CD Projekt RED’s presentation from GDC has been revealed to the public. In it, they explained why they went with middleware Umbra 3 for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. As you can imagine, this talk went very technical, so we’ll try to focus on the stuff that’s most relevant to you as a player.
To put it simply, they went for Umbra 3 to handle the task of occlusion culling. In the simplest terms, this is a feature that disables the rendering of objects that aren’t visible to the camera. As you can imagine, accomplishing this one task successfully means the game will run far more efficiently, and resources can be drawn for other tasks, such as framerate and displaying detail.
Umbra 3 in particular has a stellar reputation for middleware. CD Projekt Red cites Call of Duty Ghosts, Destiny, and Killzone Shadow Fall as games that have made use of the program. After considering the pros and cons, they decided to go with Umbra 3 to save time and make things easier for everyone involved. In fact, they used other middleware programs too, including PhysX, APEX, SpeedTree, Wwise, and Scaleform.
Overall, what we should take from this presentation is that CD Projekt Red’s use of middleware means they will be able to deliver on Witcher 3 on time, and that it will help fully realize their vision of an open world 35x the size of Witcher 2.
Fun fact; Witcher 3’s engine team only has 16 people. Thanks to licensing middleware, they didn’t need to allocate more people for it.
We leave you now with an interesting video on another aspect of Witcher 3’s development – motion capture. Things go wrong when some instruction goes way out of hand.
Hold up. Did you want to get more technical details from the GDC talk? Are you serious? OK then. You can read a small summary here, download the slides as a PDF here and watch the whole thing here.
