HENT, BELGIUM (February 22nd, 2017) – For immediate release – Video game company Funcom has become the latest developer to license Graphine’s advanced texture streaming and compression technology to ensure its massively multiplayer online game, Conan Exiles, can be enjoyed by a wide audience. The Norwegian company has joined fellow MMO specialist Wargaming.net in using Granite SDK to help them display their dynamic and highly-detailed environments on PCs with a range of graphical capabilities.
Based in the brutal world of Conan the Barbarian, Conan Exiles was launched on Steam Early Access to great acclaim on January 31st. On release, it hit the headlines for its stunning environment and savage, fast-paced combat. Its creators turned to Graphine’s flagship middleware when it became clear that the visual demands of their latest game could limit its potential audience to players with high-end hardware.
“For Conan Exiles, the sheer size of the world and number of unique meshes populating it meant that memory usage on GPU was always going to be a major bottleneck,” reflected Funcom CTO, Fred Richardson. “Our lack of an advanced texture-streaming system meant we originally had to use extremely low resolution textures on memory-constrained devices. However, Granite proved to be an excellent solution to this problem, providing out-of-the-box texture compression and streaming support. We would not have been able to support the same range of hardware without it, nor offer the same degree of visual fidelity.”
Graphine engineers worked closely with Funcom’s artists to help them implement their pioneering system as quickly as possible. This close cooperation also allowed the Belgian middleware company to build new technology for, and provide tailored solutions to, the game’s unique demands.
“Graphine engineers worked with us directly in our repository on the Granite integration, providing fixes and changes tailored to our development needs, which was key in enabling us to adopt Granite in a very short amount of time,” added Mr Richardson.
Reflecting on the hugely-successful collaboration between the two companies, Graphine’s CEO, Aljosha Demeulemeester thanked Funcom’s development team for their invaluable feedback, which enabled his engineers to further perfect their market-leading product: “Working with the team at Funcom as they constantly sought to derive the maximum benefit from our technology and production workflow has been a thrilling experience. We are proud to be working hand-in-hand with them on this awesome game and excited to see hundreds of thousands of players enjoying the fruits of our work on Granite SDK.”
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About Granite SDK
Available as a standalone SDK or as a plugin for the Unity and Unreal game engines, Granite’s advanced texture streaming and compression technology supports multiple platforms. Enabling users to display large amounts of texture data and stream it so efficiently that it can be loaded by low-end graphics cards, it has been employed by a variety of virtual reality creators (Survios, Realities, Solfar), AAA game developers (Wargaming, Funcom), independent studios (Minority Media, Mothership Entertainment, Digital Confectioners) and VFX houses (The Mill, Saatchi and Saatchi).
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we’re still working on the game. On our end, we’ll continue to work on optimizations that will improve the performance of the game on lower end hardware. Funcom will use more and more features of Granite in the next releases which will result in even more diverse and detailed environments.
