Guild Wars is a Competitive Online Role Playing Game with an emphasis on rewarding player skill. In large head-to-head guild battles, cooperative group combat, and single player missions, players will explore a fantasy world while pursuing professions and acquiring skills to develop their own personalized character. Unique items, special abilities, and a wide variety of skills add meaningful value for the player and for their comrades.“Rather than spend resources developing a new occlusion system to meet the demands of our next game we decided to license technology from the experts,” said Jim Scott, ArenaNet’s lead graphics programmer. “This allowed us to get up and running with sophisticated culling quickly.”
Umbra is a highly robust, GPU based, visibility optimization solution that allows game developers to create highly dynamic game worlds without preprocessing. With Umbra game developers can increase their polygon budgets significantly and create highly complex game worlds which were previously impossible.
“ArenaNet has proven their talent and leadership in building a lasting franchise with over 5 million copies of Guild Wars sold around the globe,” said Farhad Taherazer, VP of marketing for Umbra Software. “With Umbra’s occlusion culling technology, we will give ArenaNet’s talented developers and designers the toolset they will need to create more innovative and large complex 3D worlds with less development time and effort.”
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