CAMBRIDGE, UK — Geomerics (http://community.arm.com) has announced that its Enlighten real-time global illumination technology is to deliver large-scale dynamic lighting to open-world games. The enriched technology can halve the performance cost of dynamic global illumination effects, such as time of day, in games where map sizes are vast and draw distances are long.
The new feature set is being showcased at Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2016 in a demonstration for PC and PlayStation 4, titled Seastack Bay. The demonstration was developed in collaboration with Ninja Theory, the developer of Hellblade. It delivers dynamic global illumination to a 25km2 playable world made up of interior spaces, gorges, forests and beaches, while maintaining a steady 30FPS.
Enlighten’s new technology includes advanced level of detail mechanisms for terrain, non-terrain light maps and probes. By solving the global illumination for distant geometry at lower resolutions than nearby geometry, users can achieve higher quality dynamic global illumination within the same map size and performance budget, or improve performance without sacrificing the user experience.
“Reproducing the beauty of natural lighting is central to the look and feel of Hellblade,” says Tameem Antoniades, co-founder & chief creative director, Ninja Theory. “In a world as rich as ours it is a challenge to achieve realistic dynamic lighting effects at our target frame rate, but this is something Enlighten will allow us to do, adding great value to the overall Hellblade experience.”
Other key benefits of the new large world feature set include physically correct results even in highly occluded or vertical areas, such as gorges or cliffs; continuous traversal between different environments, from enclosed spaces to large, open vistas, with consistent global illumination updates; and support for common open world features including foliage, rocks and grass.