during the PlayStation 4 period, he has cooperated with Nathan Vos, the chief technical programmer of Guerrilla Games, to jointly develop an efficient open world three-dimensional cloud system, and it was first applied in “Horizon: Zero Dawn”. , and can correspond to the change of sky clouds within a day, and present the sky landscape through realistic animation.
And in “Horizon: The Scorching Coast of the Forbidden Land of the Western Regions”, the performance of the sky and clouds is more expected to interpret the interaction between the clouds and the land through light and details, so that the world scene reflected in the player’s eyes is more real, and through the upgrade “Horizon: Zero Dawn” and “Horizon: Forbidden West” use cloud rendering technology, coupled with PlayStation 5 hardware computing performance, to form more complex cloud structures through the name “Frankencloudscapes”, making them resemble terrain Modeling becomes a more realistic background, and can even be explored in depth.
In order to speed up the processing efficiency of more complex cloud structures, Andrew Schneider uses low-detail voxel data to speed up the processing and transmission efficiency, and improves the details through the calculation and rendering process, and the senior chief technical programmer Hugh Malan uses data compression technology to make the data in the The system memory access efficiency is improved, thereby speeding up the overall cloud image processing speed.
However, due to the subsequent consideration of lighting the clouds to present a more realistic visual effect, the rendering processing time must be further shortened, and eventually the cloud visual effect can be obtained in the game to interact with the ground scene, and even Further processing of cloud details in the sky.
Subsequent challenges include the balance between rendering effects and execution performance. Therefore, James McLaren, a senior chief technical programmer and graphics engineer, will optimize the game code so that the game content can be used with less hardware performance. The resources operate stably, so that the game scene effect can be more realistic.
