Small Finnish firm, Umbra, helped IW make next-gen tools for Ghosts

A small studio based in Finland called Umbra, which employees just nine people, is the studio responsible for helping Infinity Ward make assets that run on next-gen for Call of Duty: Ghosts. They provide the tools and software necessary to full optimize their game for the new consoles.

Umbra’s toolset helped Infinity Ward get the best visuals possible from the Xbox One, PS4 and PC versions of Call Of Duty: Ghosts, and it has been part of the engineering effort on Bungie’s Destiny for three years now. Deus Ex Universe, Killzone: Shadow Fall, The Witcher 3 and Quantum Break will also play host to Umbra’s optimisation tech. The company works with developers to help next-gen games look, well, next-gen – in short, its Umbra 3 software enables studios to play with much bigger object counts and enable far greater geometric and shader complexity.

“I remember our engineers being happy that there were no convoluted SPU’s [Synergistic Processing Units, part of PS3’s CELL processor],” he recalls. “Of course back then the complaint was that the new consoles were pretty much like a PC, so not that exciting! But they were very powerful. I think the ease of use of both machines has been really great and definitely Sony’s tools and support has been really great with the PS4. That’s not to say Microsoft’s haven’t been good, but obviously, Sony had more to prove, as they’ve said themselves.”

Umbra is also working with Activision to make Destiny, and they are working on other non-Activision games, including Killzone, The Witness 3, and Quantum Break.

SOURCE: Edge Online