Escape From Tarkov: Game Tech Overview

We were lucky to talk to the amazing team behind a popular online shooter Escape from Tarkov and discussed the amazing technology, which powers this product.

We were lucky to talk to the amazing team behind a popular online shooter Escape from Tarkov and discussed the amazing technology, which powers this product.

Introduction

At the moment, our team has built up to almost 70 people in-house and over 30 on the outsourcing. Level of experience is different, but we don’t have any of the so-called rockstar developers of art directors from renowned studios. Everybody on the team more or less learned and evolved with us.

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While Tarkov is partly a Unity game it looks nothing like a Unity project. I’m wondering if you could talk about the main advancements you’ve made with this tool and what are the key additions you’ve added to the render and maybe some other systems of the engine? 

Indeed, we have put in a lot of effort to make it look like that. While developing your own shaders is pretty common, we also did post effects and created our own tools for lighting, correct rendering of indoor and outdoor environments. Also, many different tools were prepared to facilitate working on environment and level design which saved a lot of time. It’s also worth noting that good quality of assets is very important – weapons, gear, items, props, everything.We paid a great deal of attention to them from the start, and such approach has paid off. They will, most likely, look good in any engine, though, of course, we did some tweaking to maximize that impression.

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What does your production process usually look like? 

In our production process we employ or at least attempt to employ all the innovative means there currently are in the market. We used World Machine as well – to generate the general Tarkov and suburb terrain. Scanned objects too –  huge thanks to Quixel Megascans who granted us access to their library, they are awesome and we appreciate it. And of course we scan some peculiar and unique items ourselves. In general, we always try to enhance the production with something new, and we are always open to ideas from anybody on our team on how to make the pipeline more artful, smart and efficient. All sensible suggestions get researched, tried and tested, we are very flexible in this aspect.

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When building these amazing big spaces how do you approach it? 

Great question. We assume that we’ve employed a rather thorough approach to location design. First of all, we’ve planned out the whole region, down to the finest details possible at such a scale – terrain, buildings, infrastructure, minor service facilities and landmarks. Then, we have divided it into raid maps which we are gradually preparing now, fleshing it out with details. The workflow for particular location starts with rough sketches, transferred over from the region map. Then, the architect takes over, adjusting everything for realism and adequacy: placing buildings, roads, service stations, pulling in power lines and pipes, setting notable objects, etc.

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Next step is to block it out – we draft the objects, play the map and test everything for physics and visuals (yes, even at this stage). And while the draft the objects – which will already be playable when inserted – we give the long huge prop lists to our outsourced team, who are producing the particular objects we’ll be placing on location. After that, we start processing everything by appointing several key level designers, each responsible for his own area of the map, who place all received items in the designated area, making it look alive. The last finishing touch is usually on me. I do the additional optimizations, environment art, revise it and remove occasional bloopers, make minor adjustments – generally speaking, polishing and making it look beautiful. And now, as we are in production of the next upcoming location, we offer the maximum creative freedom we can, for our guys to try and make everything by themselves, without too much pressure and supervision, and such approach has paid off, yielding some interesting results. There are, in total, up to ten level designers and environment artists working on locations. Ah, almost forgot one important thing: at the very start, when we only have a rough sketch, we give it to our concept artist who draws it in detail, setting the general look, mood and ambience of the place, and drafting a part of the prop list while at it, thus helping environment artists and level designers to recreate the same mood in 3D.

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One of the key features of the game is the amazing authentic animation system of weapons and the whole way the weapons work, with all the misfires and other details. Could you tell a little about the way your modeling guys work with your animation and physics engineers? 

Right now, at this moment, there is no especially tight communication between modeling artists, animation designers and engineers. Right from the start we have developed a great entirely procedural physics system to deal with weapon handling, recoil, wear etc. There is a long list of adjustable parameters covering all aspects of weapon behavior we could think of, and, of course, all of them are visualised through an extensive set of animations, which were tailored for specific weapons – visual examining of weapon, folding and unfolding stock, operating fire mode switch, checking of ammo, jamming, stovepipes, etc. All of that is done by people who know how weapons work, and, most importantly, have experience operating them. They are regularly shooting at the range, and have a good idea of how it feels like to shoot. I think it’s a really important factor, and would be an essential asset for any realistic FPS developers. Knowing and feeling weapons firsthand really matters.

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Could you tell a little about the way you make the necessary optimizations here? How do you work on draw distance, dynamic level of detail, imposters and other stuff? 

Our game is CPU-oriented. Though we are constantly monitoring the performance and running the necessary optimizations, it’s the CPU that carries the weight of the animation systems, and gets very busy at times, more so than GPU. Graphics gets optimized uncompromisingly. My eight years of experience have left me with a big set of tricks and techniques to optimize the heavily loaded locations. We work with LODs, imposters, strictly contain draw calls per frame and otherwise try to keep within allowed limits. The main huge problem right now is textures, we have a lot of them, and in very high quality, while the Unity version we’re using now doesn’t have any texture streaming. That’s why the game consumes an immense amount of RAM with high-quality textures settings. Of course, that will be optimized as well, most likely, we’ll be adding our own streaming system. We do frequent preventive profiling both with standard Unity means and third-party tools to discover any possible weaknesses, abnormal surges in consumption of CPU and GPU resources, RAM and VRAM. Sometimes, quite regularly, in fact, we put the active development on hold to do the profiling and optimization interludes, and then I personally work nights to dilute the level of detail, combine objects together to reduce the number of draw calls, stitch textures into atlases to reduce their number, simplifying shaders… Basically, we employ almost all means currently available in Unity, and, naturally, try to think of something of our own, for instance, scripts that exclude the unused objects from rendering in semi-automatic mode, sort of occlusion culling for the poor. Unity’s native occlusion culling is rather heavy and puts quite an extra stress on CPU, which is already pretty busy.

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Probably the most effective approaches are LOD and textures optimization, cutting down the number of objects and reuse of objects. It often happens that somewhere on location far far away there stand a coffee machine with 1k textures, 3 of them, normal, specular, and diffuse. It seems like a trifling matter to remove it, it will only free up 10-15 MB of VRAM. However, if you spend the night doing it and find a score of such objects, that’ll top up to 100-200 MB. A week or so at it will free up 500-600 MB more. So it goes, that’s how we optimize, a rather tedious process. That’s why it is important to always keep that in mind at the initial level design stage. All level designers need to understand and fully realize that every new prop added to the map must be reusable as much as possible, otherwise it’s useless and will only consume valuable resources.

How did you work on the lighting in your project? 

We took the pains of creating our own lighting system. Basically, everything outdoors is lit with ambient light with spherical harmonics, i.e. we take into account sky lighting, everything is true here. For indoors we’ve created, by using stencils, special zones that tone down the ambient light, and created portals that let the ambient light through. That’s how we achieved the effect of indoors being dark and properly lit with ambient light from the outside. As for dynamic lighting and shadows, we work with the standard ones Unity provides, nothing we could do about them. Of course, we cut their distance and use separate, simplified objects for shadows, they have less polygons and vertices, thus slightly reducing the total number of polygons in frame. Otherwise it’s the same. E.g. Unity does not have settings for particular light sources where you could possibly set the shadow draw distance from that source. Unlike CryEngine, Unity doesn’t allow that.

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Overall, what do you consider to be the biggest problems you’ve encountered during this production? 

The greatest challenge, after all, is network and network infrastructure. Graphics and performance optimization is a hard task indeed, but it already has a solution. There are parts in graphics pipeline that can be enhanced to make it turn out well. Network, however, is harder. We write a lot of things of our own, of course, and encounter a huge amount of issues. Needless to say, bad network-related components can seriously damage gameplay, it’s a core-breaking thing we can’t allow. That’s why it always puts a lot of pressure on us in cases when, for instance, we’re launching an update with network optimization and something’s wrong with it. There were many occasions like that when it comes to network and it’s always hard. Naturally, there are also bugs and other tech issues… Not sure if I can single out something in particular. Almost every month, some terrifyingly humongous problem arises. How do we solve them? We get down to do our research and look for possible solution, and there always is a solution or workaround, nothing is impossible if you try hard enough. Moreover, Unity is helping us too, support sometimes aides us with some questions, and we hit the roadblock, we often develop in parallel, if something can’t be done with a specific function, we devise a workaround. That has its price, sometimes in performance, but in the end it pays off. Our project is not ideal in terms of tech, it’s really large and complex, it has a lot of parameters that can misbehave and a lot of components that can possibly fail due to its very complicated architecture, but we are gradually improving it, making it better, adding new features and repairing old ones. It’s a hard way, but we keep our spirits high with realization that we are the innovators here and no one has done something so complex in Unity before.

The Team of Escape from Tarkov

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

Join discussion

Comments 25

  • Respect

    Crybabies in this comment section show how entitled users have become. The team is clearly being transparent about the issues in this article, and yet you still see the crying and whining about those exact issues. Anything that isn't given with a silver spoon is a scam. Gamers suck sometimes.

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    Respect

    ·5 years ago·
  • Przemyslaw Krojcer

    To all who are confused about what it is they paid for - you paid for a Pre-order of Escape From Tarkov. Currently, the game is in a Closed Beta stage, and you are playing strictly as a TESTER. If you do not like the current state of the game, wait for it to be actually released.

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    Przemyslaw Krojcer

    ·5 years ago·
  • nothing

    Bug and not look like that in real game...
    I have re-sell my game.

    -1

    nothing

    ·5 years ago·
  • Scav

    It's a great game. Long live Tarkov!

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    Scav

    ·5 years ago·
  • Anonymous user

    SCAM!

    -1

    Anonymous user

    ·5 years ago·
  • Their COO just told the community to eat shit

    SCAM!

    -1

    Their COO just told the community to eat shit

    ·6 years ago·
  • BATTLESTATE ARE SCAM ARTISTS

    It's a scam ppl!
    They have you pay to them directly for a broken beta access!
    NO REFUNDS? LOL

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tfwdnY5cDg

    -1

    BATTLESTATE ARE SCAM ARTISTS

    ·6 years ago·
  • Fanboi\'s Killing Tarkov

    This game is a case of love and hate.  It still has a LONG way to go but the state it is in right now it should be still in the "Early Alpha" phase.  The game is plagued with bad performance. People with great systems claim the game runs badly, but people with low grade systems say the game runs great.  The game is still the most fun (and frustration) I have had with any game in a long long time.
    I think one of the worse parts of the development of the game is the Nazi'ism of the developers to clean and sanitize their forums and even the reddit for EFT.  A person on the forums can get banned for posting WTF (yes seriously) even though the dev's themselves post the actual F-word, not once but twice in a single post.  Of course you are not allowed to discuss the actions of the moderators or you get banned for that.  The COO Nikita spends more time on Reddit then his own official forums.  It goes on and on.

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    Fanboi\'s Killing Tarkov

    ·6 years ago·
  • Fanboi infestaction

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=40&v=6tfwdnY5cDg
    >make hardcore fps game
    >have 200 ms MINIMUM delay on damage
    >have 180 ms MINIMUM delay on movement
    >have 160 ms MINIMUM delay on gunfire
    >HAVE 5000 MS MINIMUM DELAY ON DOOR ANIMATIONS
    >HAVE 30 to 50 FPS DROPS WHEN USING A SCOPE
    It's a beta just doesn't explain these flaws anymore.

    C'mon people, the game concept is awesome. Riveting and completely engaging and immersive! The rpg component is of the top!
    But the engine?
    The netcode?
    Nothing but promises and broken dreams!
    I for one think that we, the real escapers, should keep pressuring the devs to deliver on their promises.
    Otherwise this a mermaid in the middle of the ocean..
    A white elephant...

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    Fanboi infestaction

    ·6 years ago·
  • AODqw97

    I really have no idea where the negative feedback is justified. Surely anyone who bought Escape from Tarkov bought it because they were interested in this genere. It's realism is unparallelled as ia it's gunplay,also the most realistic ever seen in an FPS, to the point that the project is supported by real world manufacturers from Volkswagon to Colt. I'm sure these high profile companies aren't in a hurry to back and be seen to back a shoddy product. The game is hard core and makes no excuses for it. It's system intensive at this time and of course requires some more optimisation. Yes there's desync and network issues, but the fans of the project try and help by submitting the issues and following thier progress through to a fix. Then there are the people who are expecting to buy into a fully working title, which it isn't. If you don't want to be part of the process then don't buy into it. My personal PC is around 3 years old and nothing special but plays the game acceptably for a beta. I play most nights with a group of 60 people who would problem have a similar view on the game, and being a senior gamers group we've been around with games a bit and seen many come and go. This title has captivated us like we can't remember the last time a game did, I'm sure we're not all wrong when we say that this game is one of the best titles in a long long while and satisfies our yearning for a game that holds the attention of the hardened FPS fan with a desire for realism and great team play. Escape from Tarkov is the game I have been waiting for, for a long time. There seems like a lot of negativity out there and I really don't understand why. Are you sure that perhaps you're just not as hardcore as you thought you were?

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    AODqw97

    ·6 years ago·

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