Brilliant Game Studios has released a new trailer for its ambitious open world game, The Black Masses. In this trailer, the lead developer of the project details some of the game’s tech, including its lighting system and its world record crowd rendering.
The Black Masses will have accurate reflections and refractions thanks to its new lighting system, and will also feature physically based rendering. The game will also feature dynamic Global Illumination. high resolution textures for a lot of objects, volumetric lighting as well as HDR lighting with eye adaptation. The Black Masses will also sport a procedural generation system for forests.
The biggest feature of the game, though, is its huge crowd. The team showcased a scene featuring 6000 zombies and stated that the engine can handle over one hundred thousand of zombies running with 60fps. Now you will notice some pop-ins but that’s to be expected when you’re dealing with such huge crowds.
To be honest, this crowd tech demo reminded me of Assassin’s Creed Unity. While Ubisoft’s title never reached those ridiculously high numbers, it did offer an incredible amount of on-screen NPCs at various scenes, something that could not be replicated in later versions of the series.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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It may be cynical of me, but I think that Elon Musk may be one of the few who will enjoy this tech.
Multiplayer…
*excitement deflates*
Level design now is just mindless arenas and horde modes. Also, no way to enjoy ANY bit of that “detail” when surrounded by XxXurm0m5w4ll0w5muhkumXxX middle schoolers and griefing manchildren trolls.
60FPS, better than RTX!
That lighting is kind of.. bad. They’re barely using any of UE4’s potential.
or just wait til it’s officially out
I don’t need to wait to know exactly what they’ve done and get annoyed by the way they’re lying about tech. Just be honest. Its not like it isn’t impressive enough without lies. That’s my issue.
Yeah, that was odd. I immediately (within 2 seconds or so) identified the engine as UE4 but then the dev started talking about “their” lighting solution and whatnot, making it sound like this was some custom engine they created themselves. Really strange.
Now you’re saying they’re using stuff from the Unreal marketplace? That doesn’t bode well unless they are using it as placeholders until they have time to create their own assets.
Most of it is marketplace assets. There’s nothing wrong with that, so long as you use them well. But the stupid refraction crap he was talking about anyone can do. In the material editor in UE4 there’s a node that controls refraction. That bothered me the most probably. Barrel stack around 1:20 is funny because they aren’t physics objects so they’re just floating as close together as whoever designed the level cared to put them.
Only 6000? Pfsh. Amateurs.
Would make a perfect VR game!
Absolutely not. You’re constantly moving and there is platforming and special melee attacks with dizzying player animations. This kind of game is impossible in VR. There are dozens of moments in the video alone that would give most VR users a headache. Completely impossible.
Which is why VR is a joke.
Black Masses= polygon “RACICM”!!
Great tech, stale game idea. Beat up helpless simple AI with melee weapons? That’s L4D with less interesting combat options. Bad recipe. The only hope is that they create more interesting enemy types like those knights that can actually pose a threat to you. The problem with that: You don’t want too many of those at the same time so the big selling point of the huge crowds doesn’t apply to them. So now you’re spending so much processing power on a feature that isn’t fun and really only holding back the features that are (potentially) fun. It’s art and tech pulling in two different directions. The tech guys wanted their huge crowd simulator and made it happen. Nobody knows what the artists were thinking but what they have created doesn’t facilitate interesting gameplay with crowds.