Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide, Fatshark’s four player, first-person, co-op rat extermination simulator, will make use of the Umbra SDK to recreate the distinct, plague-y atmosphere of Warhammer Fantasy, the developer has announced.
Fatshark explains that the game is using the new Stingray game engine developed by Autodesk, into which Umbra’s ”occlusion culling technology” has been integrated. But what in the name of Zeus does that mean?
Well basically it means ”only the visible objects in every frame are being processed and rendered”, which should result in a smoother, more optimized performance, without the team being forced to sacrifice visual fidelity in favour of a stable frame rate.
“After evaluating Umbra, it became apparent that it was the best solution for our need. In many ways, using methods like Umbra’s has always felt like the “right” or at least best solution to a complex problem. ” says Rikard Blomberg, deputy CEO at Fatshark. “Now after we have gotten more experience handling the technology, we have also realized that it is not just about culling. We have come to see the technology more as an alternative representation of game data that is structured to be very efficient for a certain subset of problems. By integrating it in the Autodesk Stingray Engine for Vermintide, we are able to render at high frame-rates without sacrificing graphics quality. It has also sped up and simplified our production pipeline.”
In case you missed the announcement earlier this year, Vermintide is a Left 4 Dead-style multiplayer game that casts players as one of five heroes with different play-styles, equipment and abilities, and charges them with clearing evil Skaven ratfolk from the depths of a ruined city. With guns, magic and swords, rather than poison-laced cheese samples.
It’s expected out late this year.
