Free for other devs to use.
The folks at Fenris Creations, everyone’s favorite developer of Eve Online, announced the release of CORTAO (Circular Occluder Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion). If you don’t know what that means, CORTAO is a rendering technique for accurate shading in real-time game worlds. If you don’t know what that means, I don’t have the technical expertise to explain it further.
Ambient occlusion is one of those graphics features players never notice until it goes wrong, like dark halos around objects or shading that shifts as the camera moves. CORTAO improves the accuracy and stability of that effect while keeping rendering costs low.
But if you’re a developer and do know what I’m talking about, you’ll be glad to know that Fenris has open sourced the tech as part of their Carbon engine framework so any dev can use it and build on it.
CORTAO promises more accurate rendering at lower cost, no baked in scene data, and of course it’s free and open source.
Check it out, you can find the repo here and the Carbon optimized version here, and what would an article on here be without an obligatory trailer.
