LogInIf you use Rust as your programming language, check out what the studio has to offer.
Image credit: Embark
You might have heard of Embark Studios, a company created by former DICE talent, known for the recently released shooter THE FINALS and the upcoming ARC Raiders. But do you know about the team's open-source game development tools? If not, I'm here to spread awareness among those looking for a way to adjust their workflows.
"Technology is reshaping our industry. We want to be part of this change, by exploring and applying the latest technology, by being honest and transparent in our relationship with each other and our community, and by allowing our curiosity to lead us down unexpected paths," states Embark's development page. "In our open source work, we're exploring and pushing the boundaries of new technologies, and sharing our learnings with the community."
The studio's programming language of choice is Rust, so if you're also familiar with it, let's see what you can take from the team's experience.
One of its featured projects is kajiya – a real-time global illumination renderer made with Rust and Vulkan. With it, Embark wants to "get as close as possible to path-traced reference at real-time rates in dynamic scenes, without any precomputed light transport, or manually placed light probes."
You should know that kajiya is a work in progress and doesn't offer the full functionality of more popular renderers. However, some features it is able to provide:
- Hybrid rendering using a mixture of raster, compute, and ray-tracing
- Dynamic global illumination
- Fully dynamic geometry and lighting without precomputation
- Volumetric temporally-recurrent irradiance cache for "infinite" bounces
- Ray-traced diffuse final gather for high-frequency details
- Ray-traced specular, falling back to diffuse after the first hit
- Sun with ray-traced soft shadows
- Standard PBR with GGX and roughness/metalness
- Energy-preserving multi-scattering BRDF
- Reference path-tracing mode
- Temporal super-resolution and anti-aliasing
- Natural tone mapping
- Physically-based glare
- Basic motion blur
- Contrast-adaptive sharpening
- Optional DLSS support
- glTF mesh loading (no animations yet)
- A render graph running it all
The renderer works on Windows and Linus running on NVIDIA RTX series, GTX 1060+ with 6 GB of VRAM, or AMD Radeon RX 6000 series.
Image credit: Embark
Something else you should be aware of is rust-gpu – a language and ecosystem for GPU graphics and compute shaders. It's an ambitious project that "has the potential to change the way GPU programming works."
"One of the primary things we think it can change is opening the door to leverage the open source culture of sharing and improving each others' code, and our end goal and vision for rust-gpu is to develop it very much in tandem with the community."
However, it's still in the early stages of development, so don't expect it to change your world at the moment. The project seems to be moving slowly, but the idea of an open-source ecosystem is certainly appealing.
Rust is not the only one to receive add-ons from Embark. As the studio is a corporate sponsor of Blender, the engine was also graced by a couple of additions: workflow tools for game development and a Python communication system for DCCs, standalone applications, web browsers, and game engines.
All of this and more can be found on Embark's website. Who knows, maybe your next project will use some of its works?
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