The evolution of the NorthLight engine in Alan Wake 2 is described in detail by Remedy

Alan Wake 2, published at the end of last month, deserved the praise of technical specialists as perhaps the best game in appearance today. This week, Remedy published an extensive article in its blog, in which she spoke in detail about the evolution of her own Northlight from Control to Alan Wake 2.

First of all, the developers switched to a new model of the entity component system (Entity System), which made it possible to make parallel execution effective and thereby ensure support for a variable number of nuclei of the hardware processor. In turn, this allows you to create "Big, more dynamic and saturated worlds", – They said in Remedy. Indeed, Alan Wake 2 is much more than the first game, and the senior creative director Sam Lake did not deny the possibility of the transition in the future to a design resembling an open world. Thus, it looks like a reasonable technological update that can bear fruit.

The studio also created a new station control character, which made his movements more smooth and natural even in a complex and dynamic environment. As an additional bonus, it can be noted that game characters do not stumble upon objects when moving in a close space. The NPC movement was also revised, which allowed them to use the animation of movement in combination with the new Motion Matching function based on the distance.

Remedy wanted the wind to be an important factor in Alan Wake 2, so I have created a technology based on Signed Distance Fields. They work as building blocks that define wind power in various areas of the game, which allows you to achieve realism and diversity of wind.

The most interesting new possibilities are associated with the updated conveyor of graphics rendering. Thanks to the integration of the net shaders, the NorthLight engine can perform an occlusion with an accuracy of one pixel, using everything that is in the scene as an occluder. Thus, the engine draws only what can be seen in Alan Wake 2, providing higher geometric details than ever in the games of Remedy.

Transparent rendering has also been modernized, due to which transparent geometry and effects are organically combined with fog (improved due to the transparent lighting and reflections affecting the fog). And finally, the trace of rays in Alan Wake 2 is supplemented with indirect lighting with trajectory trajectory and an improved blur effect, which became possible thanks to DLSS 3.5 (Ray Reconstruction) from NVIDIA. Ray tracing also improves animated foliage in the game, which is based on the new vegetation system based on shadeers.