Thick Thighs Save Lives
Gold Member
Learn how Ascendant Studios is using the flexibility of Unreal Engine 5.1 to put power in PC players’ hands.
The day is almost here. The release of Immortals of Aveum™ is just around the corner, and we here at Ascendant Studios are so incredibly excited for players to get to experience what we’ve been building all this time. As we inch closer to August 22nd, we wanted to take a moment to talk a bit more about the technology that’s powering our game, and what that means for PC players in particular.
Earlier this year, we talked about some of the amazing tools we’ve had at our disposal as one of the first studios to release a AAA game using Unreal Engine 5.1. There’s Nanite, for example, which automatically adjusts the details the player sees based on distance, letting us build huge, detailed 3D objects that look every bit as good up close as they do from virtual miles away. The additional surface detail of our objects provide significantly more places for lighting to bounce off of.
No “pop-in” here! No matter the player’s distance from an object, Nanite ensures it’ll always be there, looking great.
We also make extensive use of Lumen, which lets us add incredibly realistic-looking dynamic lighting to those more detailed Nanite objects, which interacts with lighting far better than before, resulting in prettier environments. And it lets us do so dramatically more quickly than before: In Unreal 4, we’d have to balance dynamic lights with “baked in” lighting for any area, a process that would take literal hours to complete. Lumen lets us light things pretty much instantly—with lighting effects that look fantastic.
This is how quickly Lumen lets us enable and disable lighting. And that lighting looks better than what hours of work would have done in the past.
There’s also Niagara, which lets us easily implement and modify graphical effects like fire, smoke and magic. Thanks to Niagara, we don’t have to build each and every effect separately; we can take an existing effect that’s used widely across the game world and modify it for different scenarios so it looks different each time – something that wasn’t possible before.
Niagara lets us tweak effects rather than having to build new ones each time.
And these are just some of the more visually noticeable features; Unreal 5.1 also features tools that make things work more smoothly behind the scenes. Streaming Virtual Texturing, for example, essentially reduces the memory required to show large, detailed textures to the player. The One File Per Actor system lets our team all work in a single environment simultaneously, rather than requiring us to “check out” a whole level to make the smallest of tweaks. And World Partition intelligently loads and unloads bits of the world as needed, allowing us to create enormous environments that don't slow the game to a crawl, make load screens necessary, and/or incinerate anyone’s video cards.
The thing about all these different tools, though, is that no single one of them is responsible for making Immortals of Aveum look as good as it does while running as well as it does. The magic isn’t just in any single part of Unreal Engine 5.1, but in how these tools all work together, and how the whole engine provides a degree of flexibility and modularity that hasn’t been possible before now. It’s given us the ability to create a huge game in a vast world with a relatively small team, and make it all look great and run well—on a wide variety of platforms.
And the really neat thing is, it lets us pass that flexibility on to players.
WHAT’S UNDER THE HOOD
Speaking of hardware variables, our team at Ascendant has been rigorously testing the game’s performance for PC players and feels great about 60fps performance on the following combinations of resolution and hardware:
Additionally, the studio is continuing to optimize the game to play well on lower hardware to make the game accessible to even more players. While we aren't ready to confirm anything just yet, we intend to announce new low end specs soon targeting a 1080p/30fps experience. To give you an example, the team currently has the game running well in the 40fps range on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 and Intel Core i7-8700K configuration. With Unreal Engine 5.1 being so new, we want to see just how far down we can optimize and thoroughly test as many lower-end set-ups as possible.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we’ve added specs for the current cutting edge of GPUs and CPUs. So if you have the machine that is the envy of all around you, you can run our game in 4K at 120 frames per second.
Note: Immortals supports both AMD FSR 2.2 and NVIDIA’s DLSS3 upscaling technology.
PLAYING TO YOUR STRENGTHS
And console players, don’t feel left out here! You may not be able to tweak your settings as much, seeing how consoles have much more specific and uniform specs. That means that we were able to use all this flexibility and modularity to tune the game very carefully to each console’s particular strengths. As a result, every console version will run at 60fps at your TV’s maximum resolution thanks to the upscaling magic of FSR2. So whatever system you’re using, you’ll be getting the best performance you possibly can.
That’s really one of the biggest benefits of working with Unreal Engine 5.1. All these tools that make things run more smoothly behind the scenes end up being incredibly scalable, letting us meet players wherever they are—now and in the future. We won’t claim that was easy; after all, you may remember that we delayed the game by about a month in order to spend more time polishing, bug-hunting, and optimizing. But Ascendant is a brand-new studio, and this is our first game, so we wanted to make every possible effort to ensure that Immortals of Aveum is an amazing experience no matter what machine it’s running on. And we’re so excited for you all to finally have the chance to see that for yourselves.
Immortals of Aveum releases 22 August 2023.
More at:
store.steampowered.com
The day is almost here. The release of Immortals of Aveum™ is just around the corner, and we here at Ascendant Studios are so incredibly excited for players to get to experience what we’ve been building all this time. As we inch closer to August 22nd, we wanted to take a moment to talk a bit more about the technology that’s powering our game, and what that means for PC players in particular.
Earlier this year, we talked about some of the amazing tools we’ve had at our disposal as one of the first studios to release a AAA game using Unreal Engine 5.1. There’s Nanite, for example, which automatically adjusts the details the player sees based on distance, letting us build huge, detailed 3D objects that look every bit as good up close as they do from virtual miles away. The additional surface detail of our objects provide significantly more places for lighting to bounce off of.
No “pop-in” here! No matter the player’s distance from an object, Nanite ensures it’ll always be there, looking great.
We also make extensive use of Lumen, which lets us add incredibly realistic-looking dynamic lighting to those more detailed Nanite objects, which interacts with lighting far better than before, resulting in prettier environments. And it lets us do so dramatically more quickly than before: In Unreal 4, we’d have to balance dynamic lights with “baked in” lighting for any area, a process that would take literal hours to complete. Lumen lets us light things pretty much instantly—with lighting effects that look fantastic.
This is how quickly Lumen lets us enable and disable lighting. And that lighting looks better than what hours of work would have done in the past.
There’s also Niagara, which lets us easily implement and modify graphical effects like fire, smoke and magic. Thanks to Niagara, we don’t have to build each and every effect separately; we can take an existing effect that’s used widely across the game world and modify it for different scenarios so it looks different each time – something that wasn’t possible before.
Niagara lets us tweak effects rather than having to build new ones each time.
And these are just some of the more visually noticeable features; Unreal 5.1 also features tools that make things work more smoothly behind the scenes. Streaming Virtual Texturing, for example, essentially reduces the memory required to show large, detailed textures to the player. The One File Per Actor system lets our team all work in a single environment simultaneously, rather than requiring us to “check out” a whole level to make the smallest of tweaks. And World Partition intelligently loads and unloads bits of the world as needed, allowing us to create enormous environments that don't slow the game to a crawl, make load screens necessary, and/or incinerate anyone’s video cards.
The thing about all these different tools, though, is that no single one of them is responsible for making Immortals of Aveum look as good as it does while running as well as it does. The magic isn’t just in any single part of Unreal Engine 5.1, but in how these tools all work together, and how the whole engine provides a degree of flexibility and modularity that hasn’t been possible before now. It’s given us the ability to create a huge game in a vast world with a relatively small team, and make it all look great and run well—on a wide variety of platforms.
And the really neat thing is, it lets us pass that flexibility on to players.
WHAT’S UNDER THE HOOD
Speaking of hardware variables, our team at Ascendant has been rigorously testing the game’s performance for PC players and feels great about 60fps performance on the following combinations of resolution and hardware:
Additionally, the studio is continuing to optimize the game to play well on lower hardware to make the game accessible to even more players. While we aren't ready to confirm anything just yet, we intend to announce new low end specs soon targeting a 1080p/30fps experience. To give you an example, the team currently has the game running well in the 40fps range on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 and Intel Core i7-8700K configuration. With Unreal Engine 5.1 being so new, we want to see just how far down we can optimize and thoroughly test as many lower-end set-ups as possible.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we’ve added specs for the current cutting edge of GPUs and CPUs. So if you have the machine that is the envy of all around you, you can run our game in 4K at 120 frames per second.
Note: Immortals supports both AMD FSR 2.2 and NVIDIA’s DLSS3 upscaling technology.
PLAYING TO YOUR STRENGTHS
And console players, don’t feel left out here! You may not be able to tweak your settings as much, seeing how consoles have much more specific and uniform specs. That means that we were able to use all this flexibility and modularity to tune the game very carefully to each console’s particular strengths. As a result, every console version will run at 60fps at your TV’s maximum resolution thanks to the upscaling magic of FSR2. So whatever system you’re using, you’ll be getting the best performance you possibly can.
That’s really one of the biggest benefits of working with Unreal Engine 5.1. All these tools that make things run more smoothly behind the scenes end up being incredibly scalable, letting us meet players wherever they are—now and in the future. We won’t claim that was easy; after all, you may remember that we delayed the game by about a month in order to spend more time polishing, bug-hunting, and optimizing. But Ascendant is a brand-new studio, and this is our first game, so we wanted to make every possible effort to ensure that Immortals of Aveum is an amazing experience no matter what machine it’s running on. And we’re so excited for you all to finally have the chance to see that for yourselves.
Immortals of Aveum releases 22 August 2023.
More at:
Immortals of Aveum™ - Immortals of Aveum™: UE5.1, PC Optimization, & More - Steam News
The Tech Behind the Magic
