Ripstone Discusses the Impact of UE4 on the Development of Chess Ultra

Hi everyone, my name is Rob and I’m the Lead Programmer at Ripstone Developments in the UK.  We came together last year in order to make Chess Ultra, the best video game version of chess that we possibly could. Our team is a small one, with just three programmers (one an intern, albeit an amazing one) and two artists full-time in the studio. Most of us have experience working on big teams on games that prioritise beautiful visuals, like Forza Horizon 3 and Driveclub, and we wanted to use the same approach with Chess Ultra. With around 10 months to take the game from concept art to submission simultaneously on four platforms, including VR and 4K support, our natural technology choice was UE4.

Unreal Engine 4 allowed us to quickly prototype our environments, and we were able to reduce the amount of resources needed to a minimum while keeping a very high quality for the final product. Everything in Chess Ultra is rendered in sumptuous detail, from the varnish on the boards to the lighting in the environments and the wood grain and felt on the pieces.

The image above perfectly captures why Unreal was such a pleasure to work with. Apart from the chairs, lamps and pictures, the whole scene is only using tileable textures, and with the help of vertex painted ambient occlusion (shader below) and Unreal's brilliant lighting system, everything is brought together with great effect.

We’re clearly big on realism, but we’ve taken the same approach to a more fantastical chess experience too, with the ‘Gomorrah’ environment that puts you in a desolate hellish wasteland, playing with the Fire and Brimstone set that literally burns with a cool blue flame. In VR you can even play against the Grim Reaper himself, with your soul at stake!

Our Art Director, Marco Maria Rossi, and I had previously worked on huge AAA teams where there were daily challenges to integrate art and data with minimal disruption, so it was a joy to be able to iterate quickly and with little risk, freeing us up to concentrate on quality with next to no downtime.

“A team our size relies a lot more on the tools provided by the chosen development platform,” said Rossi. “The main requirements are for it to be stable, powerful and easy to use. Unreal was that and more. While in development, the engine got updated three times and as a result we were lucky enough to benefit from a more powerful tonemapper, HDR support and a completely integrated LOD generation tool, not to mention the continuous stream of fixes implemented by Epic. One thing that was added recently that I like a lot are the new material skinning nodes which allowed me to add an internal parallax effect to the jade material for the fire and brimstone set”.

One of our biggest challenges was to support VR on Oculus Rift, Vive, and PlayStationVR, so it’s also one of the things we’re most proud of. The entire industry was still learning about VR development together when we started the project. In fact it pretty much still is, and we worked very closely with Epic as they rolled out their support, building prototype environments more or less on day one of the rollout and collaborating with them throughout. The VR integration in UE4 is now outstanding, and it shows in the cross-platform stability of our title. Gameplay is always fixed in one location (albeit with free camera movement in VR), which allowed us to make the most of Unreal's static lighting features. Only one shadow-casting dynamic light is required for the moving chess pieces, or two in scenes with an animated opponent. This is essential for good VR performance, and Unreal integrates it seamlessly with the static lighting in the rest of the scene. That in turn allows us to use a huge amount of geometric and texture detail, to an extent that in other games would be considered wasteful! That is key in making our environments stand up to the closest scrutiny by VR players who may be spending a long time in them.

When people talk about UE4 they tend to focus on visuals, but we wanted to draw particular attention to audio. Sound is really important when you are focused on realism, and although originally we were looking at using a third party plugin, the newer Unreal integration allowed us to iterate our audio design much more quickly. The new HRTF mode is essential for VR. No longer are we simply generating sounds from the appropriate direction. We’re pinpointing the location of sound in exact detail and you can pick out many, many subtle details if you listen long enough.

Chess is the second most popular sport on the planet after soccer, it is played by more than 600 million people, has been around for 1500 years, and at Ripstone Developments we are obsessed with it. We wanted to truly do it justice, and we think we’ve succeeded. We couldn’t have achieved what we have without the tools and vital support of Epic and UE4.