NetEase creates gamers’ paradise with Enlighten real-time global illumination technology

Geomerics, an ARM company, today announced that its Enlighten™ real-time global illumination technology is being deployed in the development of ‘Justice: The Only End of Kongfu’, a new game by NetEase.

“NetEase’s commitment to technological innovation has produced some of China’s most popular PC-client and mobile games,” said Chris Porthouse, general manager of Enlighten Business Unit, ARM. “The integration of Enlighten into this strong technology base will help make ‘Justice: The Only End of Kongfu’ NetEase’s most aesthetically beautiful and exciting game to date.”

With Enlighten:

• Gamers can experience a world where lights move and change without compromising on visual fidelity.
• NetEase’s artists are producing high-quality game lighting nine times more efficiently than before.

“The world of ‘Justice: The Only End of Kongfu’ will be the paradise that our gamers have always dreamed of,” said Zhipeng Hu, vice president of NetEase. “Enlighten allows us to achieve better lighting for its constantly changing environment, all while increasing production efficiency by nine times. This gives our development team the time needed to fulfil even more of our gamers’ creative wishes.”

The effect of light and shadow appearing on an object is formed by a combination of direct light and global illumination (the way light is bounced or absorbed by surfaces in a scene). Enlighten calculates this global illumination in milliseconds, taking into account the properties of both lights and materials to ensure high-quality results. The speed of this computation means users can change the lighting setup of a scene any number of times and see the correct global illumination response instantly.

Thanks to Enlighten global illumination technology, ‘Justice: The Only End of Kongfu’ will be a fully dynamic experience with many different lighting effects in each scene. Take a lake scene as an example. Enlighten generates accurate indirect reflections on the water as the day transitions from dawn to dusk. The player will immediately be able to see the sun’s changing position and color affect the lighting of the lake’s surface.

This rapid global illumination computation also takes place in the editor and allows NetEase developers to see results instantaneously, removing the need for a lengthy offline bake after each change to the lighting setup. In the case of ‘Justice: The Only End of Kongfu’, an effect that would otherwise have required nine artists can be easily created by just one.

‘Justice: The Only End of Kongfu’ is scheduled for release in 2017.