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Remedy's plant bone tech is just one of the reasons Alan Wake 2 is the best-looking videogame of 2023
08.11.2023 - 13:07 / pcgamer.com / Best
If you've been playing Alan Wake 2 you may have noticed just how pretty that game is. I'd go as far to say it's the best looking videogame of 2023. Developer Remedy has done incredibly well to make what could've been a very dull and dark world look vibrant and detailed, and has since divulged what's actually going on behind the scenes in the Northlight engine to achieve it. And boy, it's a lot.
The studio outlines heaps of features it's rolled out with the Northlight engine powering Alan Wake 2 in a blog post. It's an interesting read, not only for the technical information on the studio's proprietary engine, but because it helps explain why mesh shaders are such a big deal in Alan Wake 2—when you're staring down the barrel of heaps of geometry you start to understand why the game chugs without them.
«With GPU-driven rendering using mesh shaders, we can now do occlusion culling down to a single-pixel precision and use everything in a scene as an occluder,» Remedy says. «This ability to only draw what is visible means that the world of AW2 has more geometric detail than we've ever shipped before.»
Remedy provides some comparison images of the in-game scene and what it looks like with all the meshlets—collections of triangles—visible.
For a point of comparison, one reason why Cities: Skylines 2 is said to struggle with performance is due to its inability to cull the objects that aren't actually visible. It's loading in high numbers of triangles for highly-detailed objects and rendering the lot, often across multiple rendering passes. While Alan Wake 2 is a demanding game with everything turned up to 11, especially path tracing, it does at least run a whole lot better than Cities: Skylines 2. Though that's admittedly an apple to oranges comparison—these games couldn't be more different.
But that is key here: you can't just ramp up the detail without making it perform well, whether by clever tricks, culling, or acceleration. In Alan Wake 2's case, a little bit of everything is used to keep frames ticking over.
Now let's talk about the really exciting bit: vegetation. The level of detail in the forests and Washington wilderness is noticeably high in Alan Wake 2, and you'll be glad to know that's down to bone shader animations.
They may sound gruesome, but bone shader animations are what have allowed Remedy to rig up the plants and trees like they would characters in the game—each plant has strands (known as bones) that are animated, and along those bones an artist can apply their own shader code to do whatever they like. Remedy says there are «almost 300,000 bones in Cauldron Lake [game area] being processed every frame.»
That's a lot of bones. To get all those bones in the scene, the devs created
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