Back in October 2022, Remedy shared a talk exploring the implementation of Universal Scene Description (USD) in their in-house engine, Northlight. If you were curious about how the progress was going, you're in luck! This week, one of the speakers of that talk, Mika Vehkala (Director of Technology at Remedy) returned to the topic, six months later, in a special Q&A.
Talking with Diego Farinha at NVIDIA Developer, Mika explains that the team "adopted USD to streamline our content pipelines and have something that performs well with large amounts of data and can be easily extended. We saw that all our various asset concepts such as levels, prefabs, templates, or presets could be unified as they are all hierarchies of property containers. Finally, we wanted to have a bi-directional interoperation between our tools and third-party digital content creation tools (DCCs).
"Previously, we started seeing issues while working on ever-growing data sets, bottlenecks with version control, workflow with larger content teams, and the limited capabilities of building more complex building blocks of content to share between games. After looking into various options, USD quickly became the most obvious choice as it ticked all the boxes and more...We would not have made the jump without full support from content teams and executives. Expectations are high and we’ve had good progress adopting it. However, we will know the final verdict only after shipping the first game with USD-based content pipelines."
You can read the full interview on NVIDIA Developer, HERE.
