Today we’re super excited that Miscreated, a cool new survival sandbox game created using CRYENGINE, is the first title ever to feature Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination. While SVOGI is still an experimental feature, the team at Entrada Interactive found our implementation to be what they were looking for to make their game to come further to life.

Cool. But what is SVOGI, anyway?

Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination is a system that makes in-game light behave extremely closely to how it does in the real world, adding lifelike immersion. We achieved this by making indirect light bounce off of most objects in the scene. We’ll leave it to our friends over at Entrada to explain more:

“This system allows us to dramatically change the lighting in the game to a more accurate representation of how light behaves in real life. Interiors of buildings will be darker than the outside world as they should be and color bounces off of objects and shows up on nearby objects. In general the lighting of the entire game looks immensely better.”

Why is it better?

CRYENGINE actually has multiple indirect lighting solutions, with each of them solving just part of the GI computations. All of them have their own pros and cons and in the past it was not easily possible to make them all reach their full potential. Some of common problems are: severe light leaking, a lot of handwork for designer and long pre-computation times.

SVOGI replaces most of these older solutions with one unified system. In addition to in-directional lighting it natively supports secondary shadows which provides better, more realistic results with less manual work required. If needed, levels may be lit completely by sky light only and this produces visually pleasing results with soft darkening under objects and detailed contact shadows. All that is possible without pre-baking and without manual setup of bounce lights or light volumes.

Here are some examples of SVOGI in Miscreated:

 
Kudos to Entrada Interactive and the CRYENGINE team for this awesome achievement. We love seeing what Indie devs are able to do with CRYENGINE, so if you’re working on a CRYENGINE project and have done something kick-ass, make sure to let us know.

Happy coding,

The CRYENGINE team.