'Horizon Forbidden West' GDC session covers studio's switch to open-source physics engine

gamedeveloper.com:

Guerrilla Games is back with Horizon Forbidden West, the highly anticipated follow-up to its 2017 video game about fighting robot dinosaurs in a post-apocalypse future. At GDC 2022, the studio will be covering everything from character faces to storms and bunkers—as well as the studio's exciting switch to an open-source physics engine.

Join the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this March to check out "Architecting Jolt Physics for Horizon Forbidden West." During this session, lead game tech Jorrit Rouwe will describe Guerrilla Games' switch from a commercial physics engine to Jolt Physics, an open-source physics engine that was born as a personal hobby project. By switching to this new engine, the studio saved memory, executable size, and were able to double their simulation frequency while using less CPU time.

Jorrit will cover how they use a physics engine at Guerrilla, how their previous physics engine caused bottlenecks while streaming in data and while interacting with the multi-thread game object update. Jolt was architected specifically to help solve those two problems, so be sure to check out this session to learn about two of the systems that made this possible.

"Architecting Jolt Physics for Horizon Forbidden West" is a must-see event available for All-Access and Core pass holders.

This is just one of several Horizon Forbidden West talks happening at GDC 2022! Here's a few standout sessions to check out (visit our Session Viewer for more):

For those wanting to dive into the new robots and characters, there's "Evolving the Horizon Series: Animating Believable Robots and Characters." In this session, gameplay animation director Richard Oud takes an in-depth look at the supporting animations and systems