Doctor Strange's portals were 'particularly challenging' to add into Marvel Rivals, as they created 'unprecedented performance demand' for Unreal Engine 5
I never cease to be amazed by portals in video games. Even though the tech is nearly two decades old (and older still, if you include the use of portal rendering for hidden environment transitions inThief and other early 3D games),Portal's seamless, real-time transitions through holes in space still feel like magic to me, and I love seeing it appear in other games too. One of the better uses of portals lately can be found inMarvel Rivals, where if you're playing as Doctor Strange, you can conjure portals in thin air and drop your entire team of superheroes on the heads of your foes.
It's a fantastic effect which, as explained by Rivals' technical lead designer Ruan Weikang, was extremely difficult to pull off. Weikangrecently spoke to Epic Games about how NetEase used Unreal Engine 5 to recreate an Avengers movie's worth of superheroes, and he referenced the good doctor's space-folding abilities as one of the trickiest powers to replicate.
In the interview, Weikang starts by providing a broad overview of why Doctor Strange's portals «proved particularly challenging» to implement. «Creating portals that enable real-time spatial connections and bi-directional combat interactions not only presented complex gameplay implementation challenges, but also introduced unprecedented performance demands when combined with advanced graphics features».
The details of the technologies involved in Strange's portal conjuring come later in the chat. Weikang states that the portals were initially built using Unreal Engine 5's scene capture system, which essentially lets designers place a virtual camera in the world that captures live footage of a scene, deployable as a texture in in-game materials. However, Weikang says this approach «encountered significant performance limitations in complex combat scenarios», due to «substantial CPU wait states», Moreover, the fact that each portal essentially re-rendered the entire scene «creat[ed] a GPU overhead.»
Instead, Weikang and the Rivals'
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