I caught mention of Turbine getting yet another middleware package last week but forgot to check into it. Turns out they’re licensing the Umbra occlusion culling technology. I wrote a few weeks ago that Turbine had started licensing other middleware packages to incorporate into their engine but the descriptions on those were hinting at their use in Turbine’s future games. The Umbra announcement, however, says they will be integrating Umbra into DDO and LOTRO!
While perusing the site and checking out what Umbra can do, I also noticed Arena.net licensed Umbra for Guild Wars 2 in October, and in September CCP licensed Umbra for EVE as well as “unannounced projects.” Age of Conan also used Umbra, and all other issues with that game aside, I think we can agree it does some have fantastic scenery with great visibility.
The description of Umbra reads:
Umbra is a highly robust, GPU based, visibility optimization solution that allows game developers to create highly dynamic game worlds without preprocessing. With Umbra game developers can increase their polygon budgets significantly and create highly complex game worlds which were previously impossible.
Guild Wars, DDO and LOTRO all make use of several technical tricks playing with visibility, level of detail, distance imposters, etc. to keep performance to an acceptable level while still rendering immersive scenery that gives a perception of a huge breadth of scope. Umbra’s tech optimizes the visible rendering so that less reliance on “tricks” is needed and more actual objects can be rendered. Check their site for a demonstration video.
This sounds great to me! While I like the overall large or “worldy” perception that distance imposters provide, it’s very noticeable when you reach the crossover point from low-res flat 2D distance imposter and the actual 3D model it was representing, and they’re often not quite in the exact same place or same shape. Guild Wars and LOTRO both use distance imposters extensively and it’s very noticeable if there’s no action, combat, whatever happening on-screen and I’m actually enjoying the scenery when I travel. Hopefully Umbra will drastically improve that in LOTRO and Guild Wars 2. I don’t have enough time in DDO to recall specific instances of watching distance imposters shift to their terrain objects but I do notice many buildings suddenly fade into view while buildings further away were rendered first. Either way, it sounds like Umbra will be a fantastic addition to the Turbine Engine.
Tags: MMO Gaming
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If this fixes the graphical issues that I spoke about in my blog, I would be willing to give the game another try. I just had huge issues with the way the trees got rendered as you approached them and it bugged the crap out of me to the point where I had to give up playing the game, that and I only had two friends playing the game and it was hard to hook up with both of them during the week. I found that LOTRO was more fun while with others rather than solo which I tend to enjoy in WoW.
But I’m sure it will be sometime before they use the licensed software to fix any issues. It could be they wanted it on hand for future expansions and not fix the current game issues.
I would welcome this change also. Sounds interesting!
No mention of the character models. Bummer.
I (mostly) like the character models, it’s the super-cleanly Men’s faces that are a little “off” at times, but then again I’m hardly ever zoomed in close enough to see it unless I’m modeling new armour, gear or cosmetics.
I do wonder, however, if the Havok physics could be fit into LOTRO and DDO… I’m thinking of say, knockbacks whose severity would depend on your proximity to the mob doing the knockback. Perhaps with all new models with skeletal animation system and ragdoll physics (not Unreal Tournament silly, mind you) to go with it all…
What is funny is 50% of my issues stem from the models, with 25% animation and 25% UI issues.
It is not just the men. From varying issues like over large hands, the clothing that looks spray painted on, the men with size 2 waists, women whose breasts look like they are always on a shelf..it is not just Men’s “cleanly” faces (which mainly shows up when they have beards which look like playdoh strapped on).
Updated models would go a long way into making the game more immersive is all.
But, physics is good, and may help with the animation issues…