Umbra Software

See Umbra 3 at Nordic Game 2012

umbra — Wed, 16 May 2012 08:57:47 +0000

The Nordic Game conference is the Scandinavian gaming industry’s premiere event. This year’s show is held between May 24th and 25th in Malmö, Sweden, come see us there!

Umbra will be present as usual at the event, so if you wish to set up a meeting with us and see a demo of our latest occlusion culling technology. Umbra 3, please email us at sales[at]umbrasoftware.com.

You can read more about the conference here.

The Secret World is coming

umbra — Fri, 04 May 2012 11:00:27 +0000

Longtime Umbra-partners Funcom over in Norway are applying the final touches to Ragnar Tornquist’s much-anticipated MMO The Secret World

As Funcom’s previous game, Age of Conan, The Secret World also utilizes Umbra’s occlusion culling technology. Take a look at the GDC 2012 presentation of the game which is shipping on June 19th for the PC.

Upcoming games using Umbra

umbra — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:29:20 +0000

There’s quite a few games in the pipeline using Umbra’s occlusion culling technology, some of which will be announced at E3, but some have been in works for quite a while. Take a look…

ArenaNet are slowly wrapping up Guild Wars 2, or rather, preparing for a beginning of a long journey. Take a look at Guild Wars 2 in action via Game Informer

Then, our good buddies Sony Online Entertainment are working on PlanetSide 2, which is looking to redefine the MMO FPS genre.

GDC2012 showreel is up

umbra — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:35:01 +0000

Check out some of the developers and videogames using Umbra’s occlusion culling middleware in our GDC 2012 showreel.

Incremental visibility bake video

umbra — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:25:58 +0000

We’ve added an new video to our video page that shows off how Umbra 3′s Incremental bake feature works.

Umbra 3 creates visibility information in pre-process with Umbra 3 Optimizer that has to be integrated into your world / game editing tool. Once you have baked in the visibility information of a scene once, and that’ll be minutes and not hours, it’ll be even faster to keep the visibility data accurate. Any changes you make to the scene, Umbra will look at the area that has been affected and only needs to compute new visibility data for that area instead of the entire scene.

So, you will only be waiting for seconds to get accurate data. The video here visualizes how all this works. Go take a look.

Major Umbra 3 FAQ update

umbra — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 10:31:14 +0000

We’ve done a major update to our Umbra 3 FAQ over here.
We delve into streaming Umbra data, how Umbra handles large open worlds and how you can have multiple levels of occlusion culling detail in a single scene / Tome.

Read about next-generation occlusion culling

umbra — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:34:45 +0000

We take a look at current occlusion culling systems and their pro’s and cons, as well as discuss Umbra’s next-generation occlusion culling solution at a lengthy Gamasutra-feature here.

Square Enix licenses Umbra!

umbra — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 21:15:18 +0000

Square Enix has licensed Umbra’s rendering optimization middleware for it’s Luminous engine that the publisher has been developing for use in it’s future videogames. Read more here.

Umbra collaborates on Square Enix’s Gunslinger Stratos

umbra — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:00:37 +0000

Umbra is proud to announce a partnership with Japanese games developer ByKing who are using Umbra’s rendering optimization middleware for their upcoming arcade game Gunslinger Stratos.

The game is four versus four player action game set in downtown Tokyo locations featuring third person action and dual wielding, of course. Gunslinger Stratos is developed by ByKing and the game uses Silicon Studio’s Orochi engine, to which ByKing has integrated Umbra into.

Square Enix will publish the game in arcades in the summer of 2012.

Job openings at Umbra

umbra — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:00:48 +0000

We are looking for new talent to join our team in Helsinki. If you are interested in graphics programming and taking care of our development infrastructure, go check out the Jobs page.