The Callisto Protocol Helps Ray Tracing, Includes Some UE5 Parts

At Gamescom 2022, Striking Distance Studios Chief Technical Officer Mark James revealed that The Callisto Protocol will assist ray tracing. While the game is made with Unreal Engine 4, the builders additionally added some minor UE5 parts (although not Lumen or Nanite) to their {custom} model of the engine. James defined to IGN:

It was essential for us to realize a bodily constant lighting and shadow mannequin within the game. Contrast and occlusion make nice horror. Using our corridor-based scale of round 20 meters, we discovered that round eight lights might be affecting a floor of the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we discovered that UE4 was restricted to 4 shadow-generating lights, so first we labored on modifying the engine in order that we may assist a better variety of lights at a decrease value per gentle.

We appeared on the UE4 ray tracing answer on the time and located that for the variety of shadows we wished to create, we would have liked to create our personal answer. So as a substitute we created a Hybrid Ray Traced Shadows answer that applies ray traced shadow element to areas of the display screen that matter to the general scene high quality.

UE5 took a really totally different method for lighting with Lumen that didn’t match the inner hall mannequin we wished for the game, however I’ve been very impressed with the standard of the UE5 demos thus far.

As we labored to complete The Callisto Protocol on UE4 we checked out areas of UE5 that we felt could be helpful for each improvement iteration and new console options. Epic even helped us move a few of these options again into our custom-made model of the engine. There’s no massive elements that stand out however as a substitute a number of smaller optimizations and workflow enhancements which have helped within the closing few months.

Mark James was additionally interviewed by TechRadar. In that chat, he confirmed that The Callisto Protocol helps ray traced reflections along with the aforementioned hybrid ray traced shadows.

Our characters are probably the most reasonable characters you may see in a game. So a lot in order that after we first confirmed our game, everyone thought it was pre-rendered. We have been like, ‘No, that is how our character seems to be. This is how Josh Duhamel seems to be’.

We’ve received a full scan, even right down to ray-traced reflections for the eyeballs. So should you look into the character’s eyes in our game, you may see their mirrored optics. It’s a extremely tiny element, however it’s these tiny particulars that really are so essential to our game.

The Callisto Protocol will assist FSR 2.0. In different information, Striking Distance Studios CEO Glen Schofield shared a controversial tweet in regards to the firm’s crunch practices.

The game is out on December 2nd for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S|X.