ArenaNet using Umbra

Tue 28th Oct 2008 | News

ArenaNet, Inc. has licensed Umbra Software’s visibility optimization technology to be used in ArenaNet's Guild Wars franchise.

"Rather than spend resources developing a new occlusion system to meet the demands of our next game we decided to license technology from the experts," said Jim Scott, ArenaNet's lead graphics programmer.  "This allowed us to get up and running with sophisticated culling quickly."

Umbra is a highly robust, GPU based, visibility optimization solution that allows game developers to create highly dynamic game worlds without preprocessing. With Umbra game developers can increase their polygon budgets significantly and create highly complex game worlds which were previously impossible.

Umbra uses instantaneous occlusion computations to speed up the development cycle; it allows for interactive worlds with more objects and characters with new levels of realism; it increases freedom for players in MMO game worlds, enabling modification of worlds by players on the fly. Umbra Software solutions are currently used by several high-profile games and 3D game engines.


Related links:
Umbra Software Ltd.
ArenaNet