umbra ignite 2015: thor gunnarsson & reynir hardarson – nailing aaa quality in vr: a creative...

Thor Gunnarsson

S. Reynir Hardarson

Our mission:

Create and publish AAA VR games and

experiences that thrill players, define the

medium and establish our company as

the world´s leading developer of virtual

reality entertainment.

Founders ex CCP Games (EVE Online).

CONFIDENTIAL

CONFIDENTIAL

We have identified 4 design principles that we believe will define the

quintessential VR product.

Any of our product candidates needs to score high on these principles

to go forward in production.

:

Suspension of disbelief requires AAA quality in the physicality of

the world with respect to the quality of graphics, animation and

sound design.

Subject matter should play upon the strength of VR such as sense

of scale and sense of presence.

:

VR performance requirements lead to compromises in visual

fidelity. Inexperience leads to content with poor presence.

:

Team must have extensive experience in AAA pipelines coupled

with strong artistic and technical direction to make the right

compromises.

A pure VR focus is needed to create killer content for virtual reality.

:

Freedom to explore and continuity of worlds makes them

believable.

:

First person navigation is prone to motion sickness. Third person

navigation breaks immersion.

This has led many VR developers to shy away from true

exploration.

:

We have converged on a new navigation paradigm where we

combine limited 1st person mobility with a 3rd person bird’s eye

view, offering larger scale mobility.

We believe this to be a true VR solution to an important problem

that allows us to have a true sense of exploration in our worlds.

:

To make worlds believable, you need to have a sense of agency

within the world such that you can change it and it can react to

you.

:

Purely static or scripted experiences break immersion and have

very poor replayability value.

:

From CCP, we have extensive experience in designing sandbox

games and systems.

We design worlds where you can interact with and modify your

environment. Object and creatures are real and behave as

expected. All actions have consequences.

:

Sharing an experience with another human is always emotionally

stronger than interacting with an NPC.

:

Avatar-based social experiences inevitably fall into the “Uncanny

Valley”, where our expectations of interaction fail on subtle

missing physical cues.

:

From EVE Online we have authoritative experience on how true

social gameplay emerges from other factors than physical

presence.

Furthermore, the sharing of gestures, head position and voice

goes a long way in bridging the uncanny valley, as the brain

quickly accepts the unmistakable ‘humanity’ of these signals.

@ 100% consistent 90 fps.

2160x1200 resolution absolute minimum

(140%-160% supersampling preferred).

including double overhead all over the place because of

stereo (~40% fps drop).

… running on a GTX 970 min spec.

Crazy expensive or does not work:

Point lights with dynamic shadows

Lit translucency

Motion blur

Bokeh DOF

Lens flares (don’t work right anyway)

Particle lights

Dynamic tessellation

Each will use around 10%-20% of your total budget on a GTX 970.

So, pick carefully:

Skylight

SSAO

SSR

Atmospheric fog

Temporal AA

Bloom

Refraction

Directional light with dynamic cascaded shadow maps (1 cascade)

Spotlight with dynamic shadows

Light shafts

Eye adaptation

Gaussian DOF

Subsurface scattering

Instanced foliage

Dual sided foliage shading

Physics

Destructible meshes

GPU particle systems - with particle collision

Vector fields

Morph targets

Skeletal animations

Physical materials

Decals

Parallax mapping

Height fog

Audio!

Lightmass baked lighting

Lightmass indirect lighting probes

Old school cool shader trickery:

Cubemap reflections (fire off render targets at begin play).

Fresnel, everywhere!

BDRF lookup tables

Animated UVs normal maps

Old school dot products to fake lit transparency

Make the shaders dance!

Turn everything you are not using off, else it is costing you.

Pick the appropriate quality setting for rendering features.

Keep the transform count low.

Merge static meshes in the scene wherever possible.

Distance culling to get the transforms fast out of the rendering loop.

LODs on everything, everywhere. 4-5 stages. Allows for high detail up close.

Fill rate is usually the bottleneck for particle systems, not particle count. Use

more, but smaller GPU particles.

Skeletal meshes can get very expensive, very fast. Don´t update animations

and skeletons when not needed.

command-shift-, all the time!

Dont’ create your own engine

Largest engine team in history working now on Unity.

Unreal has hundreds and hundreds of man years behind it.

Kill all sacred cows: Not built here, every pixel/polygon made here.

Use off the shelf tech, tools and middleware

(Unity, UE4, Simplygon, PhysX, Lightmass, Umbra, WWise etc)

Don’t draw pictures of horses

(Turbosquid, GameTextures)

If it is not in the box, you probably don't need it. Developing complex tech is

risky and takes away precious time from building the game itself.

Innovate where you get the most out of it without risking the whole

project/company on it.

All tech we have created was all first prototyped in Blueprint and was then

rewritten in C++ for optimisation purposes.

Extremely rapid prototyping. Blueprints allow EVERYONE on the team to

make gameplay.

No technology silver bullets. At the end of the day, some proprietary

technology is not going to make or break your game. Your game will.

Era of the mega teams is over.

Small teams are the future. Keep the headcount down.

Small teams have more velocity. Less overhead. More

autonomy, greater participation and greater satisfaction.

Skyscraper analogy. Less $ risk. Greater upside potential.

Everyone has to wear many hats and carry responsibilities.

No room for super egos. Don't pamper any prima donnas -

fire them now.

There is no room for whiners on the longship.