Associate Technical Director Andrea Sancio has written a blog post detailing the benefits of upgrading Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 to Unreal Engine 5.
In the shadows
In the highly-detailed post, The Chinese Room‘s Sancio covers the trials, tribulations, and treats that come with moving the vampire RPG onto Unreal’s highly adaptable engine.
” I wanted to delve into our experiences and challenges with some of the experimental technologies that have come to define UE5: Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps and Lumen, said Sancio. ”These technologies play a pivotal role in creating a realistic and dark world that aligns perfectly with the neo-noir art direction of our game.
”An important milestone in our development was the upgrade from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5. It was a big risk because normally, you lock in the version of your development engine early. The changes touched every part of the game, and all our scenes, lighting, and assets had to be converted. All the dev teams communicated with us brilliantly to make sure the new tools were exactly what we needed to make the game look amazing and run smoothly.”
Sancio goes on to describe the benefits of the Lumen lighting system and Virtual Shadow Maps for a game that will likely spend a lot of time in the shadows.
”Lumen lets us change the colour, position, and intensity of lots of lights that can change dynamically. So to figure out the best way to include these new lights, we spent a lot of time working with our artists. It works by storing all the surfaces hit by light in a memory cache. This cache is at a lower resolution than the output. This means it’s way faster to calculate the effects of lighting. Then, Lumen uses Temporal Upsampling which makes the lower resolution larger without losing quality and detail. None of this can work without Nanite, Cached Virtual Shadows and Temporal Super Resolution so we adapted all those technologies too!”
Bloodlines 2 is the long-awaited followup to the cult-classic Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. The game takes players to the dark underbelly of Seattle, where vampires struggle for survival and supremacy. The Chinese Room took over development from Hardsuit Labs, who had suffered multiple setbacks with the game over the past few years.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 will be released in Fall 2024
