Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would later go on to win command of the kit cupboard as hardware editor.
have noticed just how pretty that game is. I'd go as far to say it's the best looking videogame of 2023. Developer Remedy has done incredibly well to make what could've been a very dull and dark world look vibrant and detailed, and has since divulged what's actually going on behind the scenes in the Northlight engine to achieve it. And boy, it's a lot..
But that is key here: you can't just ramp up the detail without making it perform well, whether by clever tricks, culling, or acceleration. In Alan Wake 2's case, a little bit of everything is used to keep frames ticking over.exciting bit: vegetation. The level of detail in the forests and Washington wilderness is noticeably high in Alan Wake 2, and you'll be glad to know that's down to bone shader animations.
That's a lot of bones. To get all those bones in the scene, the devs created something called the scattering tool, which is like a plant and prop paintbrush.Alan Wake 2 also comes with some piping hot fog tech. Because of course it does—the game is extremely moody. This is reportedly using a MBOIT, or rather a Moment-Based Order-Independent Transparency system, to make sure fog plays nicely with everything else going on in a scene.
Apparently the gameplay programmer's favourite tech is the ECS framework, which is sufficiently nerdy sounding that I believe it. It allowed the devs to take specific control over targeting hardware, and helped make tools like the scattering tool a reality. It also helped with the development of the case board, which you can flick in and out of in the game at a moment's notice.