The Technical Art of Sea of Thieves

SIGGRAPH TALK: history.siggraph.org/learning...
Sea of Thieves posed a unique challenge - developing a stylised, open world game in Unreal Engine 4, a demanding and contemporary game engine focused on photo-realistic rendering. Our game contains a large number of dynamic elements and is designed to run on hardware ranging from integrated GPUs on a laptop, to the most powerful modern gaming PCs. Over the course of development, we have come up with a number of innovative techniques focused both on keeping an open world game like ours performant and visually appealing.
We introduced several techniques that we used to stylise and supplement the look of our FFT water implementation for the game’s oceans. We also created a new cloud rendering and simulation system for this game, allowing for fast rendering of three-dimensional, art-directed cloudscapes without using expensive raymarching techniques.
To bring the world to life, we also developed other graphical features, including a physically-based system of rendering rope-and-pulley systems, our use of baking simulation data to textures and real-time surface fluid simulations to model incidental water behaviour on the GPU.

[@AprilFoolsChild]

Man, I'm a sound designer and I couldn't pull myself away from this video! Really awesome problem solving. Still overwhelmed by the beauty of that project every time I see it in motion.

[@hbonin]

This was higly informative, thank you. Also, from a self-learning dev point of view, you guys are pure magicians.

[@boldoberan]

have I just watched a video on Sea of Thieves visuals? Yes. Does it help me in any way? Probably not. But it was still worth it. The "very cheap" after every other slide and the small details I will notice when playing

[@erenozklnc9427]

Just amazing. Thank you for this beautiful presentation. Can you share the slide also? I Couldn't find it on the Rare's website.

[@bdenix1997]

i dont get nothing like 7:28 when i follow tessendorfs paper. i just get a line that indicates the crest of the waves :S

[@metaroonlabstech]

❤🤯

[@blavkadam2153]

Want to make a sea of thieves ocean? Do this: Make the ocean, make the displacement, make the foam with a color ramp (higher on Z is foam, wave top). I don't know why they used the UV for world position. use world position for world position. Add normal buoyancy code like a normal person. For ship breaking and falling apart, use chaos style physics or carefully code each board of the ship to be destructable and replaceable (many ways to do this) Now you have a random displacement ocean, with foam, your ship is buoyant, and destructable. Last thing to do is code when ship takes on water = less buoyancy till none at all. EZ. UV maps for buoyancy? barbaric I say. They used this in some weird twisted way with raycasting for buoyancy im sure. But they also stated in one of their videos I watched a long time ago they had multiplayer syncing issues because the packets could not keep up with all the trash code likely. So do it the right way.