In an interview with IGN, Marc James, chief technical officer at Striking Distance Studios, revealed that The Callisto Protocol would feature a hybrid, Ray Tracing. Speaking in an interview he revealed that The Callisto Protocols characters are the most lifelike you will ever see in the game, down to their eyeballs, which boast ray-traced reflections. The Callisto Protocol uses his hybrid shadow-ray-tracing technique, applying ray-tracing to certain areas on the screen that are important for the overall quality of a scene.
Chief technical officer Mark James said that in order to produce accurate optical details, the development team painstakingly models the light reflections from each perspective. Callisto also had protocols in place for tracking light to their characters’ eyes, but James says it was essential for the studio. According to chief technical officer Mark James, characters are created in such a detailed manner that some fans would assume that it was done in advance, which is not the case.
Mark James, chief technical officer at Striking Distance Studios, confirmed to Golden News that The Callisto Protocol will have ray-tracing, at least on PCs and next-gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft, and detailed some important elements such as lighting and reflections.
By now, we pretty much know everything about The Callisto Protocol, and these last few months leading up to The Callisto Protocols release, the development team is dedicating themselves to publicizing some of the elements that we will be finding in-game, via interviews and new materials being released. After spectacular gameplay showcases at PlayStations State of Play and Summer Game Fest, including the revelation of an amazing Gravity Gun weapon, everyone looking forward to the former PUBG spin-off is sure to be wanting to learn more about the scary space game.
Striking Distance Studios looked at Unreal Engines ray-tracing solutions back then, and found that “for the number of shadows that we wanted to produce, we had to make our own solutions”. Unfortunately, Striking Distance Studios found out that UE4 was limited to only four shadow-generating lights, so first, we worked to change the engine to allow us to support a higher number of lights with less per-light costs.
Video games do not always need to be entirely realistic, but anybody that is checked out the studio will see it definitely does not hurt things to have an excellent sense of authenticity for added immersion. Year by year games have been breaking the barrier and getting closer to reality, it won’t be long when we see games with virtually lifelike graphics.