DS2 Engine Changes

Hello, David Adams from Gunfire. I posted this in another thread, but thought I'd put this up top.



If anyone is curious, here's what we did engine side.



It is of course the same engine, but we rewrote huge swaths of the renderer. We wanted to bring it closer in line with more modern engines, while at the same time not dramatically changing the look of the game.



Here's a list of changes we made (beware, technical jargon incoming):



- Changed lighting model to be physically correct. Most modern engines use a physically correct lighting model, and the original Darksiders had a simple Phong lighting model. In practice, this doesn't have to change the way anything looks, but it allowed us to achieve more material variety - metal looking like metal, etc... It's not perfect when you are working with existing assets (because you would ultimately author the assets differently to get the full effect), but I think it adds something to the game. If you go back and look at the old game, all the materials just sort of looked like concrete. Now there is much more variation.



- Added irradiance environment maps. In the original, the ambient lighting was a flat color. In this remaster the ambient lighting comes from a cube map render of the scene. This adds much more depth to the ambient, and creates subtle light bleeding (the lava bleeding up and casting reddish lighting on the ceiling for instance). It also means the reflections in the metal reflect the actual room, so if Death is near lava - there's a lava-ish reflection in the metail in his armor and weapons.



- Improved the SSAO - it's still not great, but it's better (SSAO is my nemesis for some reason)



- Implemented Filmic Tone-Mapping (the original game had no filmic tone mapping)



- Improved the shadow filtering dramatically. It's still the same basic shadowing technique, so there is room for improvement - but this makes the shadows look a lot better even at the same shadow resolutions.



- Implemented shadow casting point lights with transparency (there are a lot more shadow casting lights in the game in general).



- I'm sure there's a few more misc things I'm forgetting.



- All these changes did add more processing time to the renderer, but we did some optimizations which I think in the end should put it at performance parity with the original (barring any technical issues)



The artists then took these changes, and rebalanced all the textures/materials - and relit most of the game. Again, trying to mantain the original look, just "modernizing" it a bit.



I won't claim it's the most advanced engine in the world, but myself and one other guy were the only graphics programmers (even at Vigil that was essentially the case, we never had a massive team of graphics engineers like some other studios do - and we didn't use an off the shelf engine, we - maybe foolishly - rolled our own:p)



That's should give you more insight on the changes that were made engine side. I think it looks hands down better than the original.



And of course, we and Nordic are working hard to make sure we fix any issues.