{"id":64215,"date":"2018-11-23T02:30:00","date_gmt":"2018-11-23T02:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/news\/2018\/11\/bringing_starlink_to_switch_was_technically_challenging_according_to_developer_virtuos"},"modified":"2018-11-23T02:30:00","modified_gmt":"2018-11-23T02:30:00","slug":"bringing-starlink-to-switch-was-technically-challenging-according-to-developer-virtuos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/11\/23\/bringing-starlink-to-switch-was-technically-challenging-according-to-developer-virtuos\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing Starlink To Switch Was &#8220;Technically&#8221; Challenging, According To Developer Virtuos"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"media_block\"><a href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/dfd94533bafae\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/dfd94533bafae\/small.jpg\" class=\"media_thumbnail\"><\/a><\/div>\n<aside class=\"picture strip\">\n<div class=\"img\"><a title=\"Starlink Battle For Atlas E3 2018 Star Fox Trailer Ubisoft [NA] 0 47 Screenshot\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/dfd94533bafae\/starlink-battle-for-atlas-e3-2018-star-fox-trailer-ubisoft-na-0-47-screenshot.original.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/dfd94533bafae\/starlink-battle-for-atlas-e3-2018-star-fox-trailer-ubisoft-na-0-47-screenshot.900x.jpg\" alt=\"Starlink Battle For Atlas E3 2018 Star Fox Trailer Ubisoft [NA] 0 47 Screenshot\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<p>During the development of <strong><a class=\"external\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/nintendo-switch\/starlink_battle_for_atlas\">Starlink: Battle for Atlas<\/a><\/strong> on Nintendo Switch, Ubisoft Toronto collaborated closely with the Shanghai-based studio Virtuos. Founded in 2004, the developer is previously known for its work on the Switch iterations of <a class=\"external\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/nintendo-switch\/dark_souls_remastered\"><strong>Dark Souls: Remastered<\/strong><\/a> and <a class=\"external\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/nintendo-switch\/l_a_noire\"><strong>L.A. Noire<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Although we&#8217;ve already heard about how Virtuos <a class=\"external\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/news\/2018\/06\/ubisoft_collaborating_with_virtuos_for_the_switch_version_of_starlink_battle_for_atlas\">helped<\/a> raise the overall quality of Starlink on Switch to new heights, <a class=\"external\" href=\"https:\/\/www.gamesindustry.biz\/articles\/2018-11-22-making-starlink-soar-on-switch\">Game Industry<\/a> recently sat down with the company&#8217;s technical director Jonathan Boldiga to discuss Ubisoft&#8217;s high standards throughout the development:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;It was extremely technically challenging&#8230; Ubisoft had very high standards in terms of what they wanted on the Switch platform. Basically the mandate for us was, &#8216;We need parity between all three consoles&#8217;.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;Obviously, the Switch is a great machine but we had to do a lot of work to make sure we could keep visual parity between Switch, Xbox One and PS4. We did a lot of work on rendering optimisations, multi-threading, and trying to squeeze the most that we could out of the CPU. Lots and lots of data compression to fit into memory &#8211; you name every trick, we tried it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Boldiga went on to explain how the Switch handheld mode worked to their advantage:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;Some of those post-processing passes for Xbox One and PS4 aren&#8217;t really necessary on Switch when you&#8217;re in handheld mode because the fidelity isn&#8217;t going to come through. There are tricks you can do there to avoid certain things. Plus, on a smaller screen you don&#8217;t have to worry about anti-aliasing as much because it&#8217;s not as noticeable, but when you&#8217;re on a big, high-def, 1080p screen, obviously it&#8217;s a lot more noticeable. So you can sort of use different anti-aliasing techniques to speed things up as opposed to some of the more expensive routines.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;It was definitely a challenge. There was a lot of late nights and hair pulling, but at the end I think what we were able to deliver is probably one of the best-looking Switch titles out there.&#8221;<em><br \/><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><em>What do you think about the visuals in Starlink: Battle for Atlas on the Switch? Is this one of best-looking titles available? Have you played this game yet? Tell us below.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>During the development of Starlink: Battle for Atlas on Nintendo Switch, Ubisoft Toronto collaborated closely with the Shanghai-based studio Virtuos. Founded in 2004, the developer is previously known for its work on the Switch iterations of Dark Souls: Remastered and L.A. Noire. Although we&#8217;ve already heard about how Virtuos helped raise the overall quality of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nintendo-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}