Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Gaming

Aalborg-virksomhed henter Hitman-stjerne til nyt computerspil

Denmark Entertainment News

Shadows that move in real time are an important part of Lightmatter, a new computer game that will be launched in January of the new year. Dynamic shadows place great demands on computer power, and to solve this challenge, Tunnel Vision Games, the developer of the game, in collaboration with the Alexandra Institute, has developed a new shadow solution that only updates the shadows that need to be updated. This has helped to accelerate the development of the game, and means that the game will be available on many more platforms, thus reaching many more players.

Light and shadows are an important element of “Lightmatter”, a new computer game that will be released at the beginning of the new year. The Aalborg company Tunnel Vision Games is behind the game, which they have developed over the past three years. The game is a so-called puzzle game that takes place inside a mountain, and where the goal is to stay in the light and out of the shadows in order to progress through the game’s levels.

“You have to imagine that the earth is toxic, just with shadows. If you step on a shadow, you die,” explains Philip Nymann, director of Tunnel Vision Games, which he started with four fellow students from Aalborg University back in 2013.

The five fellow students are now partners in the company, which has also added two full-time employees. The Aalborg team has hired Danish-English actor David Bateson to voice the game. He has also voiced the Hitman series from IO Interactive.

The game was originally started as a study project because the five students wanted to explore how shadows and light can be used as the driving force in a puzzle game. Here they developed a 15-minute prototype, which is now the precursor to the current “Lightmatter”. The prototype quickly received a lot of downloads and publicity. It was also nominated for best Show Case at the Danish Game Awards and best Student Game at the Unity Awards.

Shadow solution improves game performance

Shadows that move in real time are always expensive to render, as they are heavy to run on a computer, and even heavier for other platforms such as mobile, which typically have less computing power.

This was precisely the challenge that Tunnel Vision Games faced, and they therefore had to find a solution that ensures that they can run with a stable framerate, and thus achieve better performance.

They therefore tried to solve it themselves, but since they had neither the skills nor the time to familiarize themselves with it, they contacted the Alexandra Institute, who are experts in creating realistic shadows. They have previously helped Danish Playdead https://playdead.com, which is behind successes such as “Inside” and “Limbo”.

“We found that a lot of our shadows are static. We have been able to exploit this because it means that there is no need to calculate these shadows all the time. We have a solution where we can switch between the shadows that need to be calculated over and over again, and where we can reuse the shadows that have already been calculated,” explains Gustav Dahl, producer and programmer at Tunnel Vision Games.

The new feature has helped to accelerate the workflow and has laid the foundation for the game to be released on other platforms such as consoles and mobile.

According to Christian Heider Nielsen from the Alexandra Institute, the feature was not available in Unity, the game engine in which the game is built. In principle, the rendering technique used in the game is utilized:

“In that technique, you create partial results that are combined into a final result just before it appears on the screen. Here, we chose to focus on the light sources where we already know the partial result in advance, because we have calculated it before. This means that we can reuse previous calculations.”

You May Also Like

Lifestyle

The Danish National Audit Office criticizes the authorities’ implementation of legislation on groundwater protection. The water sector is fighting to protect drinking water from...

Lifestyle

Assets under custody of more than 200 tonnes of gold / Nordnet first broker to Deutsche Börse Commodities has launched Europe’s leading gold-backed exchange-traded...

Lifestyle

I begyndelsen af september meddelte MediPharm, at de vil begynde at sende cannabiskoncentrerede produkter til Danmark. Dette er en del af en ny white...

Lifestyle

According to the Swedish government, the Scandinavian country needs 10,000 more police officers to stop the catastrophic development in the country. Rape, violence, robberies, and murders...