The limiting factor when it comes to creating realistic grass is the number of grass blades. Water surface simulation is a well-established algorithm, but you can always make it more interactive by adding CPU power to it, and that’s exactly what we had to spare. However, we started to think about how we could make the water more interactive so that it didn’t look out of place in the fields of swaying, interactive grass. Originally, we were planning to have minimal interaction with the water since it didn’t play an important part in battles - it was just there to make the landscape complete.
This was the kind of simulation we could run on the CPU, and by either reducing the range or lowering the sim quality, we could make it scalable too.Īnother idea we had was to improve the water. If we could have grass that swayed realistically in a simulated wind system, and that interacted with dynamic objects in the game like the armed units and chariots, then we would have a significant increase in visual quality. We had a few brainstorming sessions with Intel, and one subject that kept coming up was the grass.
Their plan fit well with ours, as our work to make 4K our rendering standard had pretty much saturated the GPU, and, since we had a few inherently single-threaded algorithms running on the CPU side, we had some idle cores to utilize. Intel was interested to see how we could use CPU capacity to push the realism of the environments, while at the same time ensuring that the game was equally playable on a wide range of systems.
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