Guerrilla Games has revealed plans to harness a GPU-based procedural technology in Horizon Zero Dawn that will facilitate the creation of “a dense world around the player on the fly.”
As reported by WCCFTech, the studio’s Senior Tech Programmer Jaap van Muijden will be in attendance at the Game Developers Conference 2017 to discuss the tech in full, specifically its ability to dynamically create and render full environments — wildlife, effects, sounds, and various gameplay elements included.
Jaap van Muijden from Guerrilla Games will describe the GPU based procedural placement system that dynamically creates the world of ‘Horizon: Zero Dawn’ around the player. Not limited to just rocks and trees, the procedural system assembles fully-fledged environments while the player walks through them, complete with sounds, effects, wildlife and game-play elements. He will show the entire pipeline, from the graph editor where artists can define the procedural placement rules to the GPU algorithms that create a dense world around the player on the fly. He will demonstrate the power of this procedural approach by showing how painting in a tree line and redirecting roads can be just as easy as moving mountains and changing a desert into a tropical swamp.
Attendees will be introduced to our new GPU-based run-time procedural technology. Learn how the team at Guerrilla Games used compute shaders to dynamically populate the world around the player. Find out how artists define and edit their diverse environments and how this procedural workflow allows global and independent content iterations for both artists and designers.
Horizon Zero Dawn has been earmarked for launch on February 28, 2017. The Game Developers Conference, meanwhile, is due to commence just prior to Horizon’s release on February 27.
