Breaking down an Unreal Engine 5 technological showcase.
Digital Foundry: I want to start by going back to the beginning.
When the project first got underway, this was announced prior to the arrival of the new consoles.
It was the first next generation game announced.
Mark Slater-Tunstill: The initial Senua’s Saga was actually UE4 for quite a while.
Are we going to be able to use that many triangles?"
So there was a little bit of trepidation.
Dan Atwell: So I’m trying to think when we transitioned.
And so we transitioned after that, which was pretty smooth, really.
It wasn’t too bad.
It wasn’t the case that many parts of moving over to UE5 that were that alien.
There was the excitement of going to Nanite and Lumen.
But it was pretty easy, I would say.
Mark Slater-Tunstill: I think as a developer though, it’s so easy to get super excited.
You see all these new features and say “we’re going to use them all!
We want everything!”
But then you come back down to reality and go, OK, we’ve got this.
The GPU limits, the CPU limits, certain memory limits.
So actually, how do we balance this stuff?
This is just going to sell those performances so much better.
Digital Foundry: So one of the key features then, of course, is Nanite.
And Hellblade is a game that features a lot of dense, granular geometry across its world.
It’s extremely detailed.
It’s more expensive to have a non-Nanite mesh, so we had to go all in.
So it is a big bit of that that’s just gone.
It was quite a bit of a change really.
That was the biggest thing for us in terms of environment art.
Actually, you could then think “what will make this scene look good?
How can we adjust the light to really pick out the detail?”
Digital Foundry: Which version did you end up shipping on?
Because there was a point where Nanite couldn’t handle things such as vegetation, foliage and the like.
Which version was that?
Mark Slater-Tunstill: Uh, 5.3 we shipped on.
And then you had a Nanite mesh, but with a mask material on it that was super expensive.
Dan Atwell: Yeah, so for the equivalent of LOD 0 stuff, there’s definitely a bump.
It’s probably not as high a poly count as you would think in a lot of instances.
Because the big bottleneck with Nanite is memory; that’s the new poly count, as it were.
Was it baked lighting with light maps or was it something else?
Digital Foundry: That’s really interesting.
So we weren’t really doing anything new in that respect.
Dan Atwell: On Sacrifice, we were using a real time GI add-in called Enlighten.
So it’s very similar to what we ended up doing with Lumen.
It was a lot slower in terms of updating, but you were getting that baked real-time bounce stuff.
It’s the one visual thing that falls a little short of everything else in the game.
Mark Slater-Tunstill:Yeah, I totally agree with you.
It was a learning process on how we balance in terms of performance and everything.
On console, it just wasn’t an option this time.
But we have a limited team size, right?
Is that a memory limitation or a GPU limitation?
But there were very specific reasons for choosing that format.
Obviously, there were various cinematographers and movies that we were referencing and looking at.
And it’s those little details that help that.
So could you tell me how that was achieved?
It’s gorgeous, and it’s a proper dynamic light that spills onto the scenery.
I think we referenced Temple of Doom for that section.
Our teams love working together and interconnecting those things.
And you might do scenes like that now, which is fantastic from an artistic/creative point of view.
The timing of the audio to the gameplay beats is really, really special.
David Garcia Diaz:This thing in particular is actually really complicated in audio.
So for this, we use a tool created by Microsoft called Project Acoustics.
So I think the whole scene is really powerful.
It creates a sense of movement.
I think it helps in that scene to double-check the audio feels alive.
Digital Foundry: Part of the immersion then stems from the use of binaural audio.
David Garcia Diaz:Both!
And yet, every ear is different.
And so normally these microphones are an average of a head.
Digital Foundry: How do you tailor the audio to sound good on a home theatre versus headphones?
How do you tune the audio to work well in both cases?
David Garcia Diaz: It’s a nightmare, really.
We are a very small team, so we decided to make the game sound the best on headphones.
It’s a very good question and it’s a very hard solution.
Similarly, when Senua interacts with water in cinematics, how was that done?
It’s really awesome.
Something that other Unreal developers can have a look at as well!
For the shoreline, it does a height map capture.
And actually, even the audio used that.
David Garcia Diaz: It changed the materials of the floor.
So when the water comes, it just starts being sand.
So you’ve got the option to play the perfect sound.
The system works super well.
I wonder if it’s possible for you to share why this effect in particular changed?
Mark Slater-Tunstill:I ran out of memory [laughter].
I can go a bit more in depth about that.
Unfortunately, that way of doing it tanks your CPU.
It just cannot stream it in quick enough and pass the data over to the GPU.
But it’s a learning process, and we might make different decisions next time.
We actually used the MetaHuman animator pipeline.
We found that when we mapped it back on in game, it actually looked great.
That was exported out as height maps and brough into Unreal Engine as the kind of base level.
That gave us essentially the topography of the whole area.
So it’s a kind of two or three tier sort of approach.
Mark Slater-Tunstill:We wanted the locations to feel believable.
They’re not all exactly one-to-one, but you kind of believe they could be a real place.
I think that process definitely helped.
Digital Foundry: That sounds like a really powerful system.
Dan Atwell: Well, you do.
And it takes a big chunk of working it out.
it’s possible for you to’t be doing stuff like that by hand.
How does this work within the editor and how is it set up?
Mark Slater-Tunstill:Smoke and mirrors.
As you’ve pointed out in your videos, garbage collection and unloading of assets can easily cause hitches.
Effectively, the storage in the new consoles is so fast that you might stream stuff in pretty quick.
Digital Foundry: What was the impetus for the PC parameters menu?
Mark Slater-Tunstill:People in the team cared about that stuff.
Digital Foundry: One thing the audience always likes to talk about is frame-rate.
guys targeted 30 frames per second, uh, going for sort of that cinematic look.
And the reality is that does have some constraints.
I’m just curious what some of the challenges were on the project.
Mark Slater-Tunstill:Time is always an issue in game dev…
I think for every game developer in the world, time is always your biggest enemy.
One of the patch notes said “fixed peach fuzz on Senua” [laughter].
Mark Slater-Tunstill:A lot of it is just kind of comparing the options, right?
Thanks to Mark Slater-Tunstill, Dan Atwell and David Garcia Diaz for their time.
