The Callisto Protocol Dev Explains the Tech Behind the Game’s Gory Details
When creating a new game, an important development option is to decide whether to use your own in-house engine or one of the well-established and well-supported game development platforms. For Striking Distance Studios and its next game, The Callisto Protocol, the team chose the latter, especially Unreal Engine version 4.27.
Opportunity to talk to Mark James, Chief Technology Officer of Striking Distance Studios, to discuss the business and development aspects of creating new games, why and how Unreal helped, and the custom improvements the team made to the engine. was.
IGN: With the big challenge of setting up a new studio and team, how did the use of Unreal Engine achieve your three-year schedule?
Striking Distance Studios, CTO, Mark James: It’s a big advantage to start with an engine that has shipped hundreds of games. Workflows and tools are widely understood and experience with commercial engines facilitates adoption. There are always specific changes we want to make to the base engine based on product needs, and early on we decided on the key areas we wanted to enhance. I didn’t do this on its own, but I contacted Epic on a regular basis for these changes to facilitate integration. When starting a project, continuing the engine drop throughout the development cycle and consulting with Epic about the best way to make changes will make subsequent integration much easier.
I used Unreal’s Simple Demolitions System and customized it for the Callisto protocol. What are some of these customizations? Does this also apply to the game demolition system?
This was an area we created from scratch. We knew we needed a Gore system that would hit every component of a great horror game. Our Gore system blends blood splash, chunk creation, and decomposition to create the most realistic system possible. I wanted Gore to be a health bar for each enemy, representing realistic flesh, muscle, and skeletal scars. Not only was it used by the enemy, it was also used to represent the death of a brutal player. With the Callisto protocol, even losing is a visual feast!
This game uses ray tracing as part of its visual elements. Can we share if these are Unreal Engine 5 lighting and shadow-based elements, or if they’ve gone in a different direction?
It was important to have a physically consistent lighting and shadow model in the game. Contrast and occlusion cause great fear.
Using a corridor-based scale of about 20 meters, we found that about eight lights could be affecting the surface of the environment. Unfortunately, we found that UE4 was limited to four shadow-generating lights, so we first modified the engine to reduce the cost per light and support more lights.
When I looked at the UE4 raytracing solution at the time, I found that I had to create my own solution for the number of shadows I wanted to create. Instead, we created a hybrid raytraced shadow solution that applies raytraced shadow details to areas of the screen that are relevant to the overall quality of the scene.
UE5 has taken a very different approach to lighting with Lumen, which does not fit the internal corridor model required for the game, but so far I have been very impressed with the quality of the UE5 demo.
This is a cross-generational game, but how did the team find a transition to PS5, Series X, S based on previous generations?
I created TCP with a new generation of consoles in mind. I wanted to focus on the advanced hardware features these consoles offer. Technologies such as positional audio, ultra-fast storage, and, of course, ray-tracing GPUs are included as part of the design.
That said, we always maintain a scalable content generation approach, ensuring that we can deliver good-looking, good-sounding games for all generations.
Did the previous generation version have any important hurdles to overcome?
The biggest change in the new console was the speed of the storage device. With SSDs in these new consoles, you can seamlessly load the entire game.
Returning this to the previous generation of low-speed HDDs was the biggest design challenge. I had to figure out where to put the load volumes, and in some cases I had to find a loading screen that didn’t need them in the current generation.
Are you planning to extend your console or PC version with technical boosts other than ray tracing, loading, and possibly frame rates? For example, do current generation machines have higher density geometry?
As a team, we want to get the most out of the given hardware specifications. It represents far more material detail, geometry density, and lighting interactions than any other project to date. One of the goals we had in the early days of the project was that “every step was different”. We wanted to show a practical design of the space prison and represent the world we lived in. This meant investing in kit-based geometry and complex material systems to represent diversity.
You said that you incorporated the elements of Unreal Engine 5 into the custom-made UE4.27. Please tell me these details.
When working to complete TCP in UE4, I looked at areas of UE5 that would be useful for both development iterations and new console features. Epic also helped bring some of these features back to the custom-made version of the engine. There aren’t any big components that stand out, but instead there are lots of small optimizations and workflow improvements that have helped in the last few months.
The general visual rendering of character models, post-effects, characters, faces and movements is better than almost any other game I’ve seen, and the main character Jacob (Josh Duhamel) is a live actor in the video. Looks like. What are some of the key technical improvements here that have made this possible?
The goal of a photorealistic character begins with capturing a model or material with the correct light response. We have invested heavily in a capture verification system that allows us to easily switch from the photo setup to see the status of our technology and authoring. Using this approach, we focused our technology investment on areas other than photo browsing and character rendering. As an example, one of the key areas of technology investment for us was the correct rendering of translucency. This is shown not only in simple areas such as how light is represented behind the character’s ears, but also in enemies who render a translucent film on the skin.
The horror and tension of the demo really comes out. How much has your sound team worked with gameplay and rendering techniques to enhance this? Are they taking advantage of new technologies in new hardware such as Tempest 3D audio?
Audio is a very important part of providing horror that wanted to provide as much technological development as rendering. I think of audio as a feature of the game.
Our goal is a physics-based audio model that represents both directional audio and the interaction of audio with geometry and materials. Traditionally, these models are CPU-intensive and have not been able to run real-time games quickly. Now that the new console has new dedicated audio hardware, you can do this.
You can get a tremendous sense of space with just the sound and without the visual elements. Doing this right will increase your immersiveness in the game. We use sound to create fear and tension whenever possible.
What are the key areas of the game you are most proud of? Is that gameplay, technology, or anything else?
There are many things I’m proud of in the games we offer. Lighting technology, immersive audio, combat gameplay, and more, it’s hard to pick your favorite. The team is what I am most proud of. We built studios and new IPs in a pandemic without compromising quality. It requires true passion.
