2016 Retrospective

Introduction

As the year winds to a close, we wanted to reflect on 2016 to outline the exciting projects we worked on and to thank all of you out there who support us.

In the nearly eight years of Confetti’s existence, this was by far the most exciting, most successful, and most colorful year (I know we said this the last three years, but it is true :-)).

This year we grew again out of our office space while still having the challenge of finding more space in our Encinitas building. We now occupy the two biggest rooms in the building as well as one of the medium-sized rooms. We also started a new office in Castellón, Spain (close to Valencia), to offer even more support for our European customers.

We would like to thank everyone who recommended us to new clients. Your recommendation is our biggest reward!

Amazon | Amazon Lumberyard

As in the previous several years, we’ve spent the whole year working on the Amazon Lumberyard engine, improving the particle system and mobile support.

Dolby | Dolby Vision SDK

We wrote an SDK that would help developers add Dolby Vision support. We added Dolby Vision to Unreal Engine 4 and Amazon Lumberyard, and our SDK was used by Frostbite. Amazon showed the Rin and the Deep Sea Creatures demos.

They also demonstrated the iOS & Android support and the Particle Editor improvements we did for the engine.

Epic showed the Paragon and the McLaren demos with Dolby Vision, as well as the ProtoStar demo from the Samsung S7 Galaxy Launch event.

In the following months, we fine-tuned the Dolby Vision implementation and wrote a Dolby Vision Video player for XBOX One / PS4.

Starbreeze | StarVR SDK

Since July 2016, we’ve been working on the SDK for StarVR. This SDK will offer an API that allows integrating StarVR support into any custom engine, including Unreal Engine 4 and others. The SDK provides several examples that show how to implement certain techniques and how to drive the StarVR HMD.

Epic Games | ProtoStar Demo

At the beginning of the year, we helped to create the Samsung S7 Galaxy Launch demo in collaboration with Epic, Samsung, and Qualcomm. Epic hired us to help with the addition of Vulkan support in Unreal Engine 4.

The resulting ProtoStar Demo was shown running live on the actual device during the Samsung S7 Galaxy Launch. If you were a member of the development team, you could feel a sense of great relief and excitement when the demo was over.

Later on, we developed an even closer relationship with Samsung, which allows us to have better technical support for Vulkan implementations in mobile games.

Watch the ProtoStar Demo

Take 2 | Mafia III

From March to August 2016, we worked on Mafia III and optimized the game for the XBOX One.

GDC 2016

This year’s GDC was one of our most successful ones. We worked on an astonishing number of demos and games that were shown on the GDC show floor.

GDC Europe 2016

In August 2016, we presented a new next-gen rendering architecture called “The Filtered and Culled Visibility Buffer” during GDC Europe.

This new rendering architecture is mostly based on the idea of checking the visibility of triangles shortly after all triangles are cluster-culled and filtered. Applying triangle cluster culling and then filtering a whole scene for several rendering views at the same time can generate astonishing performance improvements on XBOX One, PS4, and also on PCs.

This new rendering system was well received by Insomniac, Microsoft, Activision, and others.

MIGS16

In November, Wolfgang gave another one-day Masterclass in Montreal during MIGS16. The topics were triangle cluster culling and filtering, ExecuteIndirect with DirectX 12, Dynamic Global Illumination, and the Modern PostFX pipeline.

EA | Battlefield 1

In September and October, we helped Reforged Studios prepare their game demo, working on particles, shadows, and bloom effects for the iOS platform.

In November, we finished more than six months of work on Battlefield 1. We mostly worked on DirectX 12 support, Multi-GPU support, and various optimizations.

Middleware Packages

We also worked on a wide range of new tech that we developed in-house. Our middleware packages Aura, Ephemeris, and PixelPuzzle evolved further and are running even more efficiently on PC, PS4 and XBOX One. Stay tuned for even more exciting stuff!

Unannounced Projects

One of our secret IP projects this year was going through 1500 GPU-related patents, categorizing them, and then extrapolating where the future of graphics is heading based on those patents.

Additionally, since December 2016, we have also been working with Deutsche Telekom on a secret project that involves real-world drones and AI. Stay tuned next year to hear more about this exciting endeavor.

Many of our unannounced projects can’t make it into a retrospective like this. You guys know who you are! Thanks for working with us!