REACH, ODST, and Destiny

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Wednesday, June 12, 2013, 14:17 (3964 days ago) @ INSANEdrive

Further more since Bungie is using (TECH TALK ALERT!) Umbra's Middleware solution for managing their world (called Occlusion culling if you would like to look it up), it is much more possible to do something like Cody expressed now, then it was when Mass Effect 1 came out in 2007.

Well, sort of. Occlusion culling has been around forever. Most games with large, winding environments probably use simple implementations of it at the very least, because you'd be insane not to. Even Halo 1 has some cheap manually-placed occlusion culling portals; nothing fancy, but it's good enough that you can render five hallway joints instead of thirty, or two sections of an AotCR chasm instead of an entire chasm and a big underground area. You can see where the occlusion cull portals are if you break out of a map and walk around in the rafters. It's really interesting to watch level sections draw in and out in coop.

The Umbra stuff should make management of occlusion culling around lots of complicated geometry much easier to develop efficient results for, though.