Mark James, director of technology at Striking Distance Studios, talks in two interviews about the ray tracing features that the horror game will have.
The Callisto Protocol, the action-horror adventure from Striking Distance Studios, the studio founded by the creator of Dead Space, will have different ray-tracing functionalities at least on PC and last-generation consoles, as revealed by the director of technology Mark James in interviews with IGN and Techradar.
“It was essential to us to achieve physically consistent lighting and shadow model in the game. Contrast and occlusion add to the horror,” says James in the first of the interviews. There he admits that Unreal Engine 4, the engine the title is being developed with, has a limited lighting system, so they modified the engine so it could have “a higher number of lights at a lower cost per light.”
“We studied the UE4 ray tracing solution at the time and found that for the number of shadows we wanted to recreate, we needed to create our solution,” the developer continues. “So instead, we created a hybrid ray-traced shadow solution that applies ray-traced shadow detail to areas of the screen that matter to the overall quality of the scene.”
While in that talk, he talks about ray-traced shadows; in the conversation with Techradar, he announces that the technology will also be used for reflections. “We have a full scanner, even for ray-traced reflections of the eyeballs,” explains James. “So if you look into [the character’s] eyes in our game, you can see it reflects what he sees.”
“It’s a tiny detail,” he admits, “but those little details matter to our game.” From the DSO Gaming portal, they assume that these statements mean that, at least the PC version, will have options for shadows and reflections with ray tracing; They add that “theoretically,” the title will have artificial intelligence rescaling technologies compatible, predictably AMD FSR, since the title is sponsored by said brand.
It will arrive on December 2 on PC, PlayStation and Xbox
The Callisto Protocol will be available on December 2 for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. You can read our impressions once the embargo lifts.