Assassin’s Creed Unity developers outlined the new technology they used to bring Paris to life in a new interview. The new tech they have enables them to automate certain technical tasks quickly, so that they can focus on quality.
The first example they gave, Paris Pate, allowed them to place an entire district relatively quickly. Thanks to Paris Pate, their artists could get to work on adding in details very quickly.
Unity’s engine, AnvilNext, has three main pillars:
· Theatre
These are the tools used for cinematics and animation.
· Zen
These tools are used to build infrastructure and improve productivity.
· City Lights
Finally, these tools give Unity volumetric cinematography. Beyond Theatre, City Lights allows them to master art direction in a 3D space, taking it a step above HD graphics.
The devs are most proud of the immersion they created in Unity. The density of detail, combined with the rendering quality, will make you feel like you are in a real city.
Ubi took dramatic steps in changing the lighting system for Unity as well. They developed a physically based renderer, and then added volumetric global illumination. Ubi has also reduced pop-in for distant objects.
Ubi received a lot of questions connected strictly to the PC version. AnvilNext has been designed to use multiple cores, eliminating the single core issue from Black Flag. They also changed the architecture for their renderer so that it would reduce driver draw calls. They also worked on eliminating the smoothing and acceleration issues PC users had when playing with a mouse.
They did work with Nvidia to make some Nvidia-card specific enhancements, but they also optimized for Mantle and DX12.
Regarding PC power, Ubi did design Unity so that it would render at a higher quality than Xbox One and PlayStation 4 if you had more powerful builds. On the flip side, if your build is still below those consoles, there may be a chance your computer won’t run it as well. Ubi is doing their best so that more people can play the game on lower end PCs, but because they designed it for current-gen console specs, there will be limits to what they can do.
Assassin’s Creed Unity will be released on November 11, for Windows, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.
