Jurassic World: Evolution is the kind of game many kids (and adult-kids) dreamed of for a long time. What’s not to like about a game that gives you the reins of a park where the main attractions are 65-million-year-old colossal beasts? This isn’t the first successful amusement park game by Frontier Developments, but it’s certainly not your typical one. Frontier is a proud developer of their Cobra technology, which has been evolving since 1988. For JWE in particular it is a DX11 tiled forward renderer. For the analysis I used Renderdoc and turned on all the graphics bells and whistles. Welcome… to Jurassic Park.
The Frame
It’s hard to decide what to present as a frame for this game, because free navigation and dynamic time of day means you have limitless possibilities. I chose a moody, rainy intermediate view that captures the dark essence of the original movies taking advantage of the Capture Mode.
Compute Shaders
The first thing to notice about the frame is that it is very compute-heavy. In the absence of markers, Renderdoc splits rendering into passes if there are more than one Draw or Dispatch commands targeting the same output buffers. According to the capture there are 15 compute vs 18 color/depth passes, i.e. it is broadly split into half compute, half draw techniques. Compute can be more flexible than draw (and, if done correctly, faster) but a lot of time has to be spent fine-tuning and balancing performance. Frontier clearly spared no expense developing the technology to get there, however this also means that analyzing a frame is a bit harder.
Grass Displacement
A big component of JWE is foliage and its interaction with cars, dinosaurs, wind, etc. To animate the grass, one of the very first processes populates a top-down texture that contains grass displacement information. This grass displacement texture is later read in the vertex shader of all the grass in the game, and the information used to modify the position of the vertices of each blade of grass. The texture wraps around as the camera moves and fills in the new regions that appear at the edges. This means that the texture doesn’t necessarily look like a top-down snapshot of the scene, but will typically be split into 4 quadrants. The process involves these steps:
- Render dinosaurs and cars, probably other objects such as the gyrospheres. This doesn’t need an accurate version of the geometry, e.g. cars only render wheels and part of the chassis, which is in contact with grass. The result is a top down depth buffer (leftmost image). If you squint you’ll see the profile of an ankylosaurus. The other dinosaurs aren’t rendered here, perhaps the engine knows they aren’t stepping on grass and optimizes them out.
- Take this depth buffer and a heightmap of the scene (center image), and output three quantities: a mask to tell whether the depth of the object was above/below the terrain, the difference in depth between them, and the actual depth and pack them in a 3-channel texture (rightmost image)
An additional process simulates wind. In this particular scene there is a general breeze from the storm plus a helicopter, both producing currents that displace grass. This is a top down texture similar to the one before containing motion vectors in 2D. The motion for the wind is an undulating texture meant to mimic wind waves which seems to have been computed on the CPU, and the influence of the helicopter is cleverly done blending a stream of particles on top of the first texture. You can see it in the image as streams pulling outward. Dinosaur and car motion is also blended here. I’m not entirely sure what the purpose of the repeating texture is (you can see the same objects repeated multiple times).