The Technical Art of Sea of Thieves

SIGGRAPH TALK: https://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.