With InstaLOD’s advanced automation, NCSOFT streamlined Throne and Liberty’s development, optimizing intricate landscapes and lush vegetation into lightweight scenes that deliver stunning visuals and high-speed gameplay across all platforms.
NCSOFT, a Seoul-based studio renowned for MMORPGs like Lineage and Guild Wars, is set to release their latest title: Throne and Liberty. With a vast, fully open world emphasizing exploration, NCSOFT sought a way to craft Throne and Liberty’s rich and colorful environment while balancing its immersive, intricate areas with the performance requirements needed for fast, action-packed gameplay. By leveraging InstaLOD’s suite of powerful optimization tools, NCSOFT could successfully fulfill their vision without compromising performance.
Optimizing Massively Detailed Worlds
InstaLOD’s technology was pivotal in NCSOFT’s process when optimizing their various locations and sub-levels throughout Throne and Liberty’s extensive and highly detailed world. The team needed to pack areas with a wealth of gameplay-relevant information, which required numerous static meshes for each scene. Their artists attempted to combine objects using Unreal Engine’s built-in static mesh merging functions, but to achieve the amount of detail they envisioned while being able to render hundreds of levels, they needed to find a better solution than what the engine could offer.
InstaLOD’s Occlusion Cull and Remesh operations enabled NCSOFT’s artists to significantly reduce the number of polygons, materials, and draw calls for each environment in the game. For a single level, InstaLOD’s occlusion culling automatically removed unnecessary, hidden geometry, resulting in a 60% reduction in polygons while maintaining an identical appearance to the original. They could then optimize the area further with InstaLOD’s multi-resolution remesher.
InstaLOD’s remesher automated the process of retopologizing the entire scene, merging materials, and combining objects to reduce draw calls. This one-click solution saved them an enormous amount of work and in the realm of production, time is the most valuable resource. The overall process transformed millions of polygons, thousands of game objects, and thousands of draw calls into a lightweight environment with fewer than 50,000 polygons and just one draw call.
A Lush, Green World at All Levels of Detail
Throne and Liberty’s world is filled with copious amounts of foliage, ranging from various trees to a large assortment of grasses and plants. The team at NCSOFT wanted their world to be covered with vegetation, but they needed an optimization solution when viewing it from great distances.
Traditional polygon reduction techniques fall short when it comes to game foliage. As polygons are removed, trees lose branches, leaves, and overall volume. InstaLOD’s Hybrid Billboard Cloud technique effectively solved this crucial issue by automatically generating simplified 3D geometry that maintained parallax effects when the foliage was viewed from different angles in the game. This approach significantly reduced polygon counts while preserving each plant’s visual integrity for distant LODs.
By leveraging InstaLOD’s powerful optimization tools, NCSOFT successfully created the vast, immersive world of Throne and Liberty without compromising on performance or visual fidelity. This collaboration exemplifies how cutting-edge technology can empower game developers to push the boundaries of what’s possible in modern MMORPGs, delivering rich, detailed environments that captivate players while maintaining smooth gameplay experiences.
