Among the most interesting advances in gaming technology unveiled at GDC is the progress in middleware. This is the key software that allows developers to make better games more swiftly and easily, and it’s become a huge business. Major announcements from GDC included Unity 5, which is boasting improved graphics, and Unreal Engine 4, which has dropped its subscription fee to seek wider adoption by developers.
Both of these development engines utilize a key component: Enlighten, lighting software from Geomerics, a middleware firm that was purchased by ARM in 2013. ARM is the company that designs the basic mobile CPUs and GPUs licensed across the mobile industry, used as the basis for almost all of the smartphones and tablets on the market. Companies are free to modify ARM’s designs for their own chips, as Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and others do.
At GDC Geomerics announced the release of what they style “the gaming industry’s most advanced dynamic lighting solution yet,” Enlighten 3 with Forge. This new version of the software “delivers cinematic-quality dynamic lighting through an accurate real-time simulation of global illumination; or how light is transferred between surfaces in a scene,” as the company puts it.
“Lighting is the key to artists expressing their creative vision across all forms of high-end graphics, and gaming is no exception to this rule,†said Mark Dickinson, vice president and general manager, media processing group, ARM. “ARM invested in Geomerics to enable gamers to benefit from the enhanced experience that advanced global illumination brings no matter what platform they use. The advances announced today place Enlighten technology at the cutting edge of game lighting quality and computer graphics.â€
While Enlighten boasts a number of advanced features, a few stand out from the business perspective. First, the Forge editor now allows artists to rapidly iterate with high quality real-time lighting. Forge also provides a customizable foundation for integrating Enlighten into any development pipeline thanks to import functionality from Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya, and a modular design. The other important feature is the product’s scalablility across platforms, providing advanced, lightweight real-time global illumination technology between mobile, console and desktop platforms. Enlighten is the lighting technology in Unity 5, is available fully integrated into Unreal Engine 3 and 4, and is used by some of the world’s most successful game development studios.
“Unity 5 is the most powerful version of Unity yet, capable of rendering incredible visuals through the combination of physically-based shading and Enlighten’s industry best real-time global illumination technology,” said Joachim Ante, chief technology officer, Unity Technologies. “We’re very happy to have forged a strong long term relationship with Geomerics to ensure Unity’s amazing community of developers has access to Enlighten and all of its benefits.”
The [a]listdaily sat down with Chris Porthouse VP Gaming Middleware for ARM, to discuss Enlighten and how it’s affecting game development indsutry-wide.
Enlighten is aimed at consoles, PCs, and mobile. Does that mean we can now see the same sort of lighting features, and therefore graphics, on all of these platforms?
Enlighten is really scalable, from the very highest end desktop it scales into console and mobile, and next-gen consoles as well. Enlighten is able to utilize all that compute power. You can scale into mobile and do dynamic lighting on mobile as well.
When people talk about mobile devices being equivalent to consoles these days, they’re really talking about being able to use the same lighting and graphics techniques on all platforms, not the sheer number of polygons, right
That’s the good thing with Enlighten. You can turn all the dials up to 11 when you’re on a high-end desktop, or you can turn them down for mobile. It’s the same solution. Developers can use the same workflow, they can use the same assets — you just change slightly how you use those assets.
There’s a lot of time saved with the new Forge tool allowing you to preview in real-time. How are developers responding to that?
For an artist now they can take an existing asset and immediately start lighting it, moving lights around the scene. They can try out new gameplay ideas, which is one of the key things we’re trying to push with Enlighten. How can you use the power of Enlighten to do things you really couldn’t do before
The presentation about Enlighten made a point about how much lighting influences the emotional content of a scene. How do you see this applying to games?
The phrase “console-quality graphics” gets very tired. Let’s talk about “cinematic-quality graphics” and using very beautiful lighting to create a world, whether you’re a game designer or Stanley Kubrick — you use lighting to do that. The artists love this because they can immediately see how they can play around and see what difference that makes. They can create a movie-like feel in a game. It’s not just about creating a mood — you’ll see some developers using this to push the bounds of what a game is. For example, there’s a game called Quantum Conundrum that used Enlighten to change unusual dimensions like “fluffy.” The lighting changes immediately, and you couldn’t have done that any other way. It’s giving designers and developers new ways to create different types of games.
Why did ARM choose to buy Geomerics?
There were a number of reasons. If you look at dynamic global illumination, to do that in real-tim is an incredibly computational-intensive task. Which is good for ARM — we need to solve computationally-intensive problems. We looked at Geomerics and what they were doing, and we saw they could solve global illumination not just at the high end, but they could move into mobile as well. That was why it was interesting to us. We saw that lighting is a key thing in games, it’s absolutely critical. The other reason was we have a really strong ecosystem with ARM — we sell to everybody — and the types of conversations we can now have, now that we have Geomerics, helps influence our CPU and GPU roadmaps. Strategically, it’s important.
From past experience I know that when you design graphics software in concert with hardware design you can usually get much better results. Is that happening with Geomerics and ARM’s designs for future chips?
That’s exactly the conversations we’re having. One of our key developers has actually moved over to the graphics side of the business to do exactly that. He’s helping inform what a GPU should look like, because he’s been working in the console space for the last ten years. He know nothing about hardware design, but he'[s in conversations with our hardware designers about how to make the GPU perform better. This is something that will definitely inform our CPU and GPU roadmap.
