Umbra Occlusion Booster

Psy

The Imp Queen
aa
Apr 9, 2008
1,706
1,491
Here's some pretty interesting middleware. It's a real-time occlusion system.

Umbra Occlusion Booster is the first component to be released from the Umbra Engine Booster middleware system - a cross-platform scene management system that optimizes game engine performance and makes game development easier, faster, and more economical.

With Umbra Occlusion Booster, the functionality of Engine Booster is extended to optimize rendering performance by informing the game engine which objects are visible – and which are not – from the camera’s point of view. Rendering performance is gained when invisible objects are not rendered, which speeds up game development by cutting down content creation time. And Umbra Occlusion Booster does all visibility optimization automatically at runtime, so there is no need for manual tweaking of game levels by fitting portals or splitting game levels to cut polygon count.

View the video and imagine how much tedious work this could cut out! :D
 

Rexy

The Kwisatz Haderach
aa
Dec 22, 2008
1,798
2,533
That's fucking brilliant...this should have been in video games ten years ago.
 

Rexy

The Kwisatz Haderach
aa
Dec 22, 2008
1,798
2,533
Man the future is looking so exciting...polygon tesselation in dx11, and now this? Oh so exciting!
 

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
aa
Nov 2, 2007
4,775
7,669
Ok, now let's hear the specs required to run it... The essence of it doesn't really seem that amazing, or new, unless it can be used without a major hike in sys req.

P.S. spinning houses and walls made me laugh
 

Psy

The Imp Queen
aa
Apr 9, 2008
1,706
1,491
Apparently the game Shattered Horizon makes use of the technology.

We chose our middleware partners to address specific requirements for the engine and the game. For example, it would look really strange to use distance fog to limit draw distance in our zero gravity near-Earth environments but we still needed an efficient method for culling away the highly detailed level geometry in addition to our LOD algorithms. Occlusion culling was a natural choice for our asteroid filled levels. Umbra's technology does just this, and it does it extremely well. With the great tools and the developer support offered by Umbra, Natural Motion and Firelight Technologies we saved a lot of time and were able to make the game the way we envisioned it.

The game doesn't have particularly demanding specs by today's standards with a minimum of an 8800GT, E6700 and 2GB of RAM.

Oh, and Bioware have licensed it for one of their upcoming games.

Helsinki-based Umbra Software has announced that BioWare is using its occlusion culling technology in several franchises including Dragon Age and Mass Effect.

Dragon Age: Origins, which releases this week, is said to use Umbra's GPU-based optimization technology.

Exciting times. :p
 
Feb 14, 2008
1,051
931
I hope Half-Life 3's engine uses this :)

(In 50 years)

This sounds brilliant :O
 

YM

LVL100 YM
aa
Dec 5, 2007
7,135
6,056
we already have half of HL3 randdalf, the episodes, remember?! :p

But this would require a 150% overhaul in the source engine since the egines you see there are mesh based and source is brush based. See how entire buildings are culled, not parts of buildings? Thats the give away that this would be largely pointless in source, although it would negate the need for placing areaportals and occluders to hide models. areaportals would still be needed for geometry.
 

Nutomic

L11: Posh Member
Feb 7, 2009
888
177
Bet this uses Raytracing in some way, hopefully we will see this in other engines soon, bye bye optimization :D