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Ubisofts Anvil-Engine erweckt seit beinahe 20 Jahren jeden Hauptteil der Assassin's-Creed-Reihe zum Leben - unter wechselnden Namen und in verbesserten Versionen versteht sich. Zum Abschluss der Arbeiten an Assassin's Creed Shadows , dem aktuellsten Serienteil, haben die AC-Macher nun eine Reihe von Videos produziert, die beleuchten, wie die jüngste Version der Anvil-Engine das feudale Japan im Spiel glaubwürdig zum Leben erweckt.
In der vierteiligen Serie, die wir für euch zu einem 20-minütigen Video zusammengefasst haben, verraten euch die Ubisoft-Entwickler mehr zu folgenden Themenkomplexen:
00:00 - Dynamisches Wetter und das Atmos-System
06:00 - Rendering und Performance
10:12 - Detailgrad und Mikropoligon-Geometrie
15:29 - Raytracing und Globale Beleuchtung
Unseren Nachtest zu Assassin's Creed Shadows inklusive der letzten Updates und des DLCs Claws of Awaji, könnt ihr übrigens hier nachlesen .
In der vierteiligen Serie, die wir für euch zu einem 20-minütigen Video zusammengefasst haben, verraten euch die Ubisoft-Entwickler mehr zu folgenden Themenkomplexen:
00:00 - Dynamisches Wetter und das Atmos-System
06:00 - Rendering und Performance
10:12 - Detailgrad und Mikropoligon-Geometrie
15:29 - Raytracing und Globale Beleuchtung
Unseren Nachtest zu Assassin's Creed Shadows inklusive der letzten Updates und des DLCs Claws of Awaji, könnt ihr übrigens hier nachlesen .
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VideospieleTranskript
00:02A game engine synchronizes every moving part of the experience, immersing us in interactive journeys like no other medium can.
00:11Achieving this in an open world as vast and systemic as Assassin's Creed Shadows is, requires a custom engine built
00:18for scale and complexity.
00:20An engine just like Anvil.
00:26Japan was an highly expected setting for us, so we treated very seriously, wanted to do the best game visually
00:33as possible, and say we wanted to push the limits.
00:35We wanted to put everything on another scale, another step in the quality and the immersion for the gamers.
00:43So, how did we build it? How could we create a world that feels this real?
00:48And what did it take to carry out the game's creative vision in an immersive open world of massive scale?
00:54What about making the world as dynamic as possible?
00:57What about having dynamic seasons that will change throughout the whole world?
01:01All of this would not have been possible without the support of the Anvil people.
01:05We feel like the only way to realize this artistic vision was to use the Anvil engine and to evolve
01:12it to its next generation iteration.
01:14An evolution that impacts everything.
01:20Like a single drop of water.
01:22Or thousands of them.
01:24All simulated living objects.
01:27Every drop contributing to a dynamic weather system powering our open world experience.
01:34Atmos.
01:41From the start, the team's ambitions were to create real-time seamless weather simulations.
01:47Something truly unique that would reinforce the sense of place and continuity central to Assassin's Creed.
01:54One of the key pillars for Assassin's Shadows was dynamism.
01:57So this is where Atmos played a big role because we wanted a world that was as immersive as possible.
02:02Atmos is our physically based weather system.
02:05It leverages wind simulation and propagates various atmospheric quantities such as temperature, vapor, humidity
02:12to determine if, for example, it's raining somewhere or there is wind somewhere.
02:18Anvil is built on the same physical principles that govern the real world.
02:22Let's go back to our water.
02:24It will evaporate under the hot summer sun, form clouds as vapor rises, and eventually turn into rain.
02:31All seamlessly in real-time.
02:33So in terms of gameplay, we affect the crowd, we affect people, we affect the animals, we affect the living
02:39world.
02:40That changes what you can do and change your experience.
02:44You could walk in Ego provinces and see different weather states coming in and out.
02:48And that will greatly immerse the pair in all seamless.
02:51It's not unloading, so it's happening in real-time.
02:53This is huge.
02:54This has never been seen before within the brand.
02:57The true power of Atmos resides in its ability to synchronize every weather-related element
03:02to create a sense of coherence between them.
03:05Like wind blows rain on character models, moves their clothes, and tussles their hair.
03:09In Assassin's Creed Shadows, coherence is key to immersion.
03:14Atmos is more like a maestro with all the ingredients.
03:19The rain, the lighting, the sound.
03:21It will use the wind simulation for the cloud generation.
03:25But the simulation of the wind is a system itself that is just used by Atmos.
03:32What really shines in Assassin's Creed Shadows is how everything uses this wind information
03:37to behave in a cohesive way so everything works together.
03:42If we talk technically, we have like kind of a fleet simulation we are using to drive multiple systems.
03:49And we compute multiple fields that are connected together to affect winds on all our systems.
03:55The team also developed what they call spray particle systems.
03:58So basically it's a dynamic wind with collision that will carry particle over.
04:02So if you add up weather state Atmos and spray particles, it's a perfect recipe to create like a very
04:09immersive and dynamic world.
04:10Atmos's unparalleled dynamism then sets the table for an equally unmatched memorable experience.
04:16One minute, you are deep in the forest, hunting your prey as sun shines through the canopy.
04:21The other, a thunderstorm is formed above you, changing the mood completely and seamlessly.
04:26Whenever the player will be walking around a place or another, the cloud cape and the effect will not be
04:33exactly the same.
04:34So it will always be a surprise.
04:37We saw, you know, in the minigame reviews and player feedback that some of them, they were avoiding fast traveling
04:43because they enjoy the systemic changes that happen throughout their travel within the world.
04:49So that shows how powerful the system that we've put in place.
04:52Sometimes I would just stand in a world in Kyoto with a storm and I would just look at the
04:58clothes of Naoe or the hair or the rain being moved by the wind, all in a cohesive ways.
05:06And I was just speechless.
05:10Anvil allows Assassin's Creed Shadows' feudal Japan to be an awe-inspiring place to get lost in.
05:17A living world breathing through a dynamic weather simulation that has a real impact on the world it inhabits.
05:23The players that experiences it and the people that created it.
05:27Of course I'm proud of this because, you know, making video games is an odyssey in a way.
05:32There's a lot of people involved and when you're able to see, you know, the final result, all the system
05:37working together,
05:38you could tell and we did achieve something special and we could not have done it without the Anvil people.
05:43And it's only just the beginning.
05:45Anvil will keep pushing the boundaries of immersion and open world design to the benefit of you, the players.
06:02Video games invite us into extraordinary worlds, some of massive dimensions.
06:08Creating such vast playgrounds without breaking the player's immersion is a real challenge.
06:13Even more so when optimizing the experience across different platforms.
06:16A challenge that the Anvil engine was built to overcome.
06:25The idea of the Anvil engine is to build systemic open world games.
06:28Scalavity was one of the first goals.
06:30The idea was to provide a good quality no matter your choice and also to provide good resolution and good
06:36performances.
06:37So how do we do it?
06:38How can we balance our game's need of realism and immersion with the limits of gaming hardware and production constraints?
06:46When we talk about scalability in Anvil, there are two dimensions to this.
06:50There is a scalability in the sense that we want to wander a very large world.
06:54But at the same time, the scalability is also in the range of platforms we support.
06:59At the core of this vision lies a fundamental capability of the engine.
07:04Rooted in its architecture.
07:06Large scale rendering and scalability.
07:08Or its ability to make massive worlds run seamlessly.
07:18Assassin's Creed Shadows is one of the biggest open worlds in the series.
07:22Multiple processes and solutions needed to be planned from the get-go to make sure it stayed strong and cohesive
07:28as the teams filled it with dynamic systems and content.
07:31In this kind of game, the scale is the main challenge.
07:36And we have to handle a very tight budget for memory in general because we want to fit as much
07:42details as possible.
07:43So streaming was definitely a challenge.
07:45And making sure all the dynamic systems behave in a cohesive way together so they deliver the best result.
07:53If you start to see popping, it broke the experience.
07:57So that's something that is pretty complex to achieve.
08:00And within Anvil, we have a lot of automatic systems that adapt to the situation that will do the work
08:06for you.
08:07So the artist only focus on quality.
08:09If we go back in time, we can see that the Assassin's Creed games got bigger and bigger.
08:13So at the start, there were more like what you could define as open city games.
08:18But later on, the games got much bigger with Assassin's Creed Origins, what we would really truly call an open
08:24world.
08:24We have a lot of subsystems to maximize the long-range rendering.
08:28This creates LOD continuity between one asset that will become one tree at two, four, six kilometers away.
08:38But there is also a second layer of scalability to Assassin's Creed Shadows.
08:42Creating a groundbreaking immersive open world was not the sole objective.
08:47It also had to be adaptable to comply with as many gaming platforms as possible.
08:52One of the magic of the system is also to work with context.
08:56If you are in a game or if you are in a cinematic or if you are in the hideout,
09:01we can change the entire rendering properties and adapt to the current situation to keep good performances and good quality.
09:11If the engine wasn't scalable, for example, it would have meant much more scoped areas, maybe in more closed environments
09:21or smaller maps connected to another by loading time.
09:25The objective was to keep super good quality from close range to super long range.
09:32The Anvil engine allows Assassin's Creed Shadows to immerse the players in its dynamic rendition of Feudal Japan in seamless
09:39fashion.
09:40Thanks to scalability and large scale rendering technology, the teams have developed the means to achieve their creative vision and
09:47to keep delivering quality experiences on a large spectrum of gaming hardware.
09:51They are setting a new standard for video game open worlds.
09:57The future of Anvil, I see it in multiple ways. I see it continue pushing the dynamism, having a better
10:03living world, giving tools and techniques to go to creative teams to achieve their goal.
10:09Shadows was the first step toward the future.
10:14We previously explored how Anvil's many systems work in concert to shape a best-in-class dynamic open world.
10:21From simulation to rendering, each tool plays a part in sustaining immersion at scale.
10:26To fully realize Assassin's Creed Shadows' vision, we now dive into another essential facet of Anvil's capabilities.
10:34One that affects the level of detail, or LOD, shown on 3D objects.
10:43It's all about quality from close range to seamless transition in long range.
10:49Before you could be distracted by LOD, pop, and now that's not the case anymore.
10:55So how did we do it? How did we build a historically grounded open world that preserves a sense of
11:00journey without cutting back on the level of visual details and immersion?
11:05Our vision is to deliver less and less friction to the artist on the floor.
11:09And for this, it's what I would call no-ground work.
11:12It's like you don't have to build LODs by yourself. They are automatically built.
11:17The gains are so big in terms of details and what you can represent in the world that it's the
11:23future. It's already the present, actually.
11:25A vision that we will illustrate with this house. One of the many objects within which lies the secret to
11:33the evergreen visual details of the game world they inhabit.
11:37Micro-polygon geometry.
11:41The 3D objects you see and interact with in a game world are created from polygons, connected with each other
11:48to form a mesh over which textures and materials are applied.
11:53So, as a rule of thumb, more triangles means more visual detail.
11:58In the past, for example, when you were doing a rock, it was like 20K triangle, 40K triangle. Today we
12:07can do 400K, 2 million, 4 million triangle.
12:11The main purpose of micro-polygon hierarchy, micro-poly, is to remove the limit of triangle.
12:19That's fine when dealing with a closed map featuring only a handful of houses, but what about dealing with a
12:24massive, dynamic open world?
12:27Micro-polygon features work with a concept of automatic occlusion that allows both dense area and more vast landscape to
12:39render efficiently.
12:40It simplifies the work of artists. They basically don't have to bother anymore about Elodie's generation.
12:49Thanks to micro-polygon geometry, the concept of level of detail essentially becomes a thing of the past.
12:57Triangles from which 3D objects are created are constantly adapting to what is visible to you.
13:03Depending on distance from said object, the house in our example, Anvil streams only what's necessary, managing resources efficiently and
13:12staging the most immersive open world possible around the player character.
13:18Using micro-polygon, there is no more Elodie. We have still Elodie's switch in very far distance, like near effects
13:26and far effects.
13:26We are able to cross the surface between them to hide any popping.
13:31And it's also here to give the ability for an artist to not have to think about the number of
13:38material you have to put on the mesh or the number of triangles you will use.
13:52A dynamic and expertly crafted open world whose visual fidelity adapts in real time relatively to your position and the
13:59movement of your camera.
14:00That is the perfect recipe for an utterly immersive video game experience.
14:06Perfect for gameplay, yes, but not necessarily adapted to in-game cutscenes where camera work differs drastically.
14:14In general, in a normal gameplay scenario, the camera is transitioning smoothly, but during a camera cut, the transition is
14:25too sharp, so we have to load in advance what will be visible in the next second.
14:30I think it's a kind of feature eventually that the player doesn't notice.
14:36But it's like a lot of things in games or in software development that if you don't notice something bad,
14:42it's actually good.
14:43In the end, the team's ambitions for Assassin's Creed Shadows had them revisit their approach to how they should create
14:50a breathtaking, dynamic game world.
14:52It was less about putting as many visually impressive models as possible all at once, than it was about working
14:58smart by only showing to the player what needed to be shown.
15:02We are very happy with what we delivered because if we consider the time it takes to develop such features,
15:08like it's multiple years of development and we feel like we've reached the level of visual quality that we wanted
15:14in the game.
15:17Micropolygon geometry is the perfect feature to cement Anvil as an open-world video game powerhouse, and to give the
15:24developers the means to achieve their ambitions.
15:31Across this series, we've explored the technologies that bring Assassin's Creed Shadows' Feudal Japan to life.
15:37From dynamic weather systems to scalability and micropolygon geometry, we now turn to Light itself.
15:43One of the most challenging, yet essential, ingredients of a truly immersive game world.
15:49A challenge Anvil was built to meet.
15:55From the beginning, the objective of the game was to put more dynamism to the world.
16:02Traditionally in games, and in Assassin's Creed as well, the lighting was very static.
16:08And now with the dynamic ray tracing, we can achieve a similar quality or even better, but with a much
16:15more dynamic world, so it opens the scope of possibilities to things we couldn't do before.
16:21But how did we do it?
16:23How did we integrate a true-to-life dynamic lighting system to a large-scale game world that is constantly
16:28changing?
16:30Just imagine you have season, you want more dynamic objects, you want dynamic lights.
16:36All of this drives the decision to have something much more dynamic.
16:41The ray tracing global illumination provides that ability. It's real-time.
16:46An ability that stems from millions of rays of light, that just like in real life, bounce, morph, and react
16:53to their environment.
16:55That is the power of ray-traced global illumination.
17:01The way a scene is lit is crucial to its believability. It is the element that holds everything together.
17:08Retressed global illumination is about simulating the behavior of light that bounces off geometry in game.
17:15We are using two systems. One that is probe-based, so dynamic probes in a cascade around the player.
17:22We also have per pixel using the probe to refine what we have.
17:28And then we are using multiple systems, like denoisers, to increase the quality result.
17:34In the past, we had baked light probes that were pre-computed offline in the world.
17:39But the problem we first approached is that global illumination was static, so it couldn't accurately represent all dynamic objects
17:46in the world.
17:47For example, if you stand in a house and you open the door, the lighting won't be affected by this.
17:53But with dynamic ray tracing, then once you open the door, all the lighting, all the environment adapts to the
18:00scene, and then it looks more believable and more grounded.
18:04But it is only after working for a few months on the project with baked global illumination that the decision
18:09was made to implement RTGI in the pipeline.
18:12A decision that would prove optimal for the teams and unparalleled for player immersion.
18:17When we started working on ray tracing, we started from scratch in the Envil engine.
18:22But we knew other teams at Ubisoft were working on the same topic, such as the Sun Drop team at
18:27Massive.
18:28And so we collaborated with them as well to exchange knowledge and share.
18:32We elevate the technique together.
18:34It's a good thing that we have our own engine, and that's why it's relevant, because you can really tune
18:39your engine for your specific needs for your game, and optimize it for SSB's shadow.
18:43We optimized it for size, for dynamic seeing.
18:47For example, we had also some lighting that were coming through a paper door.
18:52And because of this, we had to implement specific techniques, like indirect translucency, to simulate the behavior of light being
18:58scattered through paper, to improve the illumination in the interiors.
19:02And also, you know, since we had a lot of vegetation and shadows as well, you could see the translucency
19:07of the leaf, the bleeding of the greens, or the colors on the ground, so it grounds everything.
19:12Thanks to RTGI, rays of light projected through feudal Japan perfectly simulate the reaction of real light when interacting with
19:19certain materials, lighting up a dark stormy sky, or getting snuffed out for a stealthy approach.
19:25However the world morphs around you, lighting is consistently and seamlessly adapting.
19:30Lighting quality definitely improves the player's immersion, because every element of the game feels properly integrated in the environment, and
19:38that's important that the world feels coherent and natural to the player.
19:42Some people say that it's just about the look, and it is about the look, but having something that is
19:47really pushing the boundary on the visual quality, I think it really helps the immersion, and in a way it
19:52can help the player to be really inside the story and live it better.
19:57Anvil's ray-traced global illumination technology brings never-before-seen coherence and adaptability to a world of massive scale.
20:05To me, at rest, global illumination is the future, and we will keep improving this technology on future games, because
20:10it offers many advantages compared to previous technologies.
20:13The barriers set by past lighting technology have been broken.
20:17With real-time, physically-based lighting, Assassin's Creed's worlds emerge with a renewed sense of place.
20:23Dynamic, reactive, and grounded in history.
20:26With Anvil enabling its ambitions, the future of the franchise looks particularly bright.
20:31normalmente cannot have power in space.
20:33But more than ever, depending on what values are, it leads to the future of the franchise.
20:35Vielen Dank.
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