Dishonored 2, a game whose very premise is an elaborate work of art borne from the imagination of some very creative people, is now a household name again. The game, set slightly forward in time, lets you romp through the fictional city of Karnaca to partake in any number of overly complex plot points that build upon themselves, culminating in an ending that’s ultimately decided by the amount of chaos you caused, or achieved.
Dishonored 2 has a complex, unoptomized game engine
For this game, Arkane Studios continued with their in-house game engine known as Void. Void is an evolved version of idTech 5 that’s said to have only around 20% of that engines actual codebase still inside. Like the base engine, it’s capable of rendering realistic volumetric lighting, applying a degree of radiosity and even applhying HDR effects, if not actually rendering in true, full HDR quite yet. Animation is procedural based and shadows are still quite competitive to this day, though rely on traditional shadow-mapping which can be memory inefficient. Individual texture sizes can be up to 128,000 x 128,000 pixels large, which is massive. The upgrades to idTech 5 include support for screen space reflections, better depth of field and a more modern pixel shader engine. Theoretically it should be a much improved version of idTech 5, and thus be both more efficient and better looking. Read on to see just how unoptimized this game still is.