One of the most characteristic features of Marvel Rivals (except all running superheroes) is the destructive area. If you press B, the map will change gray in front of you, except for everything you can destroy, which will change yellow. Try it for yourself and you will see how much you can break in this game.
In various places on the maps you will be able to find brittle areas that can lead to an enemy line or reveal the flank. Next to the first point on Tokyo 2099: Shin Shibuya, there is a brittle wall that will reveal one of the paths defending the team back to the point. If you break it around the height of the head, then you just keep this vision line, you can kill players before they return to the first point and usually never see that he is coming.
But using a brittle area not only has a strategic sense; It is also worth to take advantage of the developer’s demanding work. The main technical designer, Ruan Weikong, explained in Interview with Unreal Engine How destructive environments presented quite vital problems for programmers.
First of all, the developers had to make sure that debris fell into clear movement patterns according to the hero responsible for this. “Regardless of whether they are destructive blows of Hulka, supporting Punisher’s fire, or a wide tornado storm, debris shows carefully created movement patterns that strengthen the identity of every hero,” says Weikong. This may not be obvious at the beginning, but the magician blade and Punniser’s shooting will break the area in a slightly different way.
Then it costs the performance of all this destruction on a vast scale. Initially, I discovered that Marvel’s rivals worked quite badly, regardless of whether I came across acute fps spikes, which sometimes turned my game into a PowerPoint presentation, or it just took the map of loading each game. Although this changed for the better than the premiere, apparently it was even worse conditions.
“The implementation of the destruction of the environment on a large scale while maintaining competitive performance standards was our biggest technical challenge,” says Weikong. “The number of fragments appeared as a key performance factor. To meet both the gameplay and visual requirements, we have implemented a two -level system of fragmentation of static structures (it turns large debris into small debris). The scenes after fragmentation experienced a dramatic increase in the counting, significantly affecting the GPU loads and the use of memory. “
To optimize this, developers had to implement some basic improvements. They include hiding the transition from primary to secondary fragments so that GPU players do not explode and reducing the number of a multi -piece fragment by adding native ice -free functionality to the geometry collection (resources that may fall apart by means of fracture mode). Although it may seem challenging, the biggest obstacle turned out to be how debris influenced the lighting in Marvel Rivals.
“The implementation of wide environmental destruction was our first serious technical challenge: choosing the right global lighting solution,” says the main technical designer of Weikong. “Traditional baking approaches have proved to be inappropriate for environments dominated by dynamic objects and frequent lighting changes.”
It turns out that the software based on Lumena software could not initially get lighting for damaged map areas. In the wrong places there would be a leak of delicate or simply stagnant flat lighting next to debris. Now this is not a problem of breaking the game, but it looks amusing and ruins the nice aesthetics of the maps.
Until the team has adopted a hybrid approach to the geometry collection, “attaching static nets (SM) capable of producing distance fields into each fragment,” says Weikong. “During the fragmentation process, we convert the collision of collision into SM components and process them at the same time.”
This may seem complicated, but it is basically only a way to convince the EU5 that damaged buildings are consistent material properties, not just confusing rubble. All this means that after breaking the wall you will get a nice petite shade in the right areas. It may not be much, but it is certainly a fair job.
